Voyage of the Damned

Chapter the 251st, where a disaster movie featuring a famous face or two is perfect for the Christmas TV schedule.

Plot: 

The Doctor arrives aboard the Starship Titanic, a luxury cruise ship from the planet Sto run by the Max Capricorn company, in orbit around Earth in the present day. He befriends a waitress Astrid, who joined the company to see alien planets but has never had the chance. Using the psychic paper, he gets himself and Astrid down to London with a handful of other passengers in a landing party. When they return, the Titanic is hit by meteoroids. The Captain has been paid off by someone to cause the disaster, and the ship's robot servants, the Host, are programmed to kill any survivors. The Doctor, Astrid and the others in the landing party make their way to the bridge where the one remaining crewmember Midshipman Frame is holed up. They battle the Host, and the extreme environments of the damaged ship, and many of the group are killed. The Doctor works out that whoever is controlling the Host is in a secret compartment on one level, and confronts them. It is Max Capricorn himself; he is attempting to destroy the company's reputation after being kicked off the board, by causing the Titanic to crash into the populated Earth. Astrid saves the Doctor from Max's attack, but at the cost of her life. After saving the Earth by pulling the ship out of its plummet just in time, the Doctor realises that because she was wearing a teleport bracelet when she died, he can bring Astrid back. But he can't make her become fully corporeal, so has to let her go. The Doctor takes the tour party leader Mister Copper to Earth; Copper had lied about his credentials and worried about any investigation. The Doctor tells him that he's rich based on Earth/Sto currency exchange rates, and wishes him a merry Christmas..

Context:

I have finally bowed to the inevitable. Tired of having to keep buying knock-off generic remotes for my very old (but still trusty) Blu-ray player, I bought a new player. Just for the remote. During a cost of living crisis. Who am I, Rockefeller? Anyway, I am now 4K ready for when I have to upgrade the very old (but still trusty) TV, and I hope that's not for a long time. This meant that I could watch this story from the DVD in the new series 4 box set. I was accompanied by the three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) who were all enthusiastic. We've been watching various Christmas specials and films all through December, this Doctor Who offering being just one of them. Before the main event, I put on Time Crash, the short made for the Children in Need telethon that was shown a month before the 2007 Christmas special's broadcast in December. It's a sketch featuring David Tennant meeting Peter Davison's Doctor. The children hadn't seen it before, and found it mildly diverting. It was interesting to note how many ideas and jokes that its writer Steven Moffat reused when he did a full-on Doctor meets his old selves story in 2013, The Day of the Doctor. We then preceded to watch Voyage of the Damned. The youngest particularly liked the character of Bannakaffalatta, and was so annoyed when he was killed off that she almost stopped watching. The eldest kept mentioning that the Host were a rip off of the robots from 1970s story The Robots of Death, and he's right - they are. Although, I think it's meant to be a homage (French for rip off).

First Time Round:

I remember a lot of hype in the build-up to the first UK broadcast of this story on BBC1, Christmas Day 2007. The family (which was just me, the Better Half and eldest child, one year old at the time) had just moved into a new place, our current home, a month before. A couple of weeks later the Christmas Doctor Who Magazine celebrated Kylie Minogue's guest appearance with a now rather famous cover of her posing with a bronze Dalek while wearing a bronze-coloured dress. I had been out one evening in London for the day job's Christmas party, at a Teriyaki restaurant, and was slightly merry from drinking a bit too much saki. As my subscription copy hadn't yet arrived, I impulse bought the issue at the train station to read on the train home, as I wanted to keep myself awake. In my state of festiveness there was a good chance that I'd fall asleep and find myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. It's no reflection of the content of the articles within, which as I remember were most engaging, but I fell asleep and found myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. I had to get a cab home, and found that the driver didn't know the area where I lived. As I'd only recently moved, I didn't know the area where I lived either.

I got the driver to go along the seafront road until I could see some landmark through the window that I recognised where he could drop me off. Finally, I saw it - a low bridge I remembered walking under near the train station. It turns out though, as I discovered after he'd driven away, that there is more than one low bridge in the area, and all low bridges look the same. This is why, in the wee, small hours of an early December day, I found myself wandering around suburban roads in the dark, searching for my home, clutching a magazine with a glammed-up Kylie and Dalek on the front as if it were a charm to ward off the cold. I did finally find my new home, and got in before I died of hypothermia. The lesson is: don't drink too much Saki. Anyway, a couple of weeks later on the big day I was safely inside in the warm. Of the relatives who were visiting us that year, only the Better Half's grandmother was watching with me. She stayed silent throughout except for the moment when a certain spiky, red faced alien was dying after a noble self-sacrifice. She said simply and loudly: "Who thinks of these horrible things?" and then lapsed back into silence again. I took this to be a rhetorical question, so did not reply with the full nerdy detailed answer that I could well have given.

