Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

This Daft Old Face

A couple of final links for old time's sake.  Firstly:

Doctor Who: Revolutionary Or Tool Of The Man? [via]

Semi-satirical investigation into the Doctor's political leanings using statistical analysis, assuming that real world events are mirrored in the Whoniverse (the author clearly hasn't been within a dragon's breath of AHistory, either volume).  Lawrence Miles addresses this very point at some length during the Interference epic in which the character is called upon to explain exactly why he's quite happy to fly about time and space knocking off abusive governments but when it comes to other regimes, particularly on Earth he's rather more circumspect. 

I don't remember an answer really being forthcoming other than some deep dish anguish although my understanding has always been that if the Doctor is aware of a status quo before he gets there he can't change it without there being consequences (see Father's Day etc.) but if the situation's totally new to him he can rebel away.  Which would explain why he's never specifically gone to meet a young Hitler and tried to persuade him to persevere with his painting (ala John Cusack in the film Max) or whatever.  Plus it seems to have been established that Earth has a special place in the web of time, on one of the causal fault lines.

"for the New Year we transformed our coat closet into a time-traveling space ship" [via]

Which is very clever even if, as Steven Moffat would point out, the windows are the wrong size.  If this was dimensionally transcendental it would be a neat way to store your entire wardrobe without having to build an extension on your house.  After all, doesn't Tardis actually sound like the kind of product name IKEA would give their furniture lines?  In fact most of the current real furniture names -- Pax, Hemnes, Aspelund and Mongstad -- all sound like characters from the new series.

Natalie Portman, neuroscientist

Which at first glance would seem to have nothing to do with Doctor Who (other than to say she'd make a smashing companion), except the paper that she co-wrote, "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy" is about looking into child's brains to find out how they work.  Imagine the Fear Factor and the fear factor if in future the BBC simply recorded infant brain activity to discover how to scare the bejesus out of us...

Kylie in a Forklift

The Voyage of the Damned, or The Christmas Inferno, or Kylie in a Forklift

Here are some of my thoughts on the 2007 Christmas special Voyage of Damned.

It’s The Poseiden Adventure meets Enlightenment meets Robots of Death meets Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic.

It was completely, totally and utterly bonkers, but in a good way. It is unlikely that you will see anything quite like it ever again. You may never want to see anything quite like it ever again but I quite liked it. I mean where else will you see Kylie Minogue dressed in a waitress outfit driving a forklift truck? Only in something as bonkers as this, or perhaps in an alternative history where Kylie’s career is on the skids, and she is forced to appear in adverts for B&Q or Homebase.

The new theme. I am not sure what to think of the new version of theme. It’s the same theme, but it just sounds like Murray Gold has let Buckethead into his studio and let him jam along with the theme. I didn’t mind it after I had watched it again and, boy, it sounds good loud! It’s the heavy metal version of the theme! Still it could have been worse Murray Gold could have written some lyrics to the theme and had Kylie sing them. Imagine the furore if that had happened!

The end credits were a bit quick, but with these new fangled videos and dvd’s they have today with a pause function they can easily be read after the event. It could have been worse they could have squeezed them into a little box in the corner of the screen thus not even giving you the chance to pause them to read them. I wouldn’t imagine that they would be any quicker when they are released on DVD either.

There was some brilliant work from the Mill on display here most notably the external shot of the Titanic drifting through space and the vastness of the Titanic’s engines. That really did give a sense of the scale of ship.

I thought that Kylie did a good job in her rather limited role of Astrid. She was sweet and looks damn good for a woman nearing 40. She was almost perfect companion material for the old series: humanoid but not human, no friends or family, actually wanted to travel with the Doctor, even though she just wanted to jump his bones, which is not traditional companion behaviour but is par for the course in this new version of the show and it was quite sad that her character died. Well she sort of died anyway. She might as well have died but perhaps they felt that it would be slightly too grim to actually kill her off properly. I am not sure.

I always thought that no matter who Kylie played she was never going to be any more than a single story companion (although I thought the same of Donna and look who is returning in series four so what do I know!)I have no doubt though that there will be an Astrid 5” figure very soon. It will be the only one to be a scale model of the actress herself!

Banakaffalata was another interesting character and another great part for the mighty Jimmy Vee. Just like the Moxx of Balhoon he might have been a baddie but turned out to be nothing of the sort and he also died. I have no doubt that there will be a figure of him out very soon as well.

