Thin Ice

30 April 2017

*Contains mild spoilers*

In last night's episode the Doctor and Bill find themselves at the last great Frost Fair on the river Thames. But something nasty is lurking below the ice....

In a way this episode could also have been called The Beast Below if that title had not already been taken. There are some other similarities with that story in that both involve a giant creature being abused by humans. But unlike the starwhale, we learn little of the nature of the monster in the Thames.

The real monster in Thin Ice is, it turns out, not a giant creature, or even an alien, but a human (though not humane) being, Lord Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe was very much a pantomime villain, but whilst the allusions to slavery and imperialism struck me as a little heavy-handed, we had the opportunity of seeing the Twelfth Doctor give another of his rousing speeches, whilst demonstrating an impressive right hook.

Overall, I enjoyed this episode far more that last week's.  The frost fair, complete with elephant, was well-realised, and this time the Doctor and Bill had people with whom they could interact throughout the episode. If there was something of a fairytale ending, what is wrong with that?

Personal Tutoring

Friday 28 April

As a university administrator, I have been worrying that the current series may give a slightly unrealistic impression of what can be expected from a personal tutor. One of my colleagues has been doing quite a lot of work recently on personal tutoring arrangements, so I asked for his views on the Doctor's arrangement with Bill.

It turns out that there are quite a few problems:

• Giving tuition to a non-fee paying unenrolled student (unless the Doctor went back in time to sort out Bill's UCAS and Student Loan applications)
• Favouritism
• Teaching outside core hours (tutorials at 6.00 p.m.)
• Daily tutorials, which are not scalable in today's mass higher education system and are not sustainable from a resource point of view
• 'Field work' undertaken without a risk assessment or ethics  approval
• MASSIVE health and safety concerns

His conclusion?  "Mind-blowing educational experience notwithstanding, this clearly calls for a solid bureaucratic crackdown, BUT if ownership of the bigger-on-the-inside technology reverts to the university* then  all is forgiven."

* This would depend on the university's intellectual property policy.

Thanks to Dr Arne Hofmann for kindly giving me permission  to post this.

Smile!

22 April 2017

Smile  is another one of those episodes where perfectly normal behaviour suddenly becomes perilous, as in don't blink!, don't breathe!, stay out of the shadows! but to my mind is rather less successful than such stories as Blink and Silence in the Library.  I may be rather biased, as unlike Bill,  whose face is always 'doing expressions' when she doesn't want it to, my face tends to look naturally glum, whatever I am thinking.  Often what I am thinking is homicidal thoughts about the passing strangers who interrupt my perfectly happy thoughts by calling out "cheer up love, it might never happen!" so a world in which you have to smile or face being composted was hardly likely to appeal much.

It started well, with the Doctor sneaking off in the TARDIS with Bill whilst Nardole was making the tea, and the futuristic city looked fantastic.  However, there was something not quite right about the pacing.  A large chunk of the episode involved Bill  and  the Doctor exploring on their own, without all that much happening, and then the ending,  once the colonists awoke, seemed oddly rushed.

It seemed rather out of character to me for the Doctor's first instinct to be to blow the city up, rather than to fix the robotic malfunction.  Even if he believed that the colonists were arriving in a separate ship, what did he think would happen to them when the colony ship arrived to find a bomb site rather than a functioning city?

My biggest problem though was with the whole 'smile' thing.  The mood badges were placed on the back.  The implications is that they sensed mood (like those mood rings that used to be popular), so how would a faked forced grin make any difference?

Overall,  some nice ideas, but could have been so much better.

Vote Dalek!

19 April 2017

Those of you who pay some attention for what passes as the real world these days may have noticed that there is going to be a General Election in the UK on 8 June.

Back in 2005, when the show had only just returned, Russell T Davies was able to get away with a plot involving aliens taking over 10 Downing Street and trying to provoke a war on the basis that (faked) aliens had 'massive weapons of destruction' that could be deployed within 45 seconds* the Radio Times ran with a cover, during a General Election campaign, which said 'Vote Dalek.'

