DOCTOR WHO: THE STAR BEAST
BBC iPlayer
This cute family snap of me as a toddler, circa 1966, shows me clutching my toy Dalek (it’s now probably worth a fortune; wish I still had it!). However, when it came to teatime telly thrills I soon moved on from Doctor Who to Star Trek and The Virginian, with their cooler, better-looking leading men.
The show was rebooted in 2005, to much acclaim, by the brilliant showrunner/screenwriter Russell T Davies (It’s A Sin, A Very English Scandal). My eldest was three, his sibling on the way and as they grew I assumed my boys would enjoy Davies’s pacy Who.
Yet they never took to it, moving straight from In The Night Garden to US imports such as MythBusters and Storage Wars, and then YouTube. Fact: live sport aside, neither child voluntarily watched terrestrial TV beyond the age of six and, as far as I’m aware, few of their peers did either.
The BBC knows this and rightly fears the implications for the licence fee. For years it tooled itself up with globally franchisable shows such as Top Gear (RIP?), Strictly (possibly rheumatic?) and, of course, Doctor Who.
After Davies left, it successfully passed to showrunners Steven Moffat (2010-17) and Chris Chibnall (2018-22).
Now Davies has returned to excite the hardcore ‘Whovians’ (as fans are known) with the grandiosely named, Marvel-style ‘Whoniverse’. I admire Davies while remaining baffled by his love for Who – as character, concept and vehicle for fine writing (it isn’t) – and the consistent fuss that the BBC generates around every new iteration, reboot and recasting.
Confession: the last time I watched it, David Tennant was still the Doctor and Catherine Tate his sidekick Donna. In the three much-heralded 60th anniversary ‘specials’ Tennant is back as the Doctor, and is again working alongside Tate as Donna, who has won a huge lottery jackpot, given it all away, and ‘forgotten’ the Doctor and her previous job, saving the universe.
She’s now a mum whose daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney) has an unlikely business making soft toys in the shed – until a spaceship crash-lands in London. The following epic silliness stars a cute-yet-evil alien (irritatingly voiced by Miriam Margolyes), allowing Russell to rip-off/pay homage to the movies Gremlins and ET.
There are rubbish Stormtrooper-y type baddies and inevitable riffs on the Doctor’s gender fluidity.
Throughout, Tennant and Tate are shouty and histrionic, and unless you know your way round the backstories the plot remains impenetrable, the dialogue risibly laden with lines like, ‘Activate the dagger drive!’
So, for me, this overblown, over-promoted show – once written for kids, now marketed to adults – remains less Whoniverse, more Whyniverse.
Not exactly a piece of cake
Before the technical challenge in the Bake Off final (Ch4), host Alison Hammond asked contestant Matty, ‘Do you know what lardy cake is?’ (‘No!’).
‘The second prove needs to be as long as possible,’ the voiceover intoned.
‘Any attempt to speed it up could melt the lard, ruining the rise and the lamination.’
Blimey! Anyone else think such challenges sound more like manuals for making semi-conductors than baking cakes?
Suburbia’s unlikely swingers
THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR
Mondays and Tuesday, Channel 4
‘Hello suburbia!’ says Pete (Alfred Enoch) as he and his primary school teacher wife Evie (Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson) move into a lovely new house in a part of Leeds that, I’d hazard, only exists in, er… the director’s imagination?
I love suspending disbelief in pursuit of a good time in front of the telly – however, a shiny ‘Yorkshire’ suburb that looks nothing like anywhere in England (think The Truman Show’s Seahaven-meets-Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane) is arguably the least implausible thing in this European co-production, adapted from a Dutch bestseller.
The couple’s new neighbours are yoga teacher Becka (Jessica de Gouw) and motorbike cop Danny (Outlander’s Sam Heughan, near left, with Enoch, Tomlinson and de Gouw), who’s so deep in debt he finds an illegal side-hustle. When Evie’s tragic miscarriage leads to a new (and unlikely) interest in, er, swinging with the neighbours (where do they hide their young son?) you know it will end in tears. And maybe gunfire. Meanwhile, peeping Tom/stalker Alan (Hugh Dennis, discombobulatingly) is clearly going to cause more chaos.
The excellent cast give it everything – and more – and I bet they had fun. Meanwhile, over in my own domestic suburban psycho-thriller, those bins are still refusing to put themselves out.
The latest series of Handmade: Britain’s Best Woodworker (Ch4), hosted by Mel Giedroyc, finished with Jen, Wolfgang and Nathanael building kitchen islands for judges Sophie Sellu and Tom Dyckhoff. The competitors’ kits engender power-tool envy even in those of us who don’t know our routers from our miters (‘It’s like woodwork bingo – how many joints can I show them!’ said Jen). Congrats to the deserving winner, gifted 18-year-old Nathanael, whose island looked like a holiday destination.
