The Mysterious Planet

Chapter The 103rd, which can literally be said to be a bit of a trial.

Plot: 
The Doctor and TARDIS are forced to land on a Space Station where he is put on trial by his people, the Time Lords. Or, maybe it's an enquiry not a trial. Or an enquiry that turns into a trial. Anyway, none of that matters as proceedings essentially take the form of a fan group marathon watch of Colin Baker episodes: a lot of people with an interest in the Doctor watch several stories one after the other on a TV screen, and the most opinionated pair in the room have a big argument about whether the Doctor's good in them or not. The first story that prosecutor the Valeyard presents is about the Doctor's trip to Ravolox, a very Earth-like planet that turns out to be Earth. So, not that mysterious, really.

The Doctor investigates with help from Peri, and a pair of intergalactic dodgy dealers, Sabalom Glitz and his minder Dibber. It turns out some hackers from Andromeda had retreated to Earth with a lot of high-tech data that they'd stolen from the biggest net of information in the universe. They went into suspended animation awaiting their pick-up ship to arrive, but then Earth was somehow moved across space, meaning they were never rescued. This caused a fireball which almost destroyed the planet. Their robot, Drathro, is left with instructions to keep an underground survival chamber going, with a slave population - the only humans left alive. Over 500 years, during which time the Andromedan sleepers have died, Drathro has culled many humans to keep the underground population stable; some have been released secretly by the human guards to live as primitives outside the underground complex. The Doctor saves the humans, avoiding a explosion from Drathro's failing power system. The trial continues...

Context:

I watched on my own from the from the DVD, a couple of episodes one weekend, then a gap before finishing off the second pair of episodes a week later. Members of the family dropped in and out of the living room as I watched, but nobody was engaged enough to sit down for long. The Better Half managed ten minutes of the first episode before bailing.

First-time round:

One of the clichés voiced in interviews with Doctor Who viewers of a certain age (repeated again by Bradley Walsh in this month's Doctor Who Magazine) is the interviewee, after having followed Doctor Who diligently when younger, drifting away from regular watching as they hit their teenage years. This was happening to me too by 1985, with a few episodes of Colin Baker's first full year clashing with other things I was doing on a Saturday. In the longer than usual break between that season and the Trial of a Time Lord, though, my family got its first ever VCR. Like many fans during this decade, I suddenly had the agony of choice edited out of my life. I could go out and do my teenage Saturday thing without having to put aside childish things to do so (or at least, I only had to put them aside for a couple of hours, then I could come home and catch up on a recording of childish things from earlier). Two E180 tapes were enough - with LP-mode doubling the storage capacity - for the whole 14 episode season. But I wonder if all those spools of tape were strangling the life out of me. What would have happened had I had to make that choice? Would I have been forced to grow up? What could I have become? I'll never know.

The Trial story, with its plot arcing over three and a bit months, was a perfect candidate for re-watching. Alas, my previously reported ineptitude with programming the VCR meant that I missed certain episodes or sections of them, so my home recording of Trial was never complete. These first four episodes were intact though, and I did view them many many times in a short period of time. As such, this story has a certain place in my heart. Despite this, I did not see what Glitz was mouthing in the bleeped-out excised evidence section in episode 4, even though it should have been screamingly obvious from which information store the sleepers swiped the story's MacGuffin. A couple of weeks later, my schoolfriend Dominic clued me in; I then went back and watched that section multiple times too, making sure he was right. This was a sort of anti-spoiler: rather than give anything away, it created some much needed intrigue for how things were going to pan out.

