My All New Top 10 (and a bit) Christmas Specials

Sunday 18 December 2016

Two years ago I did a series of posts on my top ten Doctor Who Christmas specials.  There have been two more since then, so an update is in order.  I am still finding it weird that Doctor Who now occupies the Morecambe and Wise spot as the traditional Christmas Day entertainment for all the family (and the Prime Minister.) However, it's been 11 years now, so here is my revised ranking, with 2014's Last Christmas and 2015's The Husbands of River Song slotted in.

1	The Christmas Invasion	2005
2	The Unquiet Dead*	2005
3	A Christmas Carol	2010
4	The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe**	2011
5	The Runaway Bride	2006
6	Voyage of the Damned	2007
7	Last Christmas***	2014
8	The Next Doctor	2008
9	The Husbands of River Song****	2015
10	The End of Time	2009
11	The Snowmen	2012
12	The Time of the Doctor	2013

* Yes, I know that this was technically not a Christmas Special, but it should have been.
**My new team member thinks this one is terrible, but at least it's properly Christmassy. We do agree about Nardole, though, so I'll let him off.

***Marked up for the Rudolph's nose car alarm gag

****Marked down for excessive continuity references and Matt Lucas.

There is still no change at number one.  How can you beat David Tennant, revived by a cup of tea, saving the world with a satsuma whilst still in his pyjamas, then having time to bring down the (female) Prime Minister before tucking in to turkey and all the trimmings?

I wonder which one is Theresa May's favourite?

PS Has anyone ever managed to solve the Watcher's Christmas Quiz in Doctor Who Magazine?  This year I don't even understand the questions.

PPS Have had a breakthrough with the Quiz.  Once we worked out the key, it isn't actually as hard as usual.  Woo hoo!

More Power of the Daleks

Sunday 11 December 2016

I am most encouraged to learn that I am not the only lady of a certain age who watches Doctor Who of her own volition. None other than Theresa May, Prime Minister (yes, we know who she is) enjoys watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special after she has cooked her goose. I just wish I could get away with wearing leather trousers...

Anyway, we have finished watching Power of the Daleks. There are definitely parallels with Victory of the Daleks - yes, we have Daleks in a servile role, bringing drinks. Why doesn't an enterprising Cardiff restaurant try that?

There are a lot of other familiar elements: lots of running up and down corridors; the Doctor being mistaken for someone in authority (psychic paper would have saved a lot of time; the Doctor being locked up; his companions being kidnapped; a misguided scientist; a rebel force and a scheming security chief. As this is the 1960s, the female companion has little to do apart from be kidnapped, although Polly seems to know quite lot about Daleks considering she hasn't actually met any before. Ben and Polly's initial suspicions of the new incarnation of the Doctor are soon forgotten.

The animation is strange in that the human characters are not particularly well realised, but the Daleks look almost photo-realistic.

Overall I enjoyed it.  Now we are on to the end of the Troughton era with The War Games.

Power of the Daleks - the beginning

Sunday 27 November 2016

On Friday my other half decided that a burgundy coloured Fourth Doctor cosplay coat was the ideal garment to wear:

a) to work (where the Finance Director correctly identified it); and

b) to the AGM and Presidential Lecture of the Royal Historical Society.

After the lecture, I tried to make a swift exit and he asked me if I didn't want to go the reception for a canapé.  "Not in that coat," I replied, "it looks a lot better in the dark." [This was a reference to our first date. We were at the theatre and as the house lights he turned to me and told me that I looked better in the dark. Reader....I married him anyway.]

The upside of this was that we got home in good time to watch The Grand Tour, leaving Saturday night free to make a start on the DVD of Power of the Daleks.

It's rather a strange story.  I'm not sure whether the animation follows the original script exactly, but it seems to be a little disjointed, as if linking action or scenes are missing.  The animation is quite basic, and doesn't seem to have captured the Doctor,  Ben and Polly particularly well.  That said, I am enjoying it, and found episode two creepy enough to be watched from a vantage point to the rear of our soft seating area.  The end of this episode is rather similar to Victory of the Daleks, which I wasn't really expecting.

