| Chapter The 176th, where the Doctor's asleep on the job, and Christmas gets forgotten about once the aliens arrive. |
Plot:
The newly regenerated Doctor accompanied by Rose crash lands the TARDIS back on the Powell Estate in time for Christmas. The Doctor sleeps in Jackie's spare room, and nobody knows how to revive him. While out Christmas shopping, Rose and Mickey are attacked by robots disguised as a Santa Claus brass band, who follow them to Jackie's flat, and also try to kill them with a spinning Christmas tree. The Doctor rouses just long enough to defeat them and explain that they were 'pilot fish' come to steal his regenerative energy, but they will be followed by something bigger and scarier. This is a big spacecraft that hovers over London, and broadcasts a message from the bone-faced aliens the Sycorax within asking for the planet to surrender. As they have a vial of A-Positive blood from a UK space probe, they are able to control all the humans with A-Positive blood, making them walk up to rooves and stand on the edge, as if to jump. UK Prime Minister Harriet Jones is transported onto the ship to negotiate on behalf of the Earth.
With the Doctor still out for the count, the others decide to hide in the TARDIS. Jackie brings a flask of tea and disappears back into the flat to get more provisions; Mickey and Rose, trying to get TV news channels so they can follow what's going on, activate something that alerts the Sycorax of the TARDIS's presence, and they transport that to their ship too. Leaving the TARDIS, Rose squares up to the Sycorax, channelling the Doctor, but to no avail. Luckily, the movement of the TARDIS spilt the tea which revives the Doctor; in short order, he disables the blood control, defeats the Sycorax leader in a sword fight and sends the rest of them packing. Returned to Earth, Harriet orders a Torchwood super-weapon to blow up the retreating ship. This upsets the Doctor, who brings down Harriet by casting doubts about her health. Later, in a better mood, the Doctor picks out a new outfit, and has Christmas dinner at Rose's.
Context:
Christmas is all about rituals, some national, some international, most personal. They tend to feel like they've been around forever, but they are often relatively recent innovations (a lot of the UK's Christmas trimmings date only from stuff Prince Albert liked to do at Christmas less than 200 hundred years ago). And rituals can spring up, develop, and reconfigure under their their own steam, whether one likes them to or not. The Christmas Doctor Who special was not a thing at all until 2005 and The Christmas Invasion. There had been one episode that debuted on the big day in the 1960s - see blog post on The Daleks' Master Plan for more details - and repeats and compilations were shown during the Xmas period in the 1970s, but that was the extent of it. After 2005, it became an instant tradition which endured for over a decade. Then, one year it ceased to be once again, and became a New Year's thing instead. For those recent years, without a new Who episode in December, I've started randomly selecting a story from Christmas past to blog as part of the lead up to the big day. I had planned to do the same this year, but another ritual impacted this and made it a more considered choice. Like many, I have a standard Christmas playlist which gets put on in heavy rotation from the start of advent onwards. Unlike many, perhaps, I try to include a lot of obscure and downright naff tunes on the playlist as well as Christmas crackers. It's rather like another self-introduced tradition I had in the earliest days of the blog of picking a banner image file for the post that was so ridiculously small that it was comically blurry, as a kind of parody of bad websites by people who didn't know what they were doing (the post for Heaven Sent is a good example).
I stopped doing this when I realised that people likely wouldn't see the joke and would assume I didn't know what I was doing. It has not occurred to me similarly that people might just think I had bad taste in music. Maybe this is because I have exercised some restraint. I've not gone as far as to add 1960s Dalekmania novelty anthem "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek" by the Go-Gos to the list, for example, though every year I consider downloading it. One song that is on the list is Song For Ten, in the re-recorded version by Neil Hannon that was commercially released on a Doctor Who incidental music CD around 2006. This song was created for Doctor Number Ten, hence the name, and plays in a different version over some of the final scenes of The Christmas Invasion. Reportedly, this was just because the production couldn't get the rights to one of the famous Phil Spector-produced Christmas records that they desired, but it started a tradition of its own where composer Murray Gold would write at least one pop song a year to include in a story, usually the Christmas one. Anyway, my youngest child (girl of 8) wondered what the song was when she heard it playing, and when I told her asked if she could watch the story from which it came. This seemed like a good enough random determining factor as it came up organically; so, one Sunday in December, the whole family (Me, the youngest, her two brothers, boys of 14 and 11, and even the Better Half who hasn't watched a Doctor Who with the rest of us for a long while) got to together to view it.