Reaction

Watching in a random order is hard on closely linked sets of stories. For example: early on, I watched the big finale of Tom Baker's Key to Time season before any of its other parts, and found it even more lacking without the half-decent preceding stories to bolster it. I was watching The Mysterious Planet this time only a few months on from watching the third part of the Trial. That third part, the Vervoids story, is usually the point when watching sequentially one gets sick of all the cutting back to the courtroom; this time, I was being annoyed by that in episode 1 (when previously watching in the right order, it was still early enough for me to be more forgiving). It makes me more sure than ever that the framing structure of the trial is a wrong-headed idea, and nothing could ever have been done to make it work. You can only tolerate it, never enjoy it. Plus, the device relegates what would have been each main story to a B subplot, and robs it of all immediacy by having it shown as reported past tense action.

Episodes 2 and 3 both have great, traditional "how are they going to get out of that?" cliffhangers within the Ravolox plotline, but they are undermined. We always know at some level the Doctor's going to survive to next week, I know, but we're not usually explicitly told he's already survived and is looking back on these events from a safe distance. Each segment of the overall trial tale is therefore two completely different stories fighting against one another. The more interesting one is happening in the past; the one happening in the present is static and dull. Nothing happens in the trial sections over the course of these four episodes. That plot does not move much at all, in fact, for the first 12 episodes; there are only three or four beats in total: the Doctor's on trial for his life, he's lost his memory, the evidence is being tampered with, he's inadvertently made himself look guilty of genocide. That's it.

In order to justify hiring the actors and building the set, though, the action has to keep jerking us back to the courtroom, interrupting the flow. With no plot to work through and an average of three courtroom scenes per episode, there's only so much they can do to fill: a smidgen of exposition, the odd meta gag about the real world of show ("I would appreciate it if these brutal and repetitious scenes are reduced to a minimum") but mostly all that's left for anyone to do is bluster. Colin Baker does his best with the material, but he has no room for manoeuvre: he's reduced to shouting, waving his arms, and calling his opponent a series of increasingly unfunny names.


On Ravolox, meanwhile, things are much better. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are playing against the tiresome bickering that marred their first full series together. With line readings and small actions alone, they override the script to create an warmly affectionate but teasing friendship. It's just a shame that they can't do anything about the lines where Peri moans on about wanting to get back to the TARDIS: why did it take most of the 1980s for someone to realise that the audience identification figure shouldn't act like they don't want to be part of the series?! The guest cast are all good: Joan Sims playing it straight, Tony Selby and Glen Murphy memorably performing the last of writer Robert Holmes's comic double acts.  The sets and robot costumes are good, the use of the Butser Ancient Farm location - a living historical recreation - as the Tribe of the Free's village is clever. The running gag about the post-apocalyptic future's misunderstanding of salvaged texts ("UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose by HM Stationary Office") is witty.

Whatever the production's resources, though, nothing is enough to break out of the restrictive structure imposed upon the story by the trial idea. The first few minutes of episode 1 epitomise this: the credits give way to the magnificent opening model shot of the space station accompanied by Dominic Glynn's majestic surging score, the screen whites out: it looks like it's going to be the best thing ever! Then we cut to a drab looking set, and Colin in his costume - which we've had extra months since last season to forget but instantly realise was every bit as bad as we remembered. He walks into another drab set and exchanges lines of dull bafflegab with people in silly hats about Time Lord nonsense. It's not much of a reboot. In almost the words of The (not Doctor) Who: "Here comes the new toss, same as the old toss..."

Connectivity: 

The Mysterious Planet, like The Woman Who Fell to Earth, is a Autumn relaunch episode following on from the end of the previous Doctor Who series a year and a bit before; both stories have a new theme tune arrangement that's heavy on the synth drums.

Deeper Thoughts:
Did Michael Grade have a point? In 1989, when the original run of Doctor Who as an ongoing series ended, the powers that Beeb didn't really want to cancel it, they just wanted it to break for a rethink. In 1985, Controller of BBC1 Michael Grade did want to cancel Doctor Who; but, because of a public outcry, he ended up only making it have a break for a rethink. Oddly, this inadvertent action was probably the right one: the show did need changes to keep up with the times. The 50-minute episodes established in Colin's first full year were a good first step, but maybe Doctor Who should have been making episodes all on film like many other dramas of the time, maybe even making fewer 90-minute stand-alone film episodes (a format that the first ever Inspector Morse, filmed around the same time as Trial, was about to showcase). The action-oriented approach of previous years was good, but the tone and content of the stories needed looking at.

