In the UK: Saturday, 7pm, 18th May 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 18th May 2013, BBC America

Ian: Just open the doors, Doctor Foreman.
The Doctor: [To himself.] Eh? Doctor who? What's he talking about…?

- from Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child

Doctor Who's name has been a subject of considerable interest, ever since the first episode. Whether it was Ian Chesterton's misnaming of him as Doctor Foreman in the very first episode or the more recent Steven Moffat antics regarding River Song, the Doctor and their wedding, everyone's wanted to know what his name really is. Doctor von Wer, Dr John Smith, Theta Sigma - Who knows, ho, ho?

This season has, in fact, been building on this, with Clara mid-runaround…

…stopping off in the TARDIS library to find out the Doctor's real name. So it all looked like we were about to get some big revelation in the appropriately named The Name of Doctor, the season finale, billed as revealing 'his secret'. And revelations we did get, just not the ones we were expecting. Let's go chat about The Trouble with Clara after the jump.

In the UK: Saturday, 7pm, 11th May 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 11th May 2013, BBC America

Well, it's Wednesday so there's probably not much point doing a full review of Saturday's Doctor Who episode - you've probably forgotten it all, already - but for the record and for completeness' sake, so I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts. Spoilers after the jump…

In the US: Sundays, 10.30pm, HBO
In the UK: Will air on BBC2 this year

Christopher Guest is a god, of course. One of the originators of Spinal Tap, he is the premier maker of the improvised 'mockumentary', with films like Best in Class that are cuttingly funny social observations. He is America's Mike Leigh.

Except, of course, Guest is half-British, the son of a UN diplomat, and shared his childhood between London and New York. Which is why we shouldn't be surprised that BBC2's latest co-production with HBO - following on from the likes of Rome and Parade's End - is set predominantly in Britain. Family Tree follows Chris O'Dowd's (The IT Crowd, Bridesmaids) attempts to trace various members of his family after his great aunt dies, leaving him a box of memorabilia. Along the way, he's helped and hindered by his sister (Nina Conti, best known for her stand-up act, but also from Guest's For Your Consideration), who still uses the therapy monkey she had when she was a child to say things that would otherwise be unsayable, and his dad (long-time Guest collaborator Michael McKean from Spinal Tap).

Again, largely improvised by the cast, it's well observed and engrossing, flirting with British stereotypes while undermining them and having far more depth than a whole load of US shows I could name. But is it funny? Well…

Here's a trailer:

We're going to have a little departure from our normal Nostalgia Corner this week as part of my somewhat unplanned 'Pagan Week' on the blog. Today, we're going to look at all the scripted shows (or as many as I can remember) on Western, English-language TV that have not just featured religions but have actually shown them to be true in some way or other.

Now, it might be tempting to instantly think that Christianity would dominate here - and certainly it shows up a lot, particularly on US TV. When it does it appear, it's also taken more seriously and is dealt with largely more accurately than other religions.

But TV is largely secular, either because the writers are atheists or agnostics or because they're afraid of offending or marginalising other religious groups, particularly when it comes to overseas sales. As a result, religion often lies unexamined in drama or when it does, it deals with 'safe' religions, doesn't make claims for the 'truth' of a particular religion or is 'fantasy' so doesn't pretend to say what it depicts is true.

Nevertheless, a few shows have done just that and I'm going to be running through them today. A few I've already covered in much greater detail elsewhere, so I'll link to those posts if necessary, but I'll still be looking at them from the point of view of religion, rather than as dramas, so there probably won't be much overlap with what I've already written.

To be included on the list (and these aren't 100% firm rules), the show has to fit into one of the following categories:

1. It has to say a tenet of or an entire religion is true in some way, be it through the appearance of a figure from that religion or by the manifestation of their powers
2. It features a follower of a religion actually performing important acts of that religion or explaining aspects of it, which are not later disproven or shown to be naive and which might even be proven right.

I won't be including shows that

1. Include figures from a given religion but reveal they're aliens, spacemen, con men, etc (cf Star Trek)
2. Made-up religions, except synthetic/reconstructionist religions that employ figures from other religions (so yes to Wicca but not to any alien's religion, for example)
3. Feature ghosts, the supernatural, magic, etc, unless those things are caused by/stem from a particular religion.
4. Merely include worshippers or the iconography of a particular religion, but don't claim that it's true or demonstrate any aspects of it (so no Father Brown or Lost).
5. Are cartoons (e.g. Family Guy, South Park, Lost Cities of Gold)

Before we leap straight into the list, though, I'd like to give a big thanks to Jim Smith, Stuart Douglas, Dave Hoskin, Simon Bucher-Jones, Naomi Jacobs, Philip Purser-Hallard, Ian Mond, SK and Jon Arnold for their invaluable help in its compilation. Cheers, everyone!