The last ten minutes did seem a little bit tacked on and the sudden change from the grimness of the previous 45 minutes or so to the high camp comedy of the last ten minutes did seem to jar a little bit it was almost as if they didn’t fancy ending it on such a grim note at Christmas (as with Astrid), but look at the average Christmas episodes of Eastenders. For me they could have cut from the bit before the Doctor flew with the angels to the last scenes on board of the Titanic before the Doctor and Mr Copper went back to Earth and it would have made it a little bit tighter as I am sure the silliness of the last ten minutes was not necessary.

The final scene between the Doctor and Mr Copper was a nice little scene. I liked the joke about the snow not being real snow. As we all know it never snows on Christmas day and hasn’t for some years now. At least Mr Copper will be able to find a room for the night, as even though its Christmas the whole population of England has buggered off except for the Queen and Bernard Cribbins

On the subject of Bernard Cribbins wasn’t he good in his little role of Wilfrid Mott, the newspaper seller. I never noticed till it was pointed out to me that he had a U.N.I.T. insignia badge on his bobble hat perhaps he is the Brigadier fallen on hard times and under some sort of witness protection programme? We know that he is coming back in the new series, and the fact that U.N.I.T. are set to return so perhaps that is not as insignificant as it might appear to be at first.

Geoffrey Palmer was another one who had a nice cameo in the special although his character wasn’t particularly sympathetic was he? Even though he wasn’t able to bring himself to kill young Midshipman Frame, he wasn’t exactly bothered about either the rest of the ships crew, passengers and the population of the Earth.

The direction by James Strong was very good and it certainly looked very cinematic, which all of the episodes he had directed, so far, have done.

The Heavenly Hosts were a quite good invention for this episode far better than the robot santas that we have had in the previous two Christmas specials. I am, though, a little disappointed that they were not in face Axons. They were however a lot like the Voc Robots in Robots of Death (even down to one of them having their hand trapped in a door) but without the personality that they managed to muster.

Clive Swift was also very good in his role as Mr Copper and I just loved his little speeches about the Christmas customs on the planet Earth. Great stuff.

Wasn’t Rickston Slade the single most unpleasant character ever to be seen in the new series? Killing him off wouldn’t have been at all dramatic as most people would have been happy if he were one of the first ones to die!

I think that the main problem with the story is the fact that you don’t really care if any of the characters in the story live or die. Apart from Rickston who is the only character you actually want to die the others don’t really register as anything other than ciphers who we don’t really know enough about to care.

If Astrid had been played by anyone other than Kylie I don’t think that her demise would have been that noteworthy either because her character is rather one-note but perfect for an original series companion as I noted earlier.

The characters of Morvin and Foon who are reasonable comic relief characters in the story who, only have the fact that Rickston is being mean to them because they are both big people, as a reason that you want them to survive rather than him.

I enjoyed Voyage of the Damned. It wasn’t perfect, but then what is?; it wouldn’t win any awards for originality, but then neither did the entire Hinchliffe era. It won’t stand up to close scrutiny, granted, but I found it enjoyable which, at the end of the day, is the one thing that is really important.

In fact I would say that it was the most enjoyable of the three Christmas specials to date.

Diddly dum, diddly dum, diddly dum...Oooooo-eeeee-oooo

The new series of Who has gone from strength-to-strength and 2007 will take some beating. The final two episodes were somewhat questionable but the rest was truly strong drama. Blink (personally) was amongst the best bit of television drama seen in recent years. Charlie Brooke (for those familiar with the wonderful Screenwipe) agreed with this. It was when I was watching Smith & Jones that the bile and disgust I had for all things New-Who fell away and I finally got what it was all about and I could now, for the first time, enjoy both the old and the new. Boy was that a wonderful feeling! I got what it was about and now and I could enjoy MY show once more. Despite all that I wasn't too keen on The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time lords nevertheless I was sad to see yet another series go by and now the anticipation of next year quickly hit home. Thank goodness for the Christmas Special: it takes some of the pain away.

Well...it was decent. The Runaway Bride was a great deal better but this was OK. Nothing really to complain about other than the really stupid stuff including Elizabeth II. I feel that the plot could have been better: just because it is Christmas does not mean we cannot deal with heavier plot lines. 1984 saw Yes, Minister have its own Christmas special and apparently Eastenders (the soap that followed the broadcast of Voyage of the Damned) gained large viewing figures (and that was dealing with some bleak having an affair with my step-daughter plot). However, it was bleak in the amount of characters that got killed on and off screen. Something that I rather enjoyed, it was nice for a family-viewing programme to cover how crap Christmas can be which is something most families will know (hell, I've been through my fair share of really shit Christmas days).