Reaction: 

The viewing figures for Voyage of the Damned in the UK were 13.31 million viewers with a peak of 13.8 million. This still is, and is likely to remain, the highest number for any 21st century story, and is up there with the biggest audiences the show ever got from 1963 to 1989 (when, lest we forget, there were larger audiences in general for top charting programmes). It was the second biggest audience for a TV programme in all of 2007. Purely based on this quantitative data, including chart position, it's the biggest Doctor Who story ever in terms of getting bums on seats compared to other entertainment on offer. Why would this be? There was still a large captive audience for TV on Christmas day 15 years ago, with a mass of people wanting to watch something without the alternative of streaming services that they have now. That's clearly a factor, but the previous Christmas specials in 2005 and 2006, though getting very respectable numbers, were not so stellar. Was it just down to having an extra special star guest in Kylie Minogue (who played Astrid)? Not only was Minogue incredibly popular as a pop star, there was the additional interest generated by her return to acting after a long time away. It may have been that this was something of a draw, but how much? The following Christmas special in 2008 got almost the same audience numbers (13.1 million), and - with all respect to him as an incredibly good actor - David Morrissey does not generate the kind of guest star publicity as does Minogue. I think the big draw of Voyage of the Damned is David Tennant.

Tennant is stunningly good in this story; he'd really found his groove in the role by this time. He had also built a fanatic (but deserved) following through his first two series and two Christmas specials. This, his third yuletide offering, saw him enter a sustained period of intense popularity - large audiences, high chart positions - that only ended when he left the role (by which time he was appearing in the Christmas idents in front of every programme). They could have paired him with the talking cabbage that Tom Baker always joked that he wanted as a companion, and Tennant might still have got 13 million people watching in December 2007. This is not to say that Kylie's presence isn't welcome. Some have criticised her acting in Voyage of the Damned, but I think that's unfair. It's not supposed to be a showy performance, and I think she delivers what's on the page well, with a couple of nice flirtatious moments with the Doctor. Of course there's only one way that introducing a character that wants to travel to the stars and is enamoured of the Doctor, but who's played by someone who has touring and recording commitments such that they are never going to become a series regular, plays out. Astrid's tragic demise, and the Doctor's desperate and doomed attempt to bring her back to life, is one of the best moments and acts as a nice counterpoint to the disaster movie action elsewhere.

Davies always throws some grit in the oyster, putting some dark or even potentially problematical material (I'm thinking of Elton's love life at the end of Love & Monsters, for example) into a knockabout romp. He doesn't hold back even at Christmas. It's interesting to compare this to Steven 'Everybody Lives!' Moffat, who essentially pulls the same trick at the end of his Library 2-parter story in the following year's run. Moffat has Tennant's Doctor go through with saving River Song as a ghost in the data, whereas Davies positions it as a cruel fate. Both choices are valid, and both create memorable moments in their respective stories. Davies can do happy, too. Clive Swift had an off day with a Doctor Who Magazine journalist on set, and the snippy interview that resulted was printed in full. This maybe overshadowed how good he is in the story, and how much Mister Copper is the heart of the piece: a person keen to learn, keen to live, with a bumbling tendency towards being endeared. He may be a metaphor for all of us; I hope he is. The final scene where he gets his reward is another stand-out moment. Such moments wouldn't work if the action movie material wasn't solid too, but it definitely is that. After many subsequent years from 2007 to date of Doctor Who pushing the envelope with its visuals, this story is now looking slightly less spectacular by comparison, but at the time it popped out of the screen. Before the disaster, the Titanic looks suitably opulent, inside and out. After the meteoroids hit, there are interesting, grand spaces for the plucky band of survivors to fight their way through.

Beyond Minogue and Swift, that plucky band of survivors are all perfectly written, cast and played: Clive Rowe and Debbie Chazen as Morvin and Foon Van Hoff, Russell Tovey as Midshipman Frame... everybody's great, there's no point in listing them all. This goes for villains too (George Costigan as Max Capricorn is overplaying it to a finely calibrated and delicious degree) and bit parts (Bernard Cribbins appearing as a newspaper vendor and being so good he'd be back as a regular before too long). And Geoffrey Palmer; good gracious, Geoffrey Palmer is so good in this. It's an embarrassment of riches. There's lots of great humour, but it's finely balanced with the thrills and the scares. A lot of the latter comes from the Host ("Information: you are all going to die"). Though they may be something of a Voc robot tribute group (see Context section above), they're still effective. There's obviously some deliberate in jokes about The Robots of Death thrown in (like one getting its hand lopped off by a door); when they remove their halos to use as killer frisbees, though, that's pure Russell T Davies.  There's some deft world building, e.g. discrimination against cyborgs on Sto, and some nice fun stuff like the cameos for Nicholas Witchell and the Queen. There's barely a blemish - maybe some of the hero shots of Tennant grandstanding (at one point the eldest said: "He looks like a bloke in a perfume advert"). Believe me, I hate agreeing with the hard-line Christian group that complained about it, but the image of the Doctor being borne aloft by angels is a bit much. These are tiny things, though. I challenge anyone not to break in to at least one massive grin by the time they reach "Allons-y Alonso!" (a punchline to a joke set up 18 months before). It's a Christmas cracker.

