Doctor Who, that’s who. Turns out that even if you air it in a crap time slot (Friday night) and forget to mention kids might like it, you can still double your ratings compared with last year’s output.
Nicely done, Eccles. Let’s see what DT does for the US as the cold winter nights set-in. Marie? Lisa? Anyone want to hazard a guess?
PS: Please find enclosed one picture of David Tennant.
Well, after the Impossible Planet, The Satan Pit was a bit of a disappointment. All that suspenseful creepy set-up, just to have most of the second part consumed by running up and down corridors, scrambling around ventilator shafts and a fortuitous appearance by the TARDIS to save the day? It all felt a bit of a waste. Where was the cunning plan by the Doctor to overcome the enemy? Where were the buckets of evil nastiness that had proved so unsettling the previous week? Where did Billie Piper’s acting talent go? It’s a bigger mystery than the Devil himself.
Basic plot: Rose and the miners escape the planet in a rocket; the Doctor throws himself down a hole, breaks a couple of jars and then rescues the people in the rocket using the TARDIS.
It could have been so much more, given the production team had Satan to work with as a villain, yet it became so conventional. Even the Ood seemed less menacing and more plasticky than last week.
It wasn’t awful, there was never a cringe-worthy moment and the Beast was a fantastic piece of CGI. But it could all have amounted to so much more, given half a chance.
And what was up with David Tennant? You’re not in the theatre again, love. You don’t have to shout every line to the back of the auditorium. You don’t have to compensate for lack of interesting dialogue by bellowing. In short, you are not Brian Blessed.
Maybe it was the alcohol that did it, but Sir Cliff swore at Gordon after tasting his own wine and calling it awful in a Ramsay taste test.
No, not the Tony Hart montage of paintings by children. The Gallery at the Odeon. What’s the point of it?
For the uninitiated, the Gallery is supposed to be the best cinema-going experience possible. First of all, you get to relax in a kind of lounge-bar before the movie. You can buy alcoholic drinks; alternatively you can have unlimited soft drinks or coffee. In addition, you can have as much popcorn, nachos and Quality Street as you like. Once you’re done in the bar, you get to watch the movie in dedicated Gallery seats, which are wide, comfy, leather chairs with their own little armrests for food and drink. You can also reserve the seats in advance to ensure you get to sit where you want.
All of this costs £18, which is £10.50 more than the price of a standard adult evening ticket.
Now, this was quite a nice idea when UCI filmworks did it and before Odeon took over. It was quite a nice “make a night of it” plan to buy Gallery tickets, spend an hour or so in the Gallery bar chatting, then watch the movie. But there have been changes by Odeon that mean I don’t think it’s worth the cash any more. Let’s weigh things up.
A US remake of Nighty Night by Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City.
© 2022 The Medium is Not Enough