Before I put on the DVD, I opened up youtube on the TV and found the exclusive scene that forms a prologue to the story, and which was broadcast a few weeks before Christmas as part of the Children in Need telethon in 2005. Once we were into the story proper there was a bit too much of a focus on a particular point for my liking: when Jackie Tyler asks of the Doctor "Anything else he's got two of?", the youngest said, a little too knowingly, "She's talking about his willy!" Later, she and the Better Half had a conversation about whether the Doctor was wearing underpants under his pyjamas during the climactic sword fight with the Sycorax leader, "Or else his willy might pop out". I apologise on behalf of my family. Middle child displayed some wisdom musing on the improbability of the Doctor's depicted lifestyle: "Why is he never allowed to just have an ordinary day when he's not threatened with death?". He also wondered whether the Sycorax ship is made out of an asteroid, or just disguised as an asteroid, which I'll admit is something that it had never occurred to me to wonder before. At the end, when they'd seen the trailer for the whole of Tennant's first full season, everybody wanted to watch that immediately, in order, and entreated me to dispense with the random shuffle experiment, but I stood firm. The naff Christmas music tradition, by the way, stems from my own childhood, where the only Christmas songs my sister and I had to listen to were the few on a lone album by The Torero Band, 'Tijuana Christmas - The Sound of Brass'. Words cannot describe what it is like. The Better Half wonders what I'm imprinting in the mental plasticity of my offspring's youth. Will they one day be sitting with their own children to watch a Doctor Who story in the run up to Christmas? I'd like that, but I can't see it happening somehow, can you?!
First time round:
Another ritual that was typical of my Yuletide before The Christmas Invasion was the pre-Christmas Christmas. Neither the Better Half or I have big extended families, and our close family is very small in number too. Yet, I still had too many relatives to be under one roof on the big day. My parents had got divorced in the 1980s, and the usual drill had been that my sister and I would spend Christmas with Mum, and New Year's with Dad. When we were older, though, and going out with friends on the last day of the year, and when even older than that and staying in with our intense loathing of New Year's in general (or maybe that was just me), we didn't get to see Dad during the festive period. Thus, the pre-Christmas Christmas was born. Usually this was the last Sunday before the 25th of December, and Dad would come to mine. I would cook a roast, and usually dig out a DVD of a recent big film to watch after that, and many drinks would be drunk. My sister would also usually be there, as would be the Better Half when we were together. Sometimes, my Mum would be there too; for some reason, it was acceptable to be under the same roof on the 18th December or whenever, just not on the 25th. I can't fully explain the rituals of my family; can anyone?
Thinking back on the first time I watched The Christmas Invasion, I momentarily couldn't remember why we hadn't had pre-Christmas Christmas that year. I was temporarily in one of those bubbles of denial of grief that one's memory can sometimes put up around one. The last one was in 2004, as Dad died after a heart attack in late summer 2005. He'd seen and enjoyed the 2005 Doctor Who series, and we'd talked about it, but he never made it to Christmas. I was still grieving in December, and Doctor Who - at least in the episode - was also finding time to grieve. After only one year, Eccleston's Doctor was gone; based on the initial scene with David Tennant as the Doctor at the end of Eccleston's final episode, it seemed like the next story wouldn't dwell on this, and would instead just rush off into a new adventure. The Children in Need scene and the story itself, though, highlight the uncertainty of Rose at this death and rebirth and then keep the new Doctor unconscious for a period of adjustment.
Outside of the story itself, the mood was more celebratory, with Doctor Who unprecedentedly being the focus of the artwork cover of the Christmas Radio Times, a rare honour for any programme, as it is usually a more generic Christmas picture without reference to specific shows. This was testament to the buzz surrounding the programme. I also remember there was a clue in the accompanying article as to what would be required to revive the Doctor - the letters starting each paragraph spelled out "A CUP OF TEA". At that time, the Better Half and I had recently moved into a new place in Hove, had just found out that the BH was expecting our eldest (boy of -7 months at the time), and were entertaining my Mum and the BH's grandmother on the big day. I got the unfeasibly large and vaguely TARDIS-shaped DVD boxset as a present, and rushed to watch the exclusive preview of the Christmas special on that set before said special was broadcast making the preview irrelevant (it was pretty irrelevant anyway, to be honest). We took the BH's relative home before 7pm, so it was just the three of us watching live when it went out. My Mum was somewhat bemused, but we enjoyed it. After it was over, I went online to play the interactive game/episode Attack of the Graske (we'd only just got connected to broadband, which made this possible). Doctor Who definitely owned Christmas that year.
