Christmas (not so) special

24 December 2019

For the second year running, there is no Doctor Who Christmas Special.  This must be strange for some, but for those of us who grew up with classic Who and lived through the drought of the 1990s, the idea of a Doctor Who Christmas Special still almost seems something of a novelty. Christmas Specials were for Morecambe and Wise, not our favourite Saturday teatime behind-the-sofa viewing.

However, in 1981 something very like a Christmas Special was aired - not Doctor Who, but a spin-off featuring two favourite sidekicks: K9 and Sarah Jane Smith.

In an attempt to get in a festive mood, I decided to watch K9 and Company on DVD.  I'm sorry to say that it really isn't very good.  In fact, it's terrible.

Let's start with the plot.  Sarah returns from working abroad for Reuters to spend Christmas with her aunt Lavinia (the famous scientist - remember?) at her, er, manor house and market garden in the Cotswolds.  But Lavinia has vanished, apparently on a book tour of the States, leaving Sarah to look after her cousin Brendan, home for the holidays from boarding school, and to open that mysterious crate that arrived a few years ago. The crate turns out to contain a gift from the Doctor.

Naturally, since it is set in the countryside, the plot involves a lot of suspicious villagers and a pagan cult. As the solstice is coming, there are rituals to perform.  The annoying cousin Brendan provides suitable human sacrifice material, leading Sarah to a frantic dash around all the churches within a five mile radius to find him before midnight, only for K9 to point out at the last moment that there is actually a chapel in the manor grounds.

And Aunt Lavinia?  Is indeed on her tour of the US.

 It could have been good, but somehow neither the script nor the editing seem to work. Who really cares about the pH of soil at Christmas?

I think I will stick with The Christmas Invasion  in future.

Pink for the Stegosaurus

9 July 2017

The Dinosaur Invasion is the first story I can remember seeing.  Or at least I don't remember seeing it as much as discussing having seen it, whilst watching Death to the Daleks (or 'the one with the hearthrugs, as my mother called it - sadly ahead of her time.  She could have had a great career writing episode titles for Friends.) When I married into fandom, I saw it again on a somewhat grainy off-air VHS tape. 

Memory plays strange tricks, though. I could have sworn that on the map of the dinosaur materialisations stegosaurus were colour coded pink. But watching the DVD whilst ironing yesterday morning, I realised that it was actually 'pink for the pterodactyls.' I have been living a lie all these years!

If you make allowances for the primitive (or prehistoric) special effects, this story stands up quite well.  True, Sarah does behave with annoying stupidity at times, when she once again picks completely the wrong person to ask for help, but then this is as far as I am aware, the only story until Mawdryn Undead where one of the series regulars is actively working against the Doctor.

Today we watched The Stones of Blood.  This I found genuinely creepy on first viewing, and it remains my favourite from the Key to Time Season. Earlier this year we visited the Rollright Stones, which were used for location filming (with a few polystyrene additions.)

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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April 2006: The Tenth Doctor

15 April 2006

So we have seen the first full outing of the new Doctor.  My first thought was that David Tennant was clearly made for the role.  He simply IS the Doctor – there is none of that feeling of awkwardness while waiting to see how the new Doctor settles down that usually accompanies a regeneration.  Christopher Eccleston had taken some getting used to, though I shed a tear at the hologram speech in The Parting of the Ways.  Five minutes into New Earth, and it was a case of Christopher Who?

 RTD’s intention with New Earth was apparently to bring back some familiar elements from the last series in order to bridge the gap. This was only partially successful, if my exhaustive survey of one casual viewer of the last series is anything to go by: “has the Face of Boe been in it before?”  To be honest, he was not really needed in this episode, but it was nice to see him again.

Cassandra, on the other hand was a revelation.  I had not really taken to her in The End of the World.  I found her character a bit, well, two-dimensional. Putting her into Billie Piper’s body dealt very effectively with that problem.  Much as I like Rose as a companion, I found the bitchy Cassandra/Rose a fascinating twist, and would have been quite happy for Cassandra to stay put for a while. It was rather strange to have a story involving body-swapping so soon after the introduction of a new Doctor, but David Tennant coped very well.  I wonder if Zoë Wanamaker has forgiven him yet?

Overall, though, there seemed to be rather too many disparate elements crammed in to the episode.  Next week looks like an improvement.

22 April 2006

That was better.  Pauline Collins was an excellent Queen Victoria, and the CGI werewolf worked well.  But kung fu monks in Victorian Scotland? What can Russell T Tarantino have been thinking?  Perhaps the plan is to use them later as station idents and thus save the Beeb some money. I wonder what the production team have against the Royal family though.  In The Christmas Invasion they were reportedly on the roof (I would have been up there too), and now it is being suggested that they are werewolves.

29 April 2006

Now we’re getting somewhere.  This could have been terrible, but fortunately was brilliant.  Anthony Head was great as the creepy Headmaster, and as for Lis Sladen, well, either she has a picture in her attic, or L’Oreal has missed an advertising opportunity.  Billie Piper got to do some seriously cheesed off acting as a dinner lady, and a lovely bitchy act with Sarah Jane.  And Mickey has discovered his role in life. At the end when the Doctor said goodbye to Sarah again and left her with K9 mark whatever, I was quite overcome.