Sitting Tennant

Today’s Sitting Tennants (from Rosby and Rullsenberg): The Stolen Earth and Partners in Crime

Billie Piper and David Tennant

David Tennant in Partners in Crime

Time for the weekly Sitting Tennants. In this case, we have two Doctor Who shots, one from Ms Rosby showing behind-the-scenes fun during The Stolen Earth, and one from Ms Rullsenberg in which David Tennant is channelling Colin Baker during Partners in Crime: “See the pretty thing swing back and forth.” Phnar, Phnar.

That means Rosby’s clawed her way into second place on our picture competition leader board:

  1. Rullsenberg: 4
  2. Rosby: 2.5
  3. Jaradel: 2

In the witty caption competition section, there’s much confusion (in my head anyway) over exactly how many pictures everyone’s captioning with each comment. But fingers crossed, this is how it stands, with Marie’s super-powered, story-telling, four-picture-captioning wittiest and topical* comment giving her an unprecedented nine points and taking her to the top of the leader board.

Oh, yes, and a bonus point to Persephone for using Gary Numan lyrics. What? You didn’t know about that secret rule? Must have slipped my mind.

  1. Marie: 16
  2. Toby: 12.5
  3. Jane Henry: 10
  4. Persephone: 9
  5. Rullsenberg: 6
  6. Rev/Views, Jaradel: 5
  7. Scott: 3
  8. Aaron: 2
  9. Electric Dragon: 1

As always, captions and new submissions for the gallery, please. Remember, you can submit as many (witty) captions as you like for each and every picture, with topical captions (and pictures of David Tennant in current productions) getting extra marks. The wittiest caption for each picture will get double points. And there’s a bonus point for using Gary Numan lyrics appropriately.

Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. You can also enter the witting and amusing captions league table by commenting on existing photos in the gallery.

* Topical once you realise that Marie has sympathetic back pains, poor lass

Friday’s “not very impressive Torchwood trailer” news

Doctor Who

  • Trailer for Torchwood: Children of Earth

Film

Theatre

  • Michael Bogdanov’s theatre company to fold after staging Thorn Birds musical
  • Les Dennis to star in Priestley comedy

British TV

US TV

Friday’s “not very impressive Torchwood trailer” news

Doctor Who

  • Trailer for Torchwood: Children of Earth

Film

Theatre

  • Michael Bogdanov’s theatre company to fold after staging Thorn Birds musical
  • Les Dennis to star in Priestley comedy

British TV

US TV

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Lie To Me

Time for a third-episode verdict on Lie To Me, in which Tim Roth stares intently at people and acts like House Jr in his Bones office with his Bones team to find out if they’re lying.

After an extremely generic first episode, the series settled down a bit and almost found some character for the second episode, in which a soldier is accused of rape and Dr Roth decides to chat him up.

Unfortunately, it lost it again for the third episode, which not only had a dumb plot and dumber sub-plot that made it spectacularly easy to guess whodunnit, it had some of the worst acting yet seen on US TV – as lovely wife put it, "Is Tim Roth really expensive? Because they don’t appear to have any budget left and so they dragged some people in off the street for the rest of the cast."

Tim Roth remains as fantastic as always and his character does almost touch on being interesting at times. And the show does have some interesting ideas – what would it be like if you knew for sure whenever anyone, even your family, lied to you? And what if you had someone like that for a partner, a father or a boss?

But it’s been saddled with a truly atrocious format, designed purely to cash in on the familiarity of existing Fox shows. The vague hints at bad deeds in Roth’s past are so much tease and little pay off.

In fact, the only noteworthy bits are the science and the use of photographs of famous people demonstrating particular aspects of body language explained by Roth or his plot-explaining assistant.

Worth watching only for Roth – otherwise, steer clear of it.

Carusometer rating: 3
Predictions: Should die within a season, but then Bones should have done, too, so it’ll probably last forever

Thursday’s Matt Smith news

Doctor Who

Film

Theatre

British TV

US TV