Being serious for a moment, I wonder if there is anything else that should be considered really bleak about this episode and wasn't mentioned on screen but was supposed to be subtle level for those who know that Voyage of the Damned is a movie from 1976 which deals with the true events of Jewish people escaping Nazi Germany in 1939 for a life in Cuba. The government of Cuba and later, America reject them and they are forced to return to Europe. The passengers decide to jump into the sea rather than return to Germany. If this is indeed the case then this gives the passengers and the plot greater depth. Of course you can look into these things too much and the tile is probably just a lack of imagination.

Anyway, the characters were dealt with in a wonderful manner both in terms of how they were written and performed. It was nice to see the miser get to live simply for the wonderful moment: if we could decide who would live and who would die, that would make us monster (excuse the paraphrasing). There were also nice kisses to the past, mainly in regard to The Robots of Death. I also found the mixed up meaning of Christmas and Mankind's history rather funny and I enjoyed that. So, there were things to enjoy with this episode and as such it can be regarded as a good episode.

However, some moments were rather bad. I was a big niggled that this didn't really continue from Time-Crash. Anyway, it is getting on my nerves the amount of times that R.T.D. feels duty bound to keep involving Earth being in mortal danger. I know this may seem hypocritical because I do think that Pertwee's time as the Doctor was bloody brilliant but for some reason, there is something about it this time round that makes it feel superfluous. Surely it would have been more than enough just to involve all in the space-liner being in mortal danger. The characters were fleshed out in a wonderful way (both in writing and acting) that we can easily identify with them in some way and as such feel for them...as well as it being Christmas! We don't want anyone to be murdered let alone in this season of thanksgiving and stuff.

Also, as I've mentioned before, that stuff with the Queen was just stupid and despite its intentions, wasn't funny. Another thing that grated is/was the religious significance that R.T.D is giving the Doctor. He did it in The Last of the Timelords and he has done it here again. Why? Why should we think that the Doctor is Jesus? Is it not enough that we think of him as a hero without having him endowed with more power. It was OK in Battlefield for the Doctor to be Merlin, mainly because Merlin is a fictitious character and it is also clever (well, I think it is). Yet, this is not. If you think this is because I think that the Doctor and religion should be kept apart then you are right. If you are one of those who will be disagreeing with me, then get a grip! Are you seriously trying to tell me that that Doctor should be hinted at as being the Son of God (the Bible says Son of Man, but that is a debate for somewhere else) as well as God--or that he is a prophet? Ridiculous! R.T.D. maybe an Atheist but...well, let me put it like this: if it were not for Jesus you wouldn't have the chance for a Christmas special!

Also, I felt that turning Kylie into that Blue-dust stuff ruined her sacrifice. It was a good moment when the Doctor realised he could not bring her back but having her as Tinker-bell and then the dust stuff was ruining a good part of the episode. It reminds me of The Trial of a Timelord when Peri is killed (which is shocking) and then it is explained that it never happened (which rid the series of a dramatic moment).It was sad that Astrid died mainly as she was a lovely character (wonderfully acted by Kylie) but that is what made her sacrifice all the more powerful and then R.T.D. pissed all over his OWN good work just making the episode feel somewhat redundant and pointless.

So, there were good moments and there were bad: and they did not overpower the other. It wasn't good and it wasn't awful. Therefore, the episode just made me feel somewhat cold. It was exciting to see the preview of Series 4 and I do hope it is a great series that somehow beats the third. I have a strong feeling that it will and yet somehow I have a feeling that Voyage of the Damned will mark some sort of end in Doctor Who. It certainly has with Behind the Sofa which is a huge shame as it has brought much joy over the years.

Happy 2008! To the future.

Have Your Say in a Tachyon TV Podcast!

Tachyon TV will be releasing a brand new podcast very soon and we have a different and exciting feature that we want to introduce called 'Have Your Say'. This is aimed at anyone who has the ability to record themselves in an audio format so we can use it in the next release. Your comments can be positive, negative, or just plain silly.

This month we'll be looking at Voyage of the Damned. So, if you've got something interesting, witty or urgent to say about the Christmas special let us know!

To take part you'll need to be quick - the deadline is next Friday, January 11th.

Please email your contribution as an mp3 or a wav file (no more than 5-10mb, please!) or put it on your own webspace or other online storage space and email me the details.

The address: neil.perryman@gmail.com

We only ask that you begin your contributions with the words "Hello, I'm ____" so when we edit the soundbites together the listeners will be able to identify you. However, be aware that we may have to edit comments for length.

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

We look forward to hearing what you have to say...