Well, I was tempted. Very tempted.  So when it came to the County Council ballot paper, and I really didn't care much for any of the candidates, I may, just possibly,  have omitted to put an X against any of the candidates, and written 'vote Dalek' at the bottom of the ballot paper.**

I don't recommend this as a course of action (imagine if everyone did it and we ended up with Davros in charge) but if you really don't know who to vote for, it is better to make the effort to turn out spoil your paper and register a protest than to stay at home and be counted as apathetic. Remember that the candidates (or at least their agents) get to see the spoilt papers.)

Women fought long and hard to get the vote.  It is important to use it.

*This was highly topical at the time.
** Of course, I could have imagined the whole thing. 

Rumours, rumours

Sunday 16 April 2017

The internet is alive with rumours that Kris Marshall is going to be the new Doctor.  Whilst I would quite like to believe them, they all seem to come from one rather flaky report in the Mirror so I shan't start celebrating yet.

Apart from anything else, when he left Death in Paradise, Marshall was quoted as saying that he wanted to spend more time with his family.  Whilst Cardiff is obviously closer to home than Guadeloupe, I hardly think the hectic Doctor Who filming schedule would leave him with that much family time.

The Pilot

Saturday 15 April 2017

After a long break from our screens, the Doctor has returned in an episode that is in many ways reminiscent of Rose. It was very much about introducing the new companion, Bill.  If first impressions are anything to go by, she will be good. Her initial reaction to the TARDIS ('like a posh kitchen') was hilarious. But it occurs to me that I need a new kitchen soon.  I wonder whether the other half would be more convinced if we went for a TARDIS look?*

The episode is called The Pilot.  It turns out that there is something lurking in the university that needs a pilot, and Bill inadvertently becomes involved.  But the title has a double meaning. The episode is a sort of reboot, and the focus is on Bill's initiation into the TARDIS rather than the wider peril.

It turns out that the Doctor has been hiding out in a university, rather like Professor Chronotis in Shada. As a university administrator, I'm glad he didn't choose mine.  I bet he never gets paperwork in on time and is really annoying in meetings (if he turns up at all.)  I wonder if he is research active for REF purposes? What sort of feedback does he get in the NSS? 

As a  Doctor Who fan, I am disappointed that he didn't choose my university.  After all we have a Cruciform, the inventor of the Panopticon and I could have loaned them a spare Dalek if they needed one...

*Edit: he has now seen this post and says he wouldn't.  But I bet he would really.

How Doctor Who Changed My Life

Yes, it's true, Doctor Who has changed my life. 

Or at least marrying a Doctor Who fan changed my life. By that I don't just mean the Daleks in the bathroom and the ever-expanding DVD and novelisation collection colonising all the available storage space.

No, marrying a fan all those years ago brought about a sequence of events that has led to my paddling a canoe on the Orinoco, travelling on the Trans-Siberian express and extolling the virtues of High Wycombe on local radio, as well as becoming far better acquainted with the works of Shakespeare than ever seemed likely. 

You see it's like this. I happened to be a member of Mensa.  (Honestly, it's not that difficult - I got sucked into doing the test after entering a competition when I was 17 and thought it would be a good thing to put on my UCAS form.) After we were married, my husband was looking through my magazine, and noticed that there was a Doctor Who special interest group, so persuaded me to sign up for it.  Fast forward a year or so and the Doctor Who SIG  was seeking contributions for Future Imperfect, multi-author  story for the 30th anniversary, and my husband wanted to join in, so he joined Mensa as well. (I told you it wasn't that difficult!)

Before long, he heard that there was a vacancy for editor of the newsletter for the Travel special interest group, and as he was getting interested in desktop publishing, he volunteered. After a while he put together an anthology of some of the best contributions which was published for charity.  Through the special interest group he got to interview Hilary Bradt of Bradt Guides, attended one of their travel writing workshops and later went on to win a travel writing competition.

Next, he decided to write a travel book himself, based on the places that Wombles were named after (Doctor Who is not the only programme from our childhoods that has made a big impression.) He didn't want to travel alone, so Muggins became assistant researcher and photographer, as we travelled up the Orinoco, by train to Tomsk, walked in Bulgaria, ate French food in Cholet etc.  You get the idea. Despite the fact that I ended up paddling a dugout canoe while he remained safely on dry land 'looking after the camera' I can't really complain about this, as I have a nagging feeling that I might have been responsible for the original idea.

