Trailers from BBC1 for its Christmas season have arrived on YouTube. Here's the drama one, with lots and lots of clips from Doctor Who and the Jonathan Creek Christmas special, among other things.

And here's the comedy one, featuring, among other things, clips from Gavin & Stacey, The Royle Family and that Blackadder documentary.

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Why, what's this stumbling out of its retirement home for the terminally enfeebled? It's the full season/series Carusometer, ready to cast its unblinking, incorruptible gaze over the fourth series of Doctor Who. Let's see what it thought.

Continue reading "Doctor Who 4x1-4x13 - Full series review"

The best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster: the drink's effect is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick - or watching a Doctor Who season finale by Russell T Davies

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Stephen Fry recently gave a speech at the BBC about the importance of the licence fee (you can listen to him retell it for his latest podgram). In it, he recalls tuning in to watch the very first episode of Doctor Who. It was the most exciting thing he'd ever seen and the seven days until the next episode were almost unbearable.

Ring any bells?

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x13 - Journey's End"

Read other posts about: Being Human, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood

So what are we reckoning: biggest double-bluff in Who history or the most elaborate, best kept secret in television history?

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x12 - The Stolen Earth"

The 1970s. A lot of people get all nostalgic about them, forgetting the constant strikes, power cuts, massive inflation and white dog poo that came with the era.

One good reason to get nostalgic is the TV. Ignore fluffy stuff like The Good Life or jaw-dropping programmes like The Black and White Minstrels Show – the essence of 70s TV was bleak, miserable and pessimistic despair, whether it was in sci-fi like Doomwatch, The Survivors, Blake's 7 or The Changes or dramas like Callan, The Sandbaggers, Special Branch or Law and Order. 

Fan-bloody-tastic TV, in other words. This is what we want. 

And praise the Lord, Rusty gave us misery in spades with tonight's episode.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x11 - Turn Left"

Read other posts about: The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood

Who's this by again? “Russell T Davies”? Blimey. Is he still writing for Doctor Who then?

With all the Steven Moffat fuss of late, it's easy to forget that Russell T Davies - aka RTD OBE - is still showrunner of Doctor Who and will be until 2010. Or that he actually writes scripts for it now and then.

With Midnight, he's drawn something of the short straw for himself - the “we've run out of budget and Catherine Tate needs a break” episode. But given a small cast and three sets or so to play with, Rusty doesn't do a bad job at all.

In fact, there's only one man who can bring this house of cards tumbling down. You guessed it. It's Murray Gold.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x10 - Midnight"

Two-parters are tricky, aren't they? You set up mysteries and problems in the first part that need to be answered in the second. Most importantly, you have to make sure there's sufficient pay-off for the viewer, who's been hanging around waiting for the answers.

Last week in Silence in the Library, Steven Moffat set up all sorts of questions that needed to be answered this week. Did he answer them this week? And did he answer them well?

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x9 - Forest of the Dead"

Where does he get these wonderful ideas? Wouldn't you just give anything to have the creativity of Steven Moffat? Everything he writes seems to have some concept designed purely to scare the crap out of kids – and adults – that no one's ever thought of before.

The man's a genius.

All the same, as brilliant as the first part of this two-part Doctor Who story was, it wasn't complete perfection. And there were several guilty culprits.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x8 - Silence in the Library"

Agatha Christie: the world's favourite novelist. 

Except for me. I bloody hate her. Apart from putting together novels populated by ciphers, who are mere components in intellectual exercises with no resemblance to reality, she single-handedly reduced most of British crime-writing to the same level – a state it didn't recover from for decades, leaving the US to take over and monopolise proper crime-writing.

Even on its own terms though:

• Miss Marple: pages of no proper clues whatsoever then three pages before the end. "Have you ever noticed the extraordinary resemblance between cipher x and cipher y?" No we bloody haven't because it's a book, Miss Marple, and we haven't had any decent descriptions that would reveal this familial connection and motive for murder.
• Hercule Poirot: pure anti-Belgian xenophobia.

And let's not get started on The Mousetrap as the ultimate example of inter-changeable Christie characters. 

Some people disagree. Bah, and indeed, humbug to them. They're wrong. I will brook no disagreement on this one. They must think about what they've done until they realise the sheer depth of their wrongness. Yes, even my wife. I won't be telling her that though.

Anyway, this week's Doctor Who. It seems when you want to do an 'homage' to an author, you call Gareth Roberts. Writer of last year's slightly uninvolving Shakespeare Code, he's back again with a moderately better but still similar effort, this time a blatant piece of recidivist pro-Christie propaganda. 

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x7 - The Unicorn and the Wasp"

Well thank heavens for that. For one terrible moment, I thought we were going to go through an entire nu-Who series without there being a completely bollocks episode. 

But praise the Lord, it's happened. A true piece of rubbish. Ladies and gentlemen, we've found this year's Evolution of the Daleks.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x6 - The Doctor's Daughter"