The list
I'm going to break this down by religion. There are a number of 'mixed faith' shows out there, that have shown more than one religion to be true, but these generally show one religion to predominate and so will be listed according to that primary religion.

• Judaism and Christianity
• Islam
• Hinduism and Buddhism
• Hellenism and Religio Romana
• Celtic, Western and Northern Germanic religions + Wicca
• Other religions

If I've left out any shows or religions, leave a comment below or on the relevant entry and I'll update the list accordingly.

In keeping with this 'ere blog's slightly unplanned 'pagan week', it's time for the (increasingly belated) monthly round-up of the comic-book appearances of everyone's favourite pagan superheroine, Wonder Woman.

After March's month of face-palming, April proved to be a somewhat better month for our Wondy, with the Amazon princess finally giving Orion the punching he deserved in Wonder Woman #19, going to Lois Lane's house-warming and giving her new secret identity, Diana Prince, its first real outing in Superman #19, and trying to set the world to rights by kicking terrorists' asses with her new boyfriend in Justice League #19. Unfortunately, though, it looks like nothing can save Injustice: Gods Among Us from being facepalm-central.

I'm also adding to the roster of comics: after trying to save my pennies, I've had to play catch up with Justice League of America #1-3, seeing as Diana features quite heavily. Kind of. And all I'll say about that that not-so-illustrious title until after the jump is "What the hell is Catwoman not wearing?"

Paganism, while not exactly featuring heavily in the more secular and Christian-influenced television drama schedules of Western societies, hasn't been completely invisible over the past few decades. As we're shortly to discover (ie either on Thursday or Friday when I write about it in much greater detail), British writers, particularly those who were working in the 70s, have occasionally taken time out to examine other religions in drama.

Despite coming from a family of strict evangelical Christians, one of the main writers to do so is David Rudkin. As well as translating Greek pagan works, such as those of Aeschylus and Euripides, Rudkin examined British paganism in plays and long-form series such as The Stone Dance, The Sons of Light and ultimately Artemis 81.

One of his major works was a Play For Today: Penda's Fen. Directed by Alan Clarke, who normally was a strictly realist director and who admits he didn't really understand it, the play is an evocation of the conflicting forces within England, both past and present. These include authority, tradition, hypocrisy, landscape, art, sexuality, and most of all, its mystical, ancient pagan past. In the play, all of this comes together in the growing pains of the adolescent Stephen, a vicar's son, who encounters angels, Edward Elgar and King Penda, the last pagan king of England, during the play.

Since its broadcast, Penda's Fen has gone on to be regarded as a minor classic. Leonard Buckley (no relation) of The Times wrote: "Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night. Rudkin gave us something that had beauty, imagination and depth." In 2006, Vertigo magazine described it as “One of the great visionary works of English film” while in 2011, it was chosen by Time Out London magazine as one of the 100 best British films, describing it as:

"A multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed - and prescient - ecological awareness, ‘Penda’s Fen’ is a unique and important statement."

And it's your Wednesday Play - enjoy!

Further reading: Sparks in Electric Jelly

In the UK: Saturday, 6.15pm, 4th May 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 4th May 2013, BBC America

Not worth a full review, more a mini-review this, I think, since despite the presence of Diana Rigg (and daughter) in the cast, a reference to Tegan and a nice joke about Tom Tom (the sat nav, not the fourth Doctor), this was a pretty meh episode. It started off well enough, going for northern comedy and Victoriana, which are writer Mark Gatiss's real strengths. Rigg was good, everyone was acting fine, and despite being Doctor-and-Clara-lite, it was engrossing, right down to Murray Gold's Sherlock-riffs in the soundtrack.

But then it just sort of carried on, progressively becoming thinner, more predictable and less interesting as it tried to deport itself not as merely a comedy, but as a proper Doctor Who story, complete with evil, incredibly shit-looking beastie (we're talking Invisible Enemy shit, here). Not even an Avengers joke, more references to Clara's significance and a certain Sontaran getting to shoot people for a change could lift it from the "When's this going to end, again?" Which is a shame, because as a comedy, it would have been a really good episode, I reckon.

Oh well, it's Neil Gaiman doing Cybermen next week, albeit with the addition of a couple of kids to the companion line-up. Fingers crossed, it should be better.

In the US: Wednesdays, 8pm ET, ABC

There seems little point in giving Family Tools a full review, what with it being largely rubbish, but also having received the lowest ever ratings for a comedy debut on ABC, but for the sake of completeness, I feel I should at least mention it.