The next project is a guidebook of our local area for Bradt.  This time I am not only assistant researcher and photographer, but co-author and exhibit A, as I have lived all my life in the area and can trace my local connection back for centuries.

Meanwhile, as is obvious from the rest of this blog, I decided that the best way to live with a Doctor Who fan was to become one. As regular readers may have inferred, I became particularly keen on the Tenth Doctor, as played by David Tennant.  So it was not surprising that I wanted to see his Hamlet. A few years later we went to see David in Richard II.  I saw from the programme that the RSC was embarking on a cycle of the entire repertoire of Shakepeare's plays over a six year period, and thought that it would be good for my general education to see them all. Now I'm a Patron of the RSC and we visit Stratford several times a year.

It's possible that some of these things might have happened without Doctor Who but I doubt it.

Why is it always the mothers?

Having recently had to attend to a few domestic emergencies involving my own mother (I've reached the disconcerting point in life where you find yourself looking after your parents rather than vice versa) I've been thinking about the role of mothers in the Who family.

The Doctor's own mother of course remains a mystery.  There have of late been the odd enigmatic moments, most notably in The End of Time Part II where viewers are led to wonder about the identity of a female Gallifreyan, but nothing definite.

The classic series did not focus on companions' family backgrounds to any notable extent.  Sarah Jane had an Aunt Lavinia, Jo Grant had an (unseen) uncle who pulled strings to get her into UNIT, but mothers tended not to feature at all. Presumably the idea was that the companions needed to be free from family ties so that they could set off on adventures in time and space without having to worry about the folk back home.

When the series returned in 2005 it was a different matter.  The family background of the companions became part of the story and the first three companions all very definitely had mothers.  And they were not impressed by the Doctor.

Who can forget Jackie 'if you're a Doctor, stitch this!' Tyler making plain her views about the Ninth Doctor's role in Rose's life?  Admittedly she had mellowed a bit by the time of his regeneration, being ready with pyjamas and offers of tea and sandwiches.  Not to mention curiosity about his physiology 'what else has he got two of? Ultimately her reward was a reunion with her husband Pete (or at least the version from an alternate universe.)

Martha's mum, Francine, was also initially suspicious of the Tenth Doctor's relationship with her daughter, and expressed her feelings at the end of The Lazarus Experiment with a clip round the ear, leading the Doctor to ponder that 'it's always the mothers.' It was not until the family were rounded up and imprisoned by the Master that Francine realised she had got wrong.

The Doctor's relationship with the mother of his next companion was not much better, although she avoided physical violence. Sylvia Noble's first meeting with the Doctor occurred when he appeared with Donna at the reception after her mysterious disappearance from the wedding in The Runaway Bride. She was not particularly pleased to see him again in The Poison Sky. But at least she wielded her sledgehammer on the window of the car in which Wilf was trapped, rather than the Doctor. Unlike Francine and Jackie, her opinion of the Doctor didn't change that much over time.  'I think you'd better go' she says coldly after he brought an unconscious Donna home in Journey's End.

Is it any wonder that the Eleventh Doctor chose companions who did not have mothers? Although in a typically Steven Moffat timey-wimey turn of events, one of them did turn out to be his own mother-in-law.

The Twelfth Doctor's companion Bill also has no mother, only a rather disengaged foster mum.

Of the Thirteenth Doctor's companions, Ryan also has no mother, only a grandmother and an estranged father, but in Yaz's family we see a bit of a return to previous form with a mother who really, really wants to know who the Doctor is and how she knows her daughter.

It remains to be seen whether this theme will continue in the New Year Special.


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Less than a week to go....

Sunday 9 April 2017

Less than a week to go now, but life (day job, book to write, elderly mother, lawn to mow etc.) has prevented me from poring over every detail of  Doctor Who related news in the run up to the new series.  

I have read the episode previews in Doctor Who Magazine, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new companion turns out.  Oh, and I did see that massive spoiler that was  around last week, but I'm trying to forget about it.

Meanwhile, the speculation about the next doctor continues.  Today comedian Lee Mack has thrown his hat into the ring. Weirdly, I could actually imagine him doing it quite well. After all, Jon Pertwee was mostly known for comedy roles before he became the Doctor. But it won't be him.  I'm still banking on a 30-40ish male actor who is just getting into TV roles but is not yet a household name.