None of this happened when Doctor Who returned in 1986, and - apart from backward steps - nothing changed at all. Grade wasn't interested enough in rebooting the show to give detailed guidance (it wasn't his job anyway), and he certainly wasn't going to give the production any more money. The 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner and his script editor Eric Saward only really had the option of doing less of the same. Or did they? What Grade could control, he did, and somewhat to Doctor Who's benefit. On the Special Features section of the Trial DVD are compiled the contemporary trails and continuity from The Mysterious Planet's debut broadcast. Watching them, I was struck that the 1986 Saturday night line-up is nicely structured. Doctor Who comes after a lead-in from a programme for slightly younger kids and is then followed by shiny-floored quiz and entertainment shows. It's very similar to the schedules that had served it well in the 1970s and 2000s. The problem is that the quality of each of those 1986 Saturday night shows is, well, a bit mid-Eighties. Instead of Basil Brush, you've got Roland Rat; instead of Brucie, Paul Daniels. It might seem horribly unfair, but Doctor Who's slightly lacklustre content fits neatly in to such a line-up.

Did Nathan-Turner and Saward do enough with what they had? They didn't even ditch Colin Baker's costume. After all, a year after Trial, incoming script editor Andrew Cartmel brought in a lot of changes to the approach without an increase in budget and without any opportunity to make fundamental structural changes. This feeds in a little to my work-in-progress theory about how the post 2005 stories are loosely following the classic series pattern but with time condensed. Christopher Eccleston is the equivalent of the black and white era: still somewhat embryonic, trying things out, several Dalek stories, massively popular at the beginning, with the popularity tailing off a bit at the end. Tennant is the big mass audience popularity phase, the equivalent of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker: big audiences, propelling the series into the top ten programmes of the week. Matt Smith is Peter Davison, a younger Doctor, with stories getting a bit more involved and giving lots of fan service; domestic ratings decreasing a bit, but the show becoming increasingly popular as a cult offering for international audiences. Capaldi is Colin Baker: both had been fans, and wanted to play the Doctor, but thought they'd lost the chance when they played another guest character before being cast later in the main role, both played the Doctor grumpy at first, and the ratings reduced again slightly, possibly because the show was becoming too obsessed with its own continuity.

So, that would mean Jodie Whittaker is Sylvester McCoy?! It works to a certain extent: new Doctor, new title sequence and music; a big effort behind the scenes to use new writers, and increase diversity in content / be politically 'right on' (delete according to prejudice). Comparing and contrasting the results that made it to screen from those two eras, though, one can only be grateful of the latitude and budget allowed to incoming 21st century showrunners to put their stamp on the series. One of the biggest 'What Ifs' in Doctor Who's history is what would have happened after that 1980s crisis period if the production team or the BBC management had found the will to do something properly different with the show. We'll never know. But fans can at least console themselves with the programme as it is on our screens right now.

In Summary:
Less of a trial if you ignore the trial bits.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

Chapter The 102nd, in which the future becomes female at last.

Plot: 
[A new episode, so the following synopsis - and post - is going to be spoilerish: be warned.]  In present day Sheffield, Ryan Sinclair is looking for his bike in the woods (long story) and accidentally invites an alien warrior to Earth when he touches a shimmery floating alien button thing that appears in thin air before him. The warrior's called Tim Shaw (long story) and with the help of a tentacle bio-android thingy, he must hunt and catch a randomly chosen human, as an initiation test to become leader of his tribe. Ryan calls the police, and meets up with an old schoolfriend, Yaz, who's now a probationary police officer. They then catch up with Ryan's grandmother Grace and her husband Graham, plus the post-regeneration Doctor, sans TARDIS, who has dropped in (long story, or rather a short punchy few seconds at the end of an otherwise very long story). Together, they work as a team to find out what the alien warrior is doing and save Karl - the lad with self-esteem issues who's being hunted. They succeed, but at a cost. The Doctor enlists her new friends help once more: she rewires Tim's travel technology to send her through space to the location of the TARDIS; but, she is instead transported into the vacuum of space, alongside Ryan, Yaz and Graham...