Anyway, cast your mind back a little way and you'll recall a terminally unfunny BBC3 sitcom called White Van Man. Starring perennial BBC3 favourite Will Mellor, it was all about a man with dreams who had to give them up to take over his dad's handyman business. Fairly typical then of UK sitcoms: working class guy has his dreams crushed because of family (cf Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses) - cue the bittersweet humour.

Bizarrely, despite the original not actually being funny, ABC decided to pick up a US version to series. Of course, no way is all that misery and frustration going to wash in the US, the land of dreams and achievement. Who has time for that in a sitcom? What a downer. At least, that was the thinking at ABC, which did the standard thing of modern US sitcoms and made Family Tools all about a buffoon (Kyle Bornheimer) who fails at everything. Nevertheless, when he has a heart attack, his father (JK Simmons) reluctantly hands over the family business to him because there's no one else who'll take on the job.

And, amazingly, it's even less funny than White Van Man. Whereas most of the original's attempts at humour revolved around Will Mellor's frustrations at the stupidity around him, Family Tools' humour revolves around Kyle Bornheimer's amazing witlessness - it's almost like they started with a name ('White Van Man' doesn't translate into American English very well) and modelled the show on that. No one's that much smarter than Bornheimer, but he's an idiot. And you must laugh at idiots, mustn't you, particularly if they're working class.

No one comes out of this well, not even old pros Leah Remini (King of Queens) and JK Simmons (The Closer, Oz, Law & Order), who appear to have had subtlety bypasses. The script has all the humour of an anthrax alert and the production values, geared up at every stage to say to viewing-idiots "This is funny!" in case they hadn't realised in their near-vegetative states, will set your teeth on edge.

Don't watch it.

In the US: Mondays, 10pm, Sundance Channel

An often-asked question these days is "Why is there so much good American TV on at the moment?" Look at Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Boss, et al. Why are these shows all getting made now?

Scratch below the surface of the broadcasting schedules and you'll soon find two of the main answers:

1. Cable TV, which caters to smaller audiences and looks to differentiate itself from the mass market through quality by giving writers creative freedom, largely unfettered by the FCC rules that stifle ideas on network TV.
2. The large-scale demise of the independent American movie scene - all the writers who would normally have written intelligent, thoughtful dramatic movies have instead gone over to cable TV, where that creative freedom and the ability to study characters in long-form drama are a constant intoxicating appeal.

One of the biggest names in the independent movie scene is, course, Robert Redford's Sundance Festival, which has its own US TV channel as well. Up to now, that channel's task has been to promote and air independent movies, but it's now looking to branch out into original dramas. It’s no surprise, therefore, that for its first ever drama, not only has the channel gone to the producers of Breaking Bad for a quality product, it's commissioned possibly the most indie-est of all indie movies masquerading as a TV show.

Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from death row after new DNA evidence shows that he might not have been the man who raped and murdered his 16-year-old girlfriend. After 19 years in jail, Daniel has to learn how to live again, his life having been on hold for so long. But having originally confessed to the crime, he also has to deal with the people in town who still believe he killed his girlfriend. Meanwhile, his family has to deal with the completely different Daniel who's returned to them.

Sound like fun? No, of course not, and despite becoming quite an incredible bit of drama, it suffers from the biggest flaw of a lot of indie movies, now stretched out and writ large over an entire season of episodes: nothing happens.

Here's a trailer.

In the UK: Saturday, 6.15pm, 27th April 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 27th April 2013, BBC America

Ever since the TARDIS showed up and proved itself to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, there have been several burning questions in the minds of viewers: how much bigger? What's in there? And will the BBC budget ever stretch to allowing us to find out?

Over the years, we've had references to the many rooms within the TARDIS, as well as stories that have given us brief glimpses of the infinite interior, including Edge of Destruction…

…Castrovalva…

…the TV movie…

…The Doctor's Wife and, of course, The Invasion of Time:

But these glimpses have been very few and far between, usually quite brief, and either subordinate to the rest of the plot or mind-numbingly dull (Castrovalva). What we've been waiting for is a proper adventure set in the TARDIS that combines everything we've learnt about it but goes on to show off as much as possible of the interior, while giving us new and exciting additions, all while avoiding the Castrovalva "Maths is Fun!" syndrome.

Did Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS give us that? Well, let's discuss it all after this lovely trailer and the jump.

