I have a sneaking suspicion that David Morrissey is Britain’s Greatest Living Actor. And as such I thought he’d make a cracking good Doctor Who. On the strength of the Christmas special though, I’m not so sure. Okay, I admit I missed the first fifteen minutes and I kept nodding off, but I was not impressed.
My wife was on the phone to one of our friends in the North, and I told her to mention my idea that he’d be a good Doctor. Only she mis-heard me and said that I thought Neil Morrissey would be a good Doctor Who. Which maybe isn’t such a bad idea. Martin Clunes could be his side-kick and they could turn the Tardis into a micro-brewery - hey, maybe not so micro! - and travel the universe getting sloshed on weak lager. Just an idea. My Christmas gift to you, BBC.
Who?! The man who is talking over Doctor Who from Russel T Davies. The seriously cool man who wrote the Best. Episode. Ever: “Blink”. He also wrote “The Empty Child” (’are you my mummy?’) which is the SCARIEST. EPISODE. EVER. I only have to say ‘muuuuuuuumy’ in that voice and my five year-old son flinches and runs to find cushions, which is frankly a useful weapon to have in one’s arsenal, and for that alone respect is due to the scare-meister Moffat.
He also wrote Press Gang, but I’ll forgive him that. And the new Tintin movie which might not suck after all.
NOTE: Just read this on Wikipedia and - if true - I like him even more now:
During production of the second series of Press Gang, he was having an unhappy personal life after the break-up of his first marriage. Producer Sandra C. Hastie was secretly phoning his friends at home to check if he was alright. His wife’s new lover was represented in the episode “The Big Finish?” by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie’s boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.
Another series of Doctor Who ends, and you gotta admire the boy Davies’s chutzpah.
It’s great but he seems to have nicked half of it from Star Wars, and the other half from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As Matt has pointed out, the timelords staring into the ‘vortex’ which drives some mad is more than a little like the Total Perspective Vortex in Hitch Hiker’s. And a couple of episodes ago they went… to the end of the universe. Arthur Dent even got name checked in the first David Tennant episode.
Tonight we had plenty of Star Wars imagery - the severed hand, the weapon sliding across the floor by telekenisis, the Master dying in the Doctor’s arms, then burning on a funeral pyre… hello! We have seen Return of the Jedi!
It was great TV, though.
This series of Doctor Who was a bit humdrum. Then came ‘Family of Blood’, which I thought was one of the best episodes ever. Next came ‘Blink’ - which has to be the best ever episode of Doctor Who ever; sheer televisual brilliance, like a great Diana Rigg-era episode of The Avengers. Only twice as good. This week I was finding ‘Utopia’ a bit humdrum again - and they pull another rabbit out of the hat - Derek Jacobi turns out to be The Master and regenerates himself into Life on Mars’s John Simm. Genius.
Don’t get me wrong - the current episodes of Doctor Who (Human Nature) are just the best ever, and I think David Tennant is the best Doctor ever. But in Doctor Who Confidential over on BBC Three, David Tennant says that scarecrows are such an obvious idea that it’s odd they’ve not been used before for their spooky potential.
Well they have - take for example The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. The screen-grab here is from episode three, in which the young Philip Marlowe sees a scarecrow from a train, waving at him in exactly the same way the scarecrow waved in part one of Human Nature. Hard to imagine they weren’t influenced by it.
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