Reaction:
The creation of the 21st century Christmas Day Doctor Who tradition looks to have been something of a last minute deal. As discussed last time in the blog post for The Long Game, writer and showrunner Russell T Davies had carefully planned out the shape of his first season, and he continued this into his second year, again producing a planning document of the stories he was going to write or commission. As can be easily discerned from the finished story, a Christmas special was not part of that plan. He'd intended to follow the same pattern for the first three episodes of the 2006 run as he did for 2005 - a contemporary Earth invasion story followed by a futuristic one, followed by a visit to a famous historical figure. The new need for a special on the big day, a sign of the success of the show earlier that year, necessitated that the first of these planned stories had to be pulled forwards. One side effect was that the 2006 series started with a full-on and possibly audience-alienating monster mash, and Davies has talked about how they briefly considered swapping it with the second story Tooth and Claw. The intended 45-minute long Sycorax invasion story has grafted on to it 15 minutes of Christmas-themed material, mostly up front, with a tiny little bit at the end too. But in the middle, once the threat is established, there's barely a mention of the yuletide setting. It works, though, and means that Davies doesn't have to spread the trimmings - flame-throwing Santa robots and a homicidal Christmas tree - too thin throughout. Thus, were established the narrative version of rituals, i.e. tropes, for the Christmas specials to come.
Mixed and a mingled in with the Christmas stuff are the pre-existing tropes of a particular Doctor Who sub-genre, the post regeneration story. Over the years of classic Who this became hardened almost to a formula; it would have been disappointing if Davies hadn't included a period of time where the Doctor is incapacitated, the companion being distrustful of the new Doctor only to be be convinced by some Doctorish act done in the final act, and a scene where the Doctor chooses his new outfit; all these are present and correct. Davies takes things to an extreme by keeping the Doctor laid out and holding his proper entrance back until the last possible moment - apart from a little cameo taster midway through. It's a good choice, as is the clever idea to have the aliens for once not speaking English, explained away as the Doctor being temporarily out of the TARDIS telepathic circuit loop, stopping the instant translations. This means that there can be a build up to the moment of the Doctor's emergence from the TARDIS and joining the story as we start to hear the Sycorax language turn into English bit by bit.
The two different Doctor Who narrative traditions, Christmas and post-regeneration, one emerging, one established, dove-tail nicely at the end where the new Doctor, in contrast with the previous incarnation, sits down and enjoys Christmas dinner with the Tylers and Mickey. It nicely rounds out the 2005 story arc and sets the Doctor up for a new direction the following Easter. here's a lot of joy in that moment, and all four regular cast, David Tennant, Billie Piper, Noel Clarke, and Camille Coduri look like a team by the end. Everyone's performance is on top form too, with Tennant finding his feet instantly, as if he'd been waiting to play this role for the whole of his life (spoiler: he had). The opportunity offered by writing a Children in Need prologue after the main story was conceived (and maybe even filmed if I'm remembering the timing of events correctly) allows Davies some retrospective continuity to smooth things over too: the mention of Captain Jack being left on the Games Station is useful, or else he's completely forgotten about, and Davies even manages to put in a line about the weakness in the Doctor's hand, the same hand that later will be cut off during the sword fight and regenerated into a new, and we assume better, one. It's also good to give the Doctor and Rose a full scene together on their own, which the busy action of the story proper doesn't allow for.
It's not all joy, though. Davies, true to form, can't help but add some grit to the oyster. This is most obvious in the treatment of Harriet Jones, but he also has the snowfall at the end turn out to be ash from the mass murder of all the Sycorax, zapped in the upper atmosphere. Harriet Jones' fate, though, is harder to take. Penelope Wilton is so very good in the role, and the character so beloved, her downfall - and the comparison to Margaret Thatcher and the sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands war - seems very unfair. There's a genuine moral discussion to be had about whether she is right in her actions. I think there is a valid point in her argument that the planet has to be prepared to defend itself when the Doctor isn't around. It's very sad to see her brought down by the Doctor whispering "Don't you think she looks tired" in her aide's ear, a hint of the occasional flash of darkness that will characterise Tennant's Doctor later on (as in the climactic scenes from The Waters of Mars, for example). You don't get material like this in any other Christmas day special, I think it's fair to say. It's just one of many things this story has to recommend it; there's some great gags (the running gaga of Harriet introducing herself only to be met with "Yes, I know who you are" starts here), a sword fight, a nice song - what more could one want at Christmas?