"Try this for a deep, dark secret. The great detective Remington Steele, he doesn't exist... I invented him. Follow: I always loved excitement so I studied and apprenticed and put my name on an office but absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so… feminine, so I invented a superior, a decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm until the day he walked in with his blue eyes and mysterious past and before I knew it he assumed Remington Steele's identity. Now I do the work and he takes the bows. It's a dangerous way to live but as long as people buy it I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure, well, almost never. I don't even know his real name."

It's hard for women to get to the top in business. Don't believe me? Just check how many women are CEOs or members of the boards of directors for Fortune 500 companies.

The reasons for this are long and complicated, involving history, discrimination and a whole lot more. In particular, there's perception. Some people, both men and women, don't think women are going to be as good as men are at certain jobs.

Particularly private detectives. Or at least people didn't in 1982, before VI Warshawski, Anna Lee and co. Certainly, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalst) found it hard to get any work when she started out. She may have come top of her class at pretty much everything, but with her name on the door, for some strange reason, no one was interested in hiring her.

So crafty Laura Holt decided to invented a boss with a very masculine name: Remington Steele (Remington as in gun, rather than Fuzzaway). Suddenly, for some equally strange reason, people were queuing up to hire her - well, they wanted Remington Steele, but he was always out of town on business but somehow he always managed to solve his cases with the help of his 'assistant'.

All was going well with this set-up until a movie-loving, very handsome con man (Pierce Brosnan) turned up and assumed Steele's identity. Together, he and Holt end up working together, solving crimes. But would their relationship ever become more, when it was all founded in lies - hell, she didn't even know his real name? Well… that would be saying.

Here's the intro from the very first episode - the observant will notice the wording is different. After that, the full, rather catchy, Henry Mancini-scored theme tune, and then every episode title from the show, all of which were puns.

In the UK: Saturday, 6.15pm, 20th April 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 20th April 2013, BBC America

Nigel Kneale is something of a god on this blog. A revolutionary writer of some of the best scripts in British TV history, his effect can still be felt today. One of his most powerful and influential works was The Stone Tape, a genuinely scary scientific ghost story that has leant its name to a parapsychology concept: the idea that ghosts may be 'memories' of events somehow imprinted on buildings or the landscape. When you have a mo, watch it below…

The latest piece of British TV to owe a debt to The Stone Tape was Saturday's episode of Doctor Who - Hide, which not only had a scientist investigating a haunted house with the help of scientific apparatus and a woman with psychic abilities, it was even set in the 70s.

Now, I have to admit I wasn't sure what to expect of this. On the one hand, it was written by Neil Cross, who also wrote the rather dreadful Rings of Akhaten. On the other, Cross only got the job of writing Rings, because he'd apparently impressed Steven Moffat and co with the quality of this script. Cross also has ghost-story form, having written the recent BBC2 adaptation of MR James's Whistle and I'll Come To You.

So which Cross were we going to get, I was wondering: super-scary ghost-writing Cross or sucky singing child Cross?

Thankfully, it turned out to be the former. Here's a trailer.

In the US: Fridays, 9pm, Starz
In the UK: Fridays, 10pm, Fox. Starts 19th April

You might have thought the horror that was Torchwood: Miracle Day had ended. There's no more Torchwood, thanks to the series being so poorly received, even the majority of die-hard Torchwood fans couldn't bear any more episodes. Yet like that giant hole in the middle of the Earth, sucking the joy from life in that show's finale, so its legacy carries on.

That legacy is an alliance between BBC Worldwide and Starz aimed at creating yet more dramas as good as Torchwood: Miracle Day - yes, that good - and Da Vinci's Demons is its first bastard offspring. On paper, it might have seemed a good idea, with David Goyer, the co-writer of Batman Begins, crafting a historical fantasy series about the early life of Leonardo Da Vinci. The well known Renaissance polymath, he's popped up in enough shows over the years that he probably deserved a show of his own.

But in practice, it's not. Starz has tried to do historical shows before. It's had huge, deserved success with Spartacus; Magic City may just be nasty but it's a loving recreation of the 1950s Miami at the very least. Unfortunately, rather than aping either of those two shows, it's decided to go the Camelot route and produced a genre-busting show that marries Camelot's sex, nudity, poor action and complete bypass of virtually all history; the BBC's child-friendly but atrocious Merlin, Robin Hood and Bonekickers; the setting and political intrigue of The Borgias; the ridiculous conspiracy theories of The Da Vinci Code; and elements of movies ranging from Batman Begins to Hudson Hawk. Yes, the probably gay Florentine polymath Leonardo Da Vinci is actually a leather-jacket wearing shagger of women, prone to the occasional sword-fight with the local guards, who somehow gets mixed up with the magical secret society that is the Sons of Mithras, all while flying people around in his inventions.