I'm off now to watch the next thrilling installment.

A Helmet for a Space Cow?

Sunday 11 November 2016

Our meander through classic black and white stories reached The Time Meddler last night. We saw the first two episodes, which were incredibly slow by modern standards.  The initial scene in the TARDIS and the scene-setting in 11th century Northumbria would have been over  in about 2 minutes these days.

There were some good lines, nevertheless.  I think  that Steven's introduction to the TARDIS remains one of the best ever: "that's the horizontal hold...and that's a panda on a chair."  I suspect that the original script didn't say "horizontal hold." (For younger readers, horizontal hold was something you occasionally had to adjust on an old-fashioned TV, possibly while dancing around holding a set-top aerial to see where the best position was.) 

I will let them off having a Viking helmet with horns on it, purely because it allowed them to have the line "what do you think it is, a helmet for a Space Cow?"

It is very difficult though to watch episodes with Steven in without thinking it's Peter Purves from Blue Peter and wondering what he has done with Valerie Singleton and John Noakes. Peter Purves is also incidentally one of the few famous people I have seen and recognised in real life - he was on the platform at Euston Square Station. I'm the person who had to travel in the same train to Marylebone Station with Geoffrey Palmer, who lives in my hometown before being sure it was him! Luckily no one collapsed from plague on arrival.

This evening we will find out what the mysterious Monk is up to.

End of an era...

30 October 2016

We were going to take a trip to the tip this morning with the old Doctor Who VHS tapes we moved out of the TARDIS yesterday.

As an afterthought, I posted on our local Facebook group asking if anyone was interested in them (free).  Within a couple of hours they had been collected. The power of the internet in action!

My TARDIS has a screw loose...

Saturday 29 October 2016

We have a storage problem: not enough room for our DVDs.   Husband has a brilliant idea: if he throws out all his remaining old Doctor Who VHS tapes we can no longer watch (he has slowly been replacing them with DVDs), then the Doctor Who DVDs can go in the TARDIS video cabinet, making space in our other storage units.

Problem 1: Find the autograph.  I distinctly remember Colin Baker signing a VHS cassette at the Who shop that briefly appeared in Little Chalfont, whilst avoiding falling Silurian masks.  Obviously we don't want to throw that one out. But none of the VHS tapes in the TARDIS are of Sixth Doctor stories. The later VHS tapes are downstairs, but the only Sixth Doctor story we have left is Trial of a Time Lord, and that hasn't been signed.  Have we already ditched the autograph by mistake? 

Problem solved: Husband finds the autographed cassette.  It turns out to be the 1994 Bill Baggs Video The Zero Imperative, starring Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, John Pertwee, Caroline John, Louise Jameson, Sophie Aldred and Linda Lusardi. (Spot the odd one out...) There is also an appearance by the writer, a young man called Mark Gatiss.  I wonder what happened to him?

Problem 2: DVDs are slightly deeper than VHS tapes.  The doors of the TARDIS no longer close properly, and one of them comes off completely.  Husband has another (not so) brilliant idea: we take the other door off to match.

I have a better idea: we put the Virgin New Adventures and Missing Adventures in the TARDIS, and the DVDs on the bookshelf.

The books fit, and I wield my (totally un-sonic) screwdriver to fix the doors.

Just one problem left.  Where shall we keep The Zero Imperative?

Revisiting the Classics

Sunday 23 October

My other half has celebrated earning a bonus at work by investing in a lot of DVDs of old Troughton stories.

As a result we have been enjoying The Invasion, The Moonbase and The Ice Warriors, all with animation filling in for missing episodes.

The last two are definitely of their time. Poor Polly spent most of The Moonbase making coffee.  Whilst I didn't like Clara that much, she wouldn't have stood for that - the Doctor had to fetch his own coffee!  The Ice Warriors was a  reminder that not so long ago we were more worried about a returning ice age than global warming.