Context:

I left a few days after watching this for the first one and a bit times (see below) to allow a bit of space for my thoughts to settle; then, I watched it again midweek on my own (well, on my own except for a gin and tonic). It was just as good as first time round. The Woman Who Fell to Earth is a solidly constructed narrative that doesn't rely on surprise, so it doesn't suffer from knowing what's going to happen before you watch it unfold. If anything, this second watch was marginally better as I could put the subtitles on, and find that the Tim Shaw character is actually pronouncing his name as Tzim-Sha.

First-time round:

The family (me, the Better Half and three kids - boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) gathered round excitedly with some white-chocolate popcorn that the BH had prepared, watching the last few minutes of Countryfile, a programme we'd  never normally watch, just to ensure we didn't miss a moment of Jodie Whittaker's first story on its BBC1 broadcast. The drawback with Doctor Who now being broadcast on a Sunday is that it makes it more difficult to view the episode for suitability beforehand. We'd have had to wait to do this Sunday night after the kids had gone to bed, which they were too excited to manage (frankly, the adults were too excited too). Should it prove suitable, making them wait to see it until Monday, after a full day of school, seemed a bit mean. So, I did what I could, and read reviews to get a feel for the tone. Will Gompertz's BBC news site review particularly led me to believe there wasn't much that was scary in The Woman Who Fell to Earth; but, alas, my youngest found a face full of other people's teeth too much, and left the room for the last 15 minutes, her Mum accompanying her. When she was settled down, and the others were also abed, the Better Half caught up with what she missed, and I watched that section again with her too.

Reaction

However good or not the story was, and it was jolly good, the only thing that ultimately matters is Jodie Whittaker's performance as the Doctor. It too was jolly and good. The first story of any new Doctor is more than anything a showcase of that actor's new take. Jodie's Doctor is your best and bravest and cleverest friend, but resolutely in charge. Each scene fizzes with energy (even the scenes where she's asleep) and her dialogue is studded with mission statements about how change is scary but okay, how knives and for idiots, how she's good at building things (probably), and how she ensures fair play across the universe, and so on. She had me at "Oh Brilliant" really, but I think I was wholly won over by the time she swirled round and said with smiling authority "I'm calling you Yaz, 'cos we're friends now".

It's a team effort, though, both in terms of the characters and the actors. Every one of the regular cast is delivering the goods. Bradley Walsh is perfectly pitched as the Everyman voice of reason;  Sharon D Clarke is no-nonsense and brave; Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole arrive fully-formed as the audience identification figures. More than being this decade's Rose and Mickey, I'd say they were shaping up to be this century's Ian and Barbara: two old friends thrown together in an adventure they didn't ask to go on, with maybe a hint that they might become a couple (though it's early days yet). Everyone's work is faultless, and they get given some lovely lines; "Can't ride a bike, started an alien invasion" from Graham is a favourite. There's something of a Sarah Jane Smith Adventures vibe, and I mean that in a good way in case you were wondering: it's probably inevitable; the shape of our new heroes' group silhouette is very similar, with only the ages of the characters tweaked a bit.