Connectivity:
The Christmas Invasion and The Long Game are both Russell T Davies penned stories first broadcast in 2005. In both, the Doctor returns someone back to their Mum's place on Earth after an alien menace has been defeated, and in both the Doctor confronts and deposes a figure of authority who's wearing a suit, who also happens in each case to be played by someone who starred in Shaun of the Dead.
Deeper Thoughts:
Christmas Dalek Baubles. In the spirit of the season's traditions, the BBC and Panini have both given us gifts recently, and both are Dalek themed. The first, which came out a few weeks back from the people who make Doctor Who Magazine, is The Daleks Bookazine. This is a lavish collection of some astonishingly well restored 1960s comic strips. They were originally published in TV21, the magazine that Gerry Anderson created as a showcase for his Supermarionation programmes such as Thunderbirds, Stingray and Fireball XL5. The Daleks somehow snuck in to the guest list too, and made their presence felt in the magazine from 1965 to 1967. The strip shows the beginning of the Daleks (not overridden in the TV series until Genesis of the Daleks) through to their decision to target Earth for invasion sometime around 2150 AD. There's a beautiful and deceptive simplicity to the story-telling in these pages that is quite hard to describe. Partly, that's down to the words, which were penned for the most part by Dalek originator Terry Nation and David Whittaker, the script editor on Doctor Who in its first couple of years and the man who commissioned Nation to deliver his earliest TV Dalek tales, and later wrote a couple of the best Dalek stories himself. Clearly, both men are obsessed to a greater or lesser degree with the Nazi pepperpots,
The storytelling would be nothing if there weren't top notch artwork, and the three artists that worked on the strip over the years, Richard Jennings, Eric Eden, and Ron Turner, all deliver the goods in different styles. My favourite is the pop art deco stylings of Turner, who did the later numbers. The colours and curves of the Dalek vehicles and machinery are a joy to behold, and they look better than they have ever done thanks to the restoration work of designer Peri Godbold. I'd normally say I recommend you pick up a copy, but it's sold out everywhere. Maybe they'll do another print run in future. The comic strips inspired the second early Christmas gift, 'Daleks!' a five part youtube series which is an attempt to recreate the style of the TV21 Dalek adventures. It is one part of the cross-media arcing Time Lord Victorious concept: lots of tie-in audios, books, comic strips, toys and even T-Shirts that can be taken as stand-alone, but which also can combine to form one big sprawling interconnected narrative. It's a bold idea, but I haven't watched or read any of the other parts, so don't know how well this fits in. For 'Daleks!' it just meant the main threat to the titular protagonists, a green wibbly thing in space, goes unexplained.
A lot of the visuals are breath-taking with mass ranks of Daleks and mechanoids, flying saucers, planets and gadgets in a Ron Turner-esque style. The story too tries to recreate the 1960s comic strip approach, with terse exchanges of dialogue as would fit into a single panel on the page. The Dalek emperor is the gold-domed version from the comic too, and he's accompanied by a new character, the Dalek Strategist, a beaten-up old school grey-and-blue Dalek who is as wily as any in a David Whittaker scripted Dalek story on TV. The Dalek voices are provided by Nicholas Briggs, and he's as good as ever. Other voices are provided by Doctor Who alumni Anjli Mohindra and Ayesha Antoine, plus Joe Sugg for some reason (he doesn't too bad to be fair). To make it possible to turn things around in a short production time - the animation was started only after Covid lockdown had started in the UK - there are no humanoid characters at all. This made it a bit hard going for me, to be honest. It's difficult to feel anything based on the drama unfolding, though it looks and sounds excellent. I think it is better watched in episode chunks one a night rather than tackling it all in one go. Though it wasn't 100% successful to me, I'm still grateful it exists, and I didn't have to wait until the first day of next year for some Dalek action. What's also heartening is a memory of the wilderness years before 2005 and stories like The Christmas Invasion made Doctor Who the going concern it is now; something like Daleks! would have been a decade-defining event back then, instead of just a nice stocking filler.
In Summary:
An instant tradition, starting an incredible 13-year run of Doctor Who specials, each of which made for a happy Christmas for all of us at home. Season's Greetings! .