And it's all filmed in Wales with an almost entirely British cast. Be proud. We made this.

In the UK: Saturday, 6.15pm, 13th April 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 13th April 2013, BBC America

Mark Gatiss is a fanboy. This will probably come as a surprise to you only if you've never heard of Mark Gatiss before. Otherwise, this should be known to you.

A member of the League of Gentlemen (a troop of horror-story loving fanboys), Gatiss first appeared in the realm of Doctor Who writing some of Virgin's range of New Adventures books that emerged following the cancellation of the original series. Then, after writing and starring in some of the Liz Shaw spin-off P.R.O.B.E. stories, and some of the Big Finish Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel audio ranges (he's an S&S fanboy, too), he came to write some Doctor Who TV episodes: The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot's Lantern, Victory of the Daleks and Night Terrors. He's also written fiction that pastiches 19th century fiction, hosted and contributed to documentaries on some of his favourite fanboy subjects (Nigel Kneale, Hammer horror), adapted and starred in HG Wells' The First Men In the Moon and being a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, too, it should come as no surprise by now for you to hear that he's one of the show runners and writers for Sherlock.

A fanboy, then. Clear?

The biggest problem facing fanboys in general and Mark Gatiss in particular is originality. It's all right when you have something to adapt and something to riff on, but actually coming up with good new ideas is actually terribly hard for the fanboy. It's no surprise therefore that whenever Gatiss writes anything, it's usually slight variations on an existing, familiar story, with knowing references to other things thrown in and some sort of Important Obvious Metaphor thrown in for good luck.

By now, it shouldn't surprise you when I tell you it was Gatiss who suggested to bestest Sherlock pal and Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat that they should do a story feature the Ice Warriors, just about the only popular old Who monster that the new series hadn't featured. Nor should it surprise you that our Stevie was a bit dismissive of the idea, thinking they were a bit rubbish looking.

But Gatiss has brought them back, with an Important Obvious Metaphor about the Cold War (hence, the title) thrown in for good luck. It's a little bit The Ice Warriors, a little bit Dalek… okay, a lot Dalek, with a big chunk of Alien and just a soupçon of Hunt For Red October on a low budget thrown in. And while it never hit the 'totally excellent' mark, by sticking with what he's best at, Gatiss turned in what's probably his best Doctor Who yet.

Here's a trailer.

Greek tragedy was the very first formal theatrical genre to be invented. Created in the 5th century BC to honour the Greek god Dionysos during his annual festival in Athens, it developed over the next century or so thanks to numerous playwrights, including Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to give us some of the greatest ever works of Western theatre and literature.

But since those times, as a genre, it's pretty much fallen by the wayside. For all that David Simon and his fellow writers on The Wire may claim to have written to the rules of Greek tragedy rather than the more common Shakespearean model, they rarely touched on the classic formula devised by Aristotle for tragedy: the hubris, catharsis then nemesis of the protagonist, an ordinary man, who through some tragic flaw or mistake is eventually undone by the gods.

Greek tragedy itself didn't always stick to the formula (e.g. Euripides' Helene, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound), so you have to hand it to former Daily Mirror journalist turned TV writer Michael J Bird to not only create one of the very few modern pieces of drama to stick to that formula, but to also set it and film it in Greece with a largely Greek cast.

1977's BBC2 serial Who Pays The Ferryman? sees former soldier turned boat builder Alan Haldane (Jack Hedley from Colditz) return to Crete after more than 30 years' absence. A legendary fighter with the Crete resistance during the War, he'd been a hero to the people and had fallen in love with Melina, one of the women he'd met there. Hoping to meet with her again after all this time, he tragically discovers that she has died. Compounding his misery, he is now getting a cold shoulder from the people who'd formerly seen him as a hero and been his friends.

Why? Well, unbeknownst to him, she'd fallen pregnant with his child. She wrote to him and, given the Cretan attitudes of the time and receiving no reply, she ended up marrying another man who would raise the daughter as his own. Haldane, who never received the letters and who now discovers his own letters to her were never received, decides to meet the now grown-up daughter he never knew he had and become her benefactor. And along the way, he meets a woman Annika (played by the very famous Greek actress Betty Arvaniti), who seems very familiar …

Why no one received the letters from their respective lovers and the lengths some people will go to to destroy Haldane are some of the central dilemmas of a very Greek story about vendetta, family and even the gods themselves that does not, of course, have a very happy ending. Here's the title sequence, followed by the opening of the second episode. It features the incredibly popular and catchy theme song by Cretan composer Yannis Markopoulos.

Oh, and here's Marina Sirtis - Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation - in her second ever TV appearance. This is all she gets to do, mind.