Earth vs. The Spider

Well, blast!  I've been away too long, and, now that I've suddenly found the time to contribute, they've decided to put the poor blog out of its misery, giving me but a scant few days in which to post some reviews.  I know many of you have been eagerly awaiting my imminent missives on "Inferno" and "The Revenge of the Slitheen".  Unfortunately, I'm afeared that I can't get to those quite yet, as I'm eager to write this timely review of the 2007 Doctor Who Chri'tmas Special.  I'd better get going, before it's too late and no longer "of the moment"...so, without further ado, here's my second ever review.

I must admit that I had a certain amount of trepidation going into the Christmas Special for a number of reasons: a new stunt-casted guest companion; yet another a script from the inconsistent hand of Russell T. Davies; a comic-cliffhanger to resolve from the end of the season finale, the inevitable dash of religion...danger at every turn.

Despite my understandable misgivings, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, aside from a few major missteps, Davies has penned a tightly-scripted, enjoyable romp with room for character development, some clever humour, and relatively few gaping holes in the plot.  Sure, there were some familiar stock plot items (pursuit by killer robots controlled by a broadly-drawn malevolent antagonist, a threat to the entire population of the Earth, David Tennant gurning and shouting, use of a sonic scwoodwivah), but I wasn't that bothered by this lack of originality...who knows, they may well end using these elements for two or three Christmas specials in a row?

This year's yuletide festival of Doctor Whoness begins with Catherine Tate (as Donna Noble) getting sucked into the TARDIS just as she's about to get married to a smarmy git named Lance.  The flabbergasted Doctor returns her to Earth, where she is promptly pursued and captured by the previous year's robotic scavengers, still in period costume as department-store Santas.  The Doctor heroically saves her a couple of times before figuring out that the robots were under someone else's control the entire time.  The villain is revealed to be a creature from the "dark times", the Queen of the Racnoss, some sort of cross between Gozer the Gozerian and a 1975 Volkswagon Beetle.

Following the Battle of Canary Wharf the Queen of the Racnoss has apparently squatted an abandoned Torchwood facility and, with the help of Lance (who has thumbs), is sifting ancient "huon" particles out of the filthy water of the Thames (you'd be amazed what you can find in there), and using it spike Donna's coffee.  (If you think Torchwood's only huge shaft belongs to John Barrowman, think again--this place has one that penetrates all the way to the center of the Earth.)  Donna, now the Keymaster, is intended to help bring about the end times, and if it weren't for you meddling kids The Doctor, she'd have gotten away with it, too.

Overall I was pleased that Davies managed to reign in his more extravagant tendencies with the plot, and actually managed to turn out a story that was largely internally consistent, much like good science fiction.   Rather than resolve the plot with deus ex machina supernatural powers, the Doctor relied on mechanisms that were plausible within the already-established setting of the story.  In order to have the TARDIS materialize around them, he used the same property of huon particles defined earlier in the programme.  ("If you think about it, the particles activated in Donna and drew here inside my spaceship.  So, reverse it...the spaceship comes to her.")  Even using the sound system at the reception to amplify a sonic screwdriver isn't as arbitrary as it might seem.

(Okay...here's a niggling plot-hole sort of thing...if they didn't need Donna to be "the key" anymore, then why did they bother to use the huons to bring her and the TARDIS back from billions of years earlier?  If they could bring Donna back, why did they bother to do the whole foie gras thing with Lance to make him into the new key?)

While there seems to have been substantial controversy surrounding the TARDIS "chase scene", I found it to be quite exhilarating.  It's always nice to watch the Doctor (any Doctor) operate the TARDIS: pulling levers, twisting knobs, wheels, gears, sparks, hammers, etc.  (I'm glad the doctor hasn't replaced his console with a new "laptop" version, where we can only watch him crouch over a tiny mouse-pad thing  and click at things on the screen.  This is why the laptop has killed electronic music....)  Then we got to see the police box bounce and careen its way down the M4 for a dramatic rescue.  When the kids in the back of the car punched the air at the successful rescue, so did we at-home viewers.  Even the accompanying music was thrilling.  We also got the excellent exchange: "I'm in my wedding dress!" "Yes!  You look lovely!  COME ON!"

If there was one particularly glaring weak point in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special, it was the over-the-top scenery-chewing of the antagonist, as portrayed by Sarah Parish, pictured here:

While Parish's performance may have had less subtlety than electrodes on the genitalia, she was also clearly limited by the script, which forced her to utter cartoonishly ridiculous lines such as, "By the Great Parrot of Hades, you shall pay for this with the last drop of your blood!  Every corpuscle, do you hear? Mister Fibuli!" and "By the curl-ed fangs of the Sky Demon, how I have looked forward to this moment!"  Every "Moons of Madness!" or "And your little dog, too!" or "By the bursting suns of Banzar, Mr. Fibuli, where are my crystals?" had me cringing.