 

Connectivity: 

Voyage of the Damned features a spaceship and robotic adversaries (just like the last two stories blogged). In both this story and The Wheel in Space, the second billed character is a companion played by someone who is a recording artist as well as an actor (though Frazer Hines' musical career was a little more fleeting than Kylie Minogue's, mind you).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of Three Doctors. It's not quite over yet but I think it's safe to say that 2022 was a very interesting year for Doctor Who. It felt for a lot of the time like there were two separate and distinct series happening simultaneously. It will always be a bit like that when a new production team is starting to film while the old one's episodes are still airing, but it was more pronounced this time. Perhaps this was because the current production and the people associated with it, Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall, seemed to disappear from view early on. Multiple factors no doubt dictated the scheduling of the three Doctor Who stories shown in 2022, and the result was a big gap in the middle of the year. Eve of the Daleks, which I very much enjoyed, was made to be shown on the first day of the year to maintain Doctor Who's presence in the festive period schedules. Legend of the Sea Devils, which was okay but a bit slight, came not that long afterwards at Easter. Finally, The Power of the Doctor had to be aligned to late October to fit in with the BBC's centenary celebrations. Chibnall's approach to publicity has always been more minimalist than Russell T Davies's anyway, and in between those latter two stories, there wasn't a peep of publicity related to the current Doctor's era. There was loads, though, related to shows that would be shown more than a year later. The campaign was clever, using distinctive cryptic combinations of emojis in social media posts in advance of press releases. Any campaign can only be as good as the product, and - though we've only seen glimpses so far - the Doctor Who 2023 product looks like it has some very interesting and powerful features. An old Doctor returns, reunited - somehow - with a companion he once travelled with but whose memory has been wiped so she doesn't know of his existence. That scenario has a lot of potential, and it's just a prelude to a new era with a new Doctor.

The most exciting moment this year was inevitably the announcement of Ncuti Gatwa as the next-ish Doctor. The brief moment of him in the trailer after The Power of the Doctor was enough to get everyone excited about his take on our favourite Time Lord. I've not seen him act in anything yet, and am holding off from watching Sex Education so that his performance as the Doctor is as surprising and fresh to me as it can be. Not being a Coronation Street watcher, I also find Millie Gibson, cast as companion Ruby Sunday, to be an unknown quantity. The picture of these two future stars of Doctor Who in costume released recently was great to see. They're a youthful (Gibson wasn't born when the relaunched 21st century version of Doctor Who went into pre-production) and exciting new team, and it does feel like a big new start for the show after what will be a bit of nostalgia in the anniversary year stories with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Talking of looking back, with less new stories on TV, the older back catalogue releases could have filled the schedule, but there were fewer of those releases too. The Blu-ray collection sets have maintained the great level of quality established in previous years, so it was a shame to only get two of them in 2022. The box-set for Colin Baker's first full season 22 was another opportunity to see lots of behind the scenes material that was kept from that time, as well as new documentaries. A highlight was Matthew Sweet's three linked 'In Conversation' interviews with the series' heroes Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and its biggest villain, Michael Grade (who as the controller of BBC1 in 1985 tried to cancel Doctor Who). At the other end of the year, the first ever black-and-white set came out with the William Hartnell-starring season 2. Seeing these old episodes on Blu-ray is a minor miracle in itself, but the extras are good too (I'm still working my way through the set at the time of writing).

Previous years have had animated story releases as well as box sets of old and new seasons, but in 2022 that came to an end (or at least a pause). The final one was The Abominable Snowmen released in September, which I was lucky enough to see at the BFI Southbank in London (see the blog post here for more details). I got to enjoy similar events there for the aforementioned Colin Baker set (blogged about here) and the preview of the 4K restorations of the 1960s Dalek films (see the Deeper Thoughts section of tangentially connected TV story The Chase). I missed the recent event to tie into the Season 2 boxset in October as I had clashing commitments during half term. I hope to be able to go to more such events in 2023, though the lack of animations may reduce the opportunities somewhat. The reason the animations ceased was because a proportion of the budget was put in by BBC America. Recently, announcements gave the reason why: BBC America would no longer be showing Doctor Who as a deal had been done with Disney+ for them to be the home of Who outside the UK. Reportedly, there is going to be a more generous amount of funding flowing from the House of Mouse for extra-curricular activity (spin-offs have been talked about, for a start). Does this mean the animations could start up again soon? I'd like that very much. In the wider world, this was the year that saw a UK prime minister come within a whisker of leaving power before a single Doctor Who story was broadcast during their tenure, which would have been the first time it had happened since the show began. It's a while before the next stories will be broadcast, so we may see that happen to the next guy, who knows? I also had a holiday in the filming location for Gallifrey in Hell Bent, which was nice. Aside from Blu-rays I haven't really bought much in the way of merchandise, but there's not many sleeps to go until Christmas now, maybe I'll find something in my stocking on the big day. Merry Christmas!

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy Kylie-mas to all of you on Sto!