Beyond the regulars, every character, however minor, is given enough room to shine, right down to the doomed drunk guy throwing his kebab salad at an alien he mistakenly thinks is a Halloween celebrator out a month early. This is all packed in to an only slightly increased running time alongside a quite dense plot with lots of intrigue and a couple of expert set pieces (if the jumping from crane to crane sequence didn't make your toes curl, you may well be a corpse, just sayin'). This is down to a very well constructed narrative, which is never overcrowded or convoluted, and keeps it lean with anything even slightly extraneous trimmed out. There's not even a title sequence (is that a first? even the assembled found footage episode Sleep No More had a brief one), and no appearance of TARDIS interior or exterior. This makes it a perfect jumping-on point for new viewers. There's only one line, about the Doctor previously being a Scotsman, that hints that this isn't a brand new show. The cliffhanger lead-in to the next episode keeps things intriguing to the end, with many revelations remaining for newbies and seasoned veteran viewers alike.

There's high quality in terms of look and feel too: good visuals, well lit, with a nice choice of interesting urban locations, as well as the windswept hills and dales at the start (a silly place to learn to ride a bike, but I'll allow them that as Ryan was probably too embarrassed to do it anywhere nearer to other people). The theme music and pulsating images accompanying the end credits are old-school but given enough of a twist to be new too. The incidentals are great; Murray Gold did sterling work over thirteen years to keep things distinctive and fresh for each story and each new Doctor, and I'll miss him; but, we have someone just as good in new composer Segun Akinola. Not everything was perfect, of course. The Stenza concept is a bit derivative of the Predator movie franchise. It's pushing things for Yaz to be recognisable to Ryan and his Gran if they last saw her at primary school age. However paranoid his preparations and monitoring, how could Rahul have found the alien transport so quickly? Plus, hunter and prey separately bumping into members of the same family on the same night in a city as big as Sheffield is stretching coincidence a bit too much. These are very minor points, though, and this is only the start of this new new Who - it's a work in progress, but then so is life.

Connectivity: 

Both Fear Her and The Woman Who Fell to Earth take place in a UK city, and involve the Doctor interacting with a family and visiting their house. In both instances the child of that family has one deceased parent; in both instances, the Dad is absent, and is characterised as being a less than admirable human being. The tentacled bio-thing looks quite similar to the scribble creature too.

Deeper Thoughts:
Sundayness. The move from Saturdays to Sundays makes more sense now I've seen The Woman Who Fell to Earth. For quite a while into the story, I couldn't work out why the tone felt so different. It was shot and directed well, but Doctor Who wasn't exactly poorly served in those departments previously. It had a bleak and dark quality to the visuals, but again this is not far from previous years. It was focusing on the Doctor's friends and their wider family as an introduction before the Doctor appeared; this is the standard pattern, though, in previous jumping-on point stories like Rose and The Eleventh Hour, and even last year's The Pilot. The most major behind-the-scenes change has happened in the writing, so maybe that's where lies a clue; but what is the factor that made it feel - for this viewer at least - so different from the stores from 2005 to 2017? The penny dropped only near the end, after Bradley Walsh had delivered Graham's eulogy, and then explained to the Doctor that his cancer was in remission. All the new characters introduced in The Woman Who Fell to Earth are real. Or, as real as TV character's can get.


Every death (and life) is made to count. Take Dennis for example, who has a sweet chat with his granddaughter moments before being offed. It would be a hackneyed device akin to the "it's my last day before retirement" cop, if the script were being cynical, but I don't think it is. I think in this it is putting out its wares for your appraisal: this is a show about real people living real lives, and this show loves them all. Graham's cancer, Ryan's dyspraxia, Yaz's struggles to be taken seriously in her job, Karl's self-help tape litanies, even Rahul's desperate loss, which is the most out there aspect - each of these grounds the characters more than ever before in new series Doctor Who (and probably in the whole of Doctor Who). The characters here are in much sharper contrast to the extra-terrestrial oddities they are going to come across in future weeks. This is now a show that puts a character in a position where he has to learn how to drive a crane. What does he do? He googles it on his phone, of course, just like we all would.