Months before this Chri'tmas special found its way onto our televisions, irate fans were pulling their hair out about Catherine Tate's casting and predicting utter disaster.  While the character of Donna ends up being a somewhat mixed result, I don't think most of the problems lie in Tate's portrayal so much as they stem from writing that can't decide whether she's a genuine character or low comic relief.  For the first 10 or 15 minutes of the programme Tate's character just brays at the top of her lungs like she's having difficulty being heard over a shouty David Tennant.  When the character finally starts to deepen, as she and the Doctor are chatting on top of some roof after she's missed her own wedding, it's sabotaged by a flashback that's at least as misguided an idea as "Alien vs. Predator", where she's annoyingly hounding Lance to marry her.  The script continuously throws obstacles in the path of character development, alternately giving the character some emotional depth and then going to ridiculous lengths to portray Donna as both shallow and thick (I can remember when those were opposites....)  Her obliviousness to the Christmas and Cyberman invasions and "I thought July" were clever bits of fun, but "can't find  Germany on a map"?   "A woman who thinks the height of excitement is new flavour of Pringle?"   It's like RTD wants us to find her annoying.  Nevertheless, in less than an hour she's actually been able to develop from a bellowing, arm-flailing caricature into a character with some degree of depth and pathos that I could actually care about, and a damn sight faster than Mickey Smith, who took more than a season to overcome his annoyance status.  At least some of this is the result of Catherine Tate doing some genuine acting when the script gave her something to work with. 

And at least they didn't do anything ridiculous like have the Doctor immediately fall in love with her before she sacrifices herself and an innocent forklift plunging the Racnoss Queen into the bottomless pit; that wouldn't work at all.

There were a number of other fine things to enjoy about the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special.  As one would expect, Euros Lyn's direction and pacing were excellent.  The Mill turned in some excellent special effects, particularly in the sequences depicting the formation of the earth and the Thames flooding the shaft.  I even rather liked the spidery parts of the Racnoss.

Incidentally (no pun intended) I rather enjoyed much of Murray Gold's rollicking contribution to "The Runaway Bride".  High points include the upbeat bit while The Doctor is waiting impatiently for his turn at the cashpoint and the outright lifting from Gershwin while he's looking out over the Thames flood barrier.  Come to think of it, I think Gershwin haunted much of the proceedings.

Other random items that deserve a mention:

• The best David Tennant character moment in the entire programme was the Doctor's exasperated "I'm...I'm not...I'm not, I'm not from Mars...."
• Another fine line: "Only a madman talks to thin air...and trust me, you don't want to make me mad.  Where are you?"
• This exchange was a lovely in-joke: "What...there's, like, a secret base hidden underneath a major London Landmark?" "I know!  Unheard of."
• I rather enjoyed seeing a religious symbol like the "Star of Christmas" turned into an instrument of destruction.  Maybe next year they can depict the baby Jeebus as the bloodthirsty spawn of an alien abduction, or even, dare I imagine, the cross as some sort of torture device.
• The pockets!  Bigger on the inside than the outside!  It's like two references to earlier in the episode in one!
• While I quickly tired of Lance once he became an abusive asshole, he does get the  clever "Director of Human Resources"/"This time, it's personnel!" quip.
• Why does everything seem to happen to the Earth?  This time not only is there some event happening on the Earth with galaxy-spanning ramifications, but the entire planet only exists as a hiding place for baby Racnosses.

So, in conclusion, while there was certainly room for improvement in "The Runaway Bride", my overall impression is positive.  It was an entertaining slice of well-plotted fun.

Well, at least they didn't pad the bloody thing by another ten minutes, and turn it into a bloated, hamfisted, cliche-ridden disaster-movie panto with piss-poor science, massive plot-holes, the Queen of England, and an annoying tiny red metaphor named after a coffee drink.  That would be bad.

The biggest disappointment I'm coming away with after this programme is that, after the development the character has had in just these short 60 minutes, Donna has declined to become a companion of the Doctor, and now we'll never see what might have resulted from that possibility.

I guess now we'll never know.

An Important Announcement

After lots of soul searching it is my sad duty to inform you all that Behind the Sofa - in its current incarnation - is coming to an end. It's been one hell of a ride, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed over the last 2 and a half years. It's been emotional.

You have until January 7th, 2008 to post your last reviews and then this blog will be frozen for posterity. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere but new posts will not be accepted after this time.

But don't despair - on January 7th we'll also be announcing some news about the next phase of BTS and Tachyon TV. I can guarantee that it's going to be a very busy year!

Many thanks,

Damon, Neil (and John)