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Plot:
A time disturbance affects the TARDIS after it materialises in present day Colchester, stranding the Doctor, who'd just stepped out of the doors, and trapping Amy in the ship within the time vortex, unable to land again. The Doctor traces the disturbance to the upper floor of a terrace house, and moves in to the bottom floor as a lodger with existing tenant Craig Owens. The Doctor investigates, while trying to blend in as ordinary person. Craig meanwhile has been building up confidence to tell his friend Sophie how he feels about her, but the Doctor cramps his style. He outshines Craig on the football field and at his work, and even seems to have persuaded his beloved Sophie to leave Colchester and chase her dreams.
With Craig on the point of throwing him out of his home, the Doctor has to perform a psychic exchange with Craig (by headbutting him) explaining who he is. Voices and mysterious figures have been luring people up to the upstairs flat where a mysterious death befalls them. Realising the latest victim is Sophie, Craig and the Doctor rush upstairs in time to save her. The upper floor is really a disguised timeship whose autopilot software has been luring people in trying to find a new pilot. Craig is immune as he doesn't want to fly away - he has a reason to stay exactly where he is. Expressing this love for Sophie forces the ship to do an emergency shutdown, and it implodes. Craig and Sophie become a couple, and the Doctor and Amy get to travel onwards, but the ominous crack in time is still following them...
Context:
Back to a random selection after a directed trip to a quarry and Kastria. One evening, at the end of a week's staycationing, in the middle of a period where - for various reasons - I was taking a bit of a rest from doing the blog, I popped the Blu-ray of the story on (from the Series 5 box set) and watched it on my lonesome, while drinking a couple of nice glasses of red. This is probably the best way to enjoy The Lodger, and certainly apt as it reflects Craig and Sophie's evenings of "pizza, booze, telly". I didn't have any pizza, though. I should have got some pizza in. Mmm... pizza.
First time round:
I often don't remember my first interactions with TV showings of stories from this era; in 2010, the show had been going a while after its 21st century resurrection, so it wasn't such a novelty anymore, and generally things don't stand out in my memory. This particular story, though, I do recall, because the family was on holiday during its initial BBC1 broadcast. In 2010, my daughter hadn't yet been born, so it was just the Better Half, me, and the two boys (who were both quite small in those days). We'd hired a cottage in the Isle of Wight (it was not too dear), and indeed we had a ticket to Ryde, where the cottage was situated. We'd arrived on the ferry the previous day, and so the Saturday of The Lodger's debut was our first full day of holiday. As the boys were very young, though, we didn't have plans for the evening apart from putting them to bed and watching Doctor Who. We had booze as well as telly, and on that night I think we had pizza too: art imitating life or vice versa. Another element of unintentional immersive theatre was the occasional groans and cheers which could be heard from people watching football. This was apt as - uniquely for Doctor Who - a match features heavily in the narrative. In reality, the broadcast was clashing with an England game in the ongoing World Cup on the other side, and we could hear people in other places nearby watching en masse through the window.
My first interaction with a prototype version of the story was a few years earlier, in the pages on Doctor Who Magazine. The episode is a reworked version of a comic strip that writer Gareth Roberts wrote of the same name, which featured David Tennant's Doctor intruding on Mickey Smith's life with hilarious consequences, while Rose was stuck in the space/time continuum. I thought it was a funny little piece at the time, and Steven Moffat agreed - in his first year in charge of the show, he got Roberts in to expand it into a full TV story.
Reaction:
If one doesn't like James Corden, then - given how much he appears in this story, and how the narrative revolves around him - one isn't going to like The Lodger. I think that's self-evidently true, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on it here (though I will talk more about Who's history of eyebrow-raising casting decisions in the Deeper Thoughts below). He is clearly a polarising figure based on my experience of online and social media discussions. I like what he does here, and elsewhere, so this wasn't a barrier for me. Putting that aside, there's another barrier for a certain type of viewer, The Lodger is a comedy. In my experience, a lot of fans don't like too much humour in their Doctor Who, and that's going to cost this particular story heavily, as it is probably the purest, most straight-up comedy the show has ever done to this date.
There's no monster, the science-fiction elements are a minor subplot, and the occasional cut-aways to mild peril (the mysterious upper floor of the house tempting people in, an ominous patch of mould on a ceiling) take up so very little of the overall running time that they're practically not there. Writer Gareth Roberts' later scripts in a similar vein, Closing Time and The Caretaker, forming a loose trilogy, are more traditional, leaving The Lodger as the boldest experiment. And this isn't a barrier for me either; I don't know why it puts many fans off - most people rave about the much less funny and arguably less innovative The Romans, a William Hartnell story that was the series' earliest foray into out-and-out comedy (sampling Carry on Cleo as greedily as this 2010 story does Gavin and Stacey).
It's a sit-com, but it's also a rom-com. The dramatic question of the story is no more or no less than whether a couple will get together, and every part of it is perfectly put together around that. The main cast trio, Matt Smith, Corden and Daisy Haggard as Sophie are all adept comic performers, with very good chemistry with one another. There is some great dialogue and comic scenarios; I love, for example, the Doctor's reaction to Craig's proposal for how they can make themselves scarce when the other brings a date home: "I'll shout if that happens, yes. Something like, I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!!!!". There's also the wonderful moment where the Doctor goads Sophie into realising her own potential. Like a lot of the best Doctor Who stories, The Lodger mines the juxtaposition of the everyday - football, call centres - with the mysteries of space (both outer and inner). In it's own small way, it's profound, but it doesn't make that big a deal of it.