Characters in previous years since the show's return in 2005 have been grounded too, to a lesser or greater degree; but, compared to Graham, Yaz and Ryan, they are almost cartoons. The stories they were in, though, went out on Saturday rather than Sunday and thus had to stand out amongst the shiny floor spangles and glitter sequins of early evening light entertainment. To make this work, the first new Who Showrunner, Russell T Davies, made his regulars slightly comic caricatures at first glance, so he could reveal their vulnerabilities and strengths in brief, telling moments. Second showrunner Steven Moffat made the regulars superheroes for most of his reign: The Girl Who Waited, The Centurion, The Child of the TARDIS, The Impossible Girl. Their mild mannered alter-egos of Amy, Rory, River Song and Clara were there for most of the time, but any moment they could take off their metaphorical Clark Kent specs and reveal their uber-selves. Interestingly, the person most like a previous new series regular in Jodie Whittaker's debut is Grace: the one who runs towards danger, and relishes the adventure. And [major spoiler, don't  read until you've seen the show] she's the one who doesn't make it. Is hers a symbolic death, representing the end of the show as we've known it previously? Time will tell; it usually does.

 

In Summary:
The best praise is that I can't wait to see The Ghost Monument, and you can't say better than that. Roll on Sunday.

Fear Her

Chapter The 101st, which features a story with a fearful reputation.

 
Plot: 
On the day of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games (as imagined from back in 2006), the Doctor and Rose visit a suburban road in London where several children have gone missing. The Doctor senses ionic energy emanating from the spots where the children disappeared, and investigation leads him and Rose to the house of Chloe Webber and her Mum. Chloe has mentally bonded with an Isolus creature, which has been stranded on Earth. The Isolus usually travel in groups of billions, and its extreme loneliness is affecting Chloe. Because the Isolus have superlative mental powers - abilities to create real worlds from pure imagination - Chloe's drawings have taken a sinister turn, trapping the children of the neighbourhood.

Things escalate (it's not immediately clear why, but they do) with Chloe trapping the entire audience of the Olympic opening ceremony in a drawing, making commentator Huw Edwards have a nervous breakdown live on air. With the Doctor also trapped in one of Chloe's drawings, Rose has to work out on her own where the Isolus's travel pod is, and that it needs heat and positive collective mental energy (or 'love') to power it. So, she bungs it into the path of the Olympic torch, as it makes it's way to the stadium. The torch-bearer is incapacitated by this (it's not immediately clear why, but he is), so the newly released Doctor takes up the torch, and lights the flame in front of the newly restored crowd (and presumably a slightly miffed handful of young athletes and Steve Redgrave). The Isolus flies off to join its billions of brothers and sisters, Chloe and Mum are back to normal, and the Doctor and Rose attend a street party (and presumably therefore miss Paul McCartney's performance of Hey Jude).

Context:

Reviewing Fear Her, I am faced with two barriers to objectivity. You could call them twin dilemmas (if you wanted to force assemble a flimsy comparison); for, the first of those barriers is that Fear Her is seen by many as The Twin Dilemma of new Who. Like that 1980s story, it consistently comes last out of its century's stories in polls. In the 50th anniversary poll in Doctor Who Magazine, which covered everything broadcast from 1963 to 2013, it came 240th out of 241, only being pipped by Colin Baker's disliked debut for the wooden spoon spot.

This is a story, lest we forget, from David Tennant's imperial era, where he's co-starring with the ever popular Billie Piper.  It's hard to come to it unaffected by the weight of negative opinion. I needed fresh perspectives. So, I corralled the kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) and even their au-pair (Spanish-speaking student of 18) to watch the DVD with me, at around 6.45pm on a Sunday evening. This is what I have always referred to as the Songs of Praise slot, but will have to get used very soon to calling Doctor Who time. The Better Half was under the weather, and sat this one out; but, I might have got her to join us too, had I remembered and told her that Tennant has his shirt unbuttoned and a bit of manly chest on display all through this story.

