Top Ten Christmas Specials: Number 10

Hard as it is to believe that it's almost ten years since the programme returned to our screens, it's even harder to believe that the Doctor Who Christmas Special has now become as much an integral part of the festivities as over-cooked sprouts.

In order to celebrate, I'm going to do my own personal top ten of the Christmas specials. 

So, in reverse order, here we go with number 10:

Time of the Doctor (2013)

I'm sorry, but I don't think this one worked. My diary for Christmas Day 2013 says "Time of the Doctor was depressing and longwinded. Didn’t enjoy it at all. Even after having watched it again."

Particular problems were:

• Clara's family: We had never really met Clara's own family before. Now they were parachuted in for Christmas.  To the Powell Estate (or somewhere suspiciously like it).

• The nudity: Don't get me wrong.  I don't mind the Doctor being naked, but there is a time and a place for it. (Generally in the TARDIS, when the Tenth Doctor is having a metacrisis). But in this story it just seemed like an excuse for cheap jokes.

• The turkey: I thought the turkey that they were cooking in the time rotor was going to turn out to save Christmas (the place), or at least Christmas (the celebration), in a sort of Three Doctors  recorder kind of way, but it wasn't.

• A town called Christmas: a town. Called Christmas. On Trenzalore. I ask you!

• Handles: the Doctor has a pet Cyberman head?

• The Doctor ageing to death naturally: a new idea, but a very depressing one for Christmas. 

Overall the programme seemed too long, too downbeat, and rather hampered by the number of hanging plot threads from previous episodes that needed to be tied up.  I'm still not entirely clear why the Silence were trying to blow up the TARDIS, who Prisoner Zero was or where the Leadworth ducks went.

Christmas Factor: 2/10 - too bleak
Dickensian/Victorian Factor: 5/10 - spurious Victorian atmosphere in implausibly-named town on a distant planet.
So that was number 10. What will be number 9?