So, a lovely little story with some lovely moments, well performed and put together. It's not the most frightening or exciting story, but is comfortable and confident to be very, very funny. It's not "game-changing" in terms of the wider narrative, but it isn't trying to be. And Matt Smith, who was very close to becoming a professional footballer earlier in his youth before injury got in the way, gets to kick a ball about and be paid for it. It's a palate cleanser before the big banquet of the two-part season finale that followed it, and it succeeds on those terms. If, and only if, you don't hate James Corden, of course.
Connectivity:
The Lodger and The Hand of Fear are both contemporary set stories which focus more than usual on ordinary humans doing their jobs. In both stories the Doctor is accompanied by a sole female companion, and one of this TARDIS duo is left behind on Earth while the other one disappears off into time and space.
Deeper Thoughts:
(Cupid) Stunt Casting. Kenny Everett never appeared in Doctor Who, I just like name-checking his fantastically rude Spoonerism-named character. But, if it had indeed happened sometime in the mid to late 80s (he could easily have played the zany DJ in Revelation of the Daleks, for example), I don't feel anyone would have been that surprised. At that time, 'stunt casting', as fans referred to it, was causing ructions between the production team and its most vocal critics within fandom. Like a lot of metaphorical sticks used to beat the 80s producer John Nathan-Turner then, it's probably not entirely fair, but perhaps not entirely unfair either. Strict definitions are resisted to allow maximum range of ire, but it's generally taken to mean a publicity-seeking inclusion in a cast of someone more known for non-acting work, or - as we get to the more snobby end of the criticism - for performing in light-entertainment or comedy programmes. In the classic era, only Nathan-Turner era caught this flak - the 1960s and 1970s may have had casting decisions that led to a duff performance, or an over the top performance, or a racially insensitive performance, but there's no example I can think of for what fandom would call stunt casting. Even Nathan-Turner's first year never comes in for any criticism in this regard. Maybe the casting of the new companion that year, Adric, a role that went to a teenager who only had one acting credit to his name, raised eyebrows for different reasons, but the guest casts were a cross-section of the usual solid BBC repertory with nary a game show host or stand-up comedian among them.
It was the following year that this changed, but even then it was gradual. In that year Michael Robbins and Beryl Reid played a theatrical highwayman and a hard-boiled space captain respectively; they were more known for sit-com or light entertainment work at the time, but they had both done dramatic acting too. Robbins comports himself well, and Reid is perfectly fine if a little distracting - there's no reason why she shouldn't play such a role, but given it's not the focus of the piece, it does slightly bring one out of the drama every time one wonders "Why did they cast Beryl Reid?!". Given the fantastical elements of the programme, one is already suspending enough belief when watching without adding to it. From there it gathered pace slowly, with a Liza Goddard here, a Chloe Ashcroft there, Leeeeee John, of course, and Alexei Sayle hamming it up a bit (though maybe it's the character he's playing that's hamming it up) as the aforementioned zany DJ. Rumour has it that Nathan-Turner briefly attempted a kind-of reverse stunt casting in that same Dalek story, wanting to cast Larry Olivier as the rambling mutant in the first episode - the most accomplished actor of his generation stuck in scabby-face make-up and being clubbed to death in the snow after saying three or four lines. Luckily for all concerned, this never came to pass. There was even - according to fandom at least - the first stunt casting of a regular, with Bonnie Langford being cast as the new companion in 1986.
Next, Delta and the Bannermen in 1987 is perhaps the apotheosis of this trend, as almost everyone and everything in it seems to be included as some kind of stunt: Bonnie herself, Hugh Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Ken Dodd, the costumes from Hi-De-Hi, the Incidental music composer and his doo-wop band... After that, though, it still didn't stop until the show did, with Nicholas Parsons and Hale & Pace appearing in the final year of regular broadcasts of classic Doctor Who. Whatever the motive for their casting, though, even if it was more about column inches in the tabloids rather than expected quality of performance, the hit rate is to my mind no worse than casting by any other method. Parsons' sensitive performance as the vicar in The Curse of Fenric is generally felt to be much better than the scenery-chewing performance of Graham Crowden in The Horns of Nimon (I like them both!), but Crowden came in via a much less publicity-worthy and more standard casting route. This all links, I think, into a snobbery that goes beyond Doctor Who and seems to be pervasive in the entertainment business, the belief that the 'lighter' (like comedy) is easier to do than the heavier drama. Not only is this incorrect, but - based on my own experience and knowledge of the opinions of many other people I respect - it's arse about face. Comedy is much harder to perform and to master than straight drama - there's nowhere to hide. This is even more difficult within the confines of Doctor Who, where there is a very narrow scope of acceptable comic performance.
Stunt casting, or at least accusations of it, continued into the new series. Peter Kay, particularly, caused a bit of a fan meltdown, but quite a few others - including James Corden in The Lodger - caused negative comments online as well. One interesting aspect of the intervening years between John Nathan-Turner bowing out and a regular series returning in 2005, though, was speculation on who would play the new Doctor if the show came back. From the press during that time, it appeared that the ghost of stunt casting was haunting even the title role. All sorts of odd choices and non-actors were suggested, the nadir being Paul Daniels, who was confidently predicted to be picking up the keys to the TARDIS early in 2004. Only a few weeks later, an announcement showed that instead of a TV magician of yesteryear, a proper serious actor - Christopher Eccleston - would be the new Doctor; that put paid to all the silly speculation, seemingly forever, which shows that - when it really counts - Doctor Who tends to cast it right.
In Summary:
It's not exactly fine cuisine, but nobody wants that for every meal - this is perfect pizza and booze telly.
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