First-time round:
Fear Her's debut BBC1 broadcast in 2006 was the same day as the Better Half's due date for the birth of our first child. This was still a period where each new episode of Doctor Who was so exciting that I tuned in as it went out live. The following year, we had an infant demanding attention, and Doctor Who had become more routine. The need to watch live quickly evaporated. At the time,though, I was concerned with having to miss Doctor Who if we had to rush to the hospital. It seemed to me that the title of this story was an imperative aimed directly at me, referring to someone closer to home than Chloe Webber, if I were to dare to bring some portable method of watching TV into the delivery room. Yes, I was a ridiculous man child; I hope I've improved slightly in the years since. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway, as there were so many repeats of Doctor Who at the time it was nigh-on impossible to miss; plus, we'd just invested in our first PVR, with Fear Her being the first episode to be saved to a hard drive rather than recorded onto tape. Anyway, in the end, baby was a few days late, born midweek, and so has Army of Ghosts as his closest birth story, rather than Fear Her.

Reaction

I said above that there were two barriers to objectivity in reviewing Fear Her. The second barrier is more personal, and the Deeper Thoughts below will go into a bit more background on this: Fear Her was the only Doctor Who TV serial at the time (and one of only two to this day) written by someone I know. Perhaps this blog post will end up as an even-handed treatment, seeing as I have all the negative feeling of received fan wisdom on one side, but on the other I'm predisposed to like it because of its author. The reaction of my viewing mates this time - none of whom are familiar with writer Matthew Graham or his other work - was positive too, though. They payed attention throughout and didn't get restless (even the 18 year old!), they were scared by the scary bits, and they laughed at the funny bits: what more could one ask?

The scary bits were a bit too scary, if anything (not something you could say about The Twin Dilemma). Whatever you think of the execution, the idea of the main threat in Fear Her - Chloe's memories of her late abusive father becoming corporeal - is unsettling and original. The youngest had to watch from outside the room through the crack in the door for a couple of moments. I don't think anyone could find fault with the funny bits - there are some great funny lines, and the Doctor parking the TARDIS badly is a lovely gag. One moment - the Doctor getting a silent telling off from Rose after putting his fingers into a marmalade jar - made the whole room laugh (even the 18 year old!). The regulars perform this, and everything here, with gusto and charm. Tennant seems to have ironed out the more annoying tics from his first few stories, and found his groove.

Beyond the two regulars, however, the performances are a little dodgy. The actor playing Chloe, Abisola Agbaje, makes a brave stab, but the role is too much for someone of her inexperience. She only has Fear Her as her one dramatic entry in the imdb (the two non-dramatic entries are for Doctor Who Confidential and Totally Doctor Who). She was recruited from a school drama club, and - though it's of course possible that she's gone on to a big theatrical career, which just hasn't been linked to anywhere on the internet - it's most likely that she never acted professionally again. That's okay, though, and is a risk any production takes with child actors. What is more surprising is that the normally reliable director Euros Lyn can't get a consistent performance from any other guest actor either. Scenes such as the one at the beginning with all the residents of the street accusing one another are static and stilted.  Maybe they just didn't have the time to get it right. The script was pulled forward to replace Stephen Fry's abandoned effort, so maybe suffered for lack of rewrite time.

The budget is also clearly very low. There's a refreshing originality of the setting being one suburban street and house, which probably arose initially from budgetary pressures. Elsewhere, it's not such a positive impact. The threat to the Earth being represented by a girl drawing the planet on her bedroom wall works on its own. You don't need the entire stadium of people disappearing. Huw Edwards tries his best to convey a believable reaction to an extraordinary situation, but it's too much to ask, and should have been snipped out. Overall, though, a couple of minor issues have overshadowed what is for the most part a very good adventure. At the time, many online commentators criticised Tennant picking up the torch and lighting the Olympic flame, the humourless bar-stewards: it's a great moment. People also cried plagiarism about the similarities to the movie Paperhouse, but I doubt Matt Graham has seen Paperhouse. Really - who saw Paperhouse? I remember seeing trailers for it ad nauseum on videos I hired in the late 1980s / early 1990s, but I never saw it ever play in a cinema, and never saw it on VHS in any shop. Is it possible it was only ever a trailer?

So, is Fear Her the worst ever story of new Who? No. It's not even the worst story of Tennant's first Season. 2006 Who does suffer from 'difficult second album' syndrome; it's not quite as new or as strong as that exciting relaunch year with Christopher Eccleston, but hasn't yet developed into something slicker and different as it would in subsequent years. Quite a few of the stories to me were forgettable, or at least good enough to be forgotten. But not Fear Her.

Connectivity:

Both Closing Time and Fear Her are set within a domestic suburban context, and both sit in the same place and same role within their respective seasons: the last relatively light stand-alone story before the big finale, with a lead-in to that finale tacked on at the end. In both stories, love is said to have been responsible for the defeat of the forces of darkness.

Deeper Thoughts:
Name dropping. Recently, I was part of a brief fan WhatsApp group discussion on the etiquette of asking for autographs. David, long term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, was visiting another university friend, the son-in-law of Frances White (Cassandra in The Myth Makers, and dependable presence of TV casts over the years - I Claudius, Very Peculiar Practice, many others). Frances was coming round to babysit, and David wondered whether it would be acceptable form to ask for an autograph. I was split from the rest of the collective on this: I thought that the context of babysitting was definitely 'off-duty' but nobody else thought it would be an issue. He didn't ask in the end, but it turned out another member of the group, Chris (also mentioned a few times before here) had previously met Frances and used his connection to David as an 'in' to bag his own autograph from her ("My friend knows your son-in-law" sort of thing).

It struck me during this text conversation that I have very few autographs considering I'm a Doctor Who fan - I've only ever obtained them when they came as part and parcel of a book or event that I would have paid for anyway. I have never ever asked anyone for their autograph. Something about the process inhibits me. It doesn't help that I've met very few people involved professionally in Doctor Who, and know even fewer. One of the few I do know is the aforementioned and very talented Chris, who worked on the CGI of the first couple of series of 21st Century Doctor Who, including Fear Her. I also met a couple of other people who've written Doctor Who books or journalism when I was an aspiring and perspiring screenwriter. Also during this period, I met Matthew Graham.

I was doing an Arvon course on writing for television in 2002. For the uninitiated, these are residential courses held in some country retreat or other: a handful of students (including me) and a couple of experts in the subject (including Matthew) spent a week doing writing exercises, having work reviewed, etc. The rest of the time, you cook and eat your meals together, and - for a few of us, at least - drink wine and talk into the wee small hours. Matt and I were both in that happy few. At the time, he had written for Eastenders, Spooks, etc. Very impressive; but, I found out on the first evening that he'd also written some key (and superb) episodes of This Life, including introducing the character of Ferdy. And, right then and there - I'm slightly embarrassed to say - I fell to the floor and did the whole Wayne's World "We're Not Worthy!" bit. This probably explains my reticence to engage with famous people from Doctor Who since: first, I've embarrassed myself enough for one lifetime; and, second, none of them created Ferdy from This Life, so it would all be downhill anyway. In 2002, I did at least stop short of asking for Matt's autograph.

After that, we stayed in touch and met up a couple of times; Matt had been complimentary about my writing, and continued to give me pointers. He also kept me posted on what he was up to, including some very intriguing news about a time-travel cop show he was co-creating, which of course turned out to be Life on Mars. It was fantastic that he got to write for Who too. I've never broached the subject of Fear Her's reputation with him exactly, but I did once email him to say I thought it is marginally my more favourite of the two stories he wrote for the show (the other being the Ganger story for Matt Smith's Doctor). He replied to tell me I was "perverse". I took this as praise. Perverse or not, I absolutely loved Bonekickers, as well - so there!

In Summary:

Nothing to fear.