Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Behind the Sofa: End of Volume 1

Volume 1 of Behind the Sofa has come to an end.

Volume 2 is about to begin.

Don't worry,  we haven't done a JNT and been persuaded to stay, we're simply regenerating. We don't know where you all got the idea that we were leaving!

The reasons for Behind the Sofa Volume 2 are simple: we want to shake things up a bit and get more co-ordinated with our content. This doesn't mean we're going to have secret meetings and decide on our next line of attack about David Tennant's haircut, but it does mean that authors will be co-ordinated so that hopefully you'll see fresh content on the blog on an almost daily basis.  At least that's the plan. In order to make this work BTS Volume 2 will be launching with a handful of contributors and no more. 

Comments will still be available on the new blog but greater moderation will be enforced. The various bunfights that crop up on a weekly basis have become boring and distracting and have on occasion brought BTS staff to the brink of Morbius-like insanity.  But on the other hand things are unlikely to be dull around here and that's as it should be.

So we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has posted here in Volume 1. It's been fun, frequently insane and you were all fantastic. And so were we.

However, Volume 1 will still be available for reference and very soon it'll be resting at its old address of: http://tachyontv.typepad.com/waiting_for_christopher/

Furthermore, Volume 2 will still link back to the archives.

The other news is that

a) Tachyon TV will be getting a similar face lift before the month is out, with closer ties to BTS itself

b) We'll be releasing a Voyage of the Damned podcast in the next few days

and most exciting of all (we hope)

c) we'll be launching a companion blog called On the Sofa which will be dedicated to everything but the Doctor Who franchise. More news on this will become apparent later this month.

See you there,
Neil, Damon and John

Carry on Cruising

Voyage of the Damned

News broadcasters. They're a strange sub-strata of humanity. Charged with injecting current affairs into our brains at regular periods after meals, like some super news drug that needs to be taken with food, often imparting the worst information in the world that any of us are likely to hear. Is it any wonder they all go a little queer, if all they do day-in-day-out is dole out misery and despair to an already confused and terminally frightened populace.

"Quantel effects box jacked up on stoat tranquilisers."

And if that's not enough, those unlucky enough to anchor a broadcast have to sit there in the middle of what looks like a Bond villain's nuclear bunker, ducking random CGI headings as they're blasted around the studio, whilst the most inane, dumbed down, mushed-up facts are spoon fed into us by a Powerpoint jockey presenting pointless packages from ridiculous locations. Whether it's Huw Pym using a Quantel effects box jacked up on stoat tranquilisers to describe to us what a house is, or a Robert Peston piece on how the credit crunch really happened - presented using nothing but glove puppets whilst wearing only a thong, they really do have it bad. Open wide, here comes the aeroplane with this evening's headlines on it...

So you can almost forgive them for diving ankle first into any sort of camp frothy nonsense without a second thought. Usually it's the latest dull but worthy charitython. Back in the day it was Morecambe and Wise, or The Goodies. Now it's Doctor Who.

"Grappled with protesting lesbians."

And the next cab off the rank is Nicholas Witchell. Of course, St Nick, is no longer to be found seated behind a desk - although he's been there and done that. And you've got to admire a man who famously grappled with protesting lesbians live on air as Sue Lawley continued telling us about the decimation of the south Yorkshire cheese industry. Probably. And he plays a lead role in my second favourite audio clip of recorded out-takes to have made it online. All damned good grounding for a staring role in a Christmas edition of Doctor Who.

"What on earth is Mrs Overall doing in this?"

Who next then? Moria Stewart's out of a job at the moment. Too old to front a news broadcast apparently. Yet even she doesn't look as old as Kylie did in the Christmas special. Seriously how much did they spend on the prosthetics to make her look that old? I know she's been through one hell of a year but she's standing there in a maid's outfit with stockings and knee high boots and all I can think of, when she's holding a drinks tray, is what on earth is Mrs Overall doing in this? It was the Titanic that the show crashed into, not Acorn Antiques.

"At the end, it felt like I'd just sat a BTEC Diploma in BBC Sitcoms."

Although as the comedy stars (and someone from Tittybangbang - which isn't, despite Radio Times billing to the contrary, a comedy show - it's an expose of high altitude breast implant explosions) troop through the set and onto the rotating knives of death you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's a case of, "oh! it's him from that thing who's married to that woman who can't cook", then it's "oh! it's him from that thing who's married to that woman who pretends she's posher than she is" etc... At the end, it felt like I'd just sat a BTEC Diploma in BBC Sitcoms.

"Profiteroles and honey glazed racks of Kerry Katona."

In early December I predicted Voyage of the Damned would be "all teeth, tits and tinsel - it'll be spectacle and little substance - it'll annoy the hell out of us and be loved by the masses". Of course, it got 12M plus viewers, but almost half that number had consumed such an excess of food that their body mass just fused with the sofa they'd slopped down in after eating their way through 4 Iceland stores worth of Profiteroles and honey glazed racks of Kerry Katona. They'd barely register as sentient life, let alone viewers. DFS could make a fortune from these new sofa people.

I'm off to Dawlish now with a pack of crayons, 40 stone of lard and a camera crew to put together another stultifying inane package for a flagship news programme on the global obesity epidemic.

Happy Bloody New Year.

The absolutely last and final ever entry in The Bumper Book of Made Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Voyage of the Damned: in the first draft of the story the setting was to have been Dame Ellen MacArthur's yacht - until the BBC One controller stepped in as distraught women by themselves at Christmas was usually something that Eastenders handled and couldn't they come up with something that had at least 6 billion of something in it instead?

Frankly, I Don't Give a Damned

Voyage of the Damned

It's like old times.  I'm full of cold, dosed-up on Day Nurse and close to hallucinating.  And so here is my Voyage of the Damned review.

It takes a strong will and an angry mind to apply criticism to Voyage of the Damned.  The show itself was so lightweight, fluffy and sloppily written that the overwhelming instinct is to shrug and say “Why bother?”.  And since Neil vented his spleen so entertainingly and accurately a few days ago, there's even less of an impetus to waste electrons on a similarly-minded review.  Worst of all there are the majority of massed denizens of the Doctor Who Forum standing on the sidelines waiting to wag their collective finger while saying “Well eight billion people watched it, and it had an AI of 2 x 10¹⁰ so by all means have your crazy opinion but don't for a moment think it actually counts for anything”.

I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy

So I'll keep it brief.  I liked the first 30 minutes or so, and I loved Clive Swift.  Judging by their on-screen chemistry I imagine that David Tennant was distraught to learn that Mr Copper won't be continuing as a new companion.  As a disaster movie fan, I loved all The Poseidon Adventure stuff, but I didn't really see it in terms of an Eric Saward “dark” massacre as disaster movies are just another Christmas staple.  Deaths in such films are just not the same as deaths in anything else, and as most of this story looked like a Playstation3 game then I doubt that the kids watching were particularly disturbed either.  Certainly I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy.

Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain.

The last forty minutes have already been demolished by better men than I, but something so unsound only needs a tap with a hammer to bring it crashing down.  What is really odd is how much of this was also revealed by the BBC audio commentary on the programme. It may not seem like it sometimes, but I actually have a boundless admiration for Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson and their achievement in bringing back Doctor Who. But my word they sound tired.  Davies commented on how pained he felt when he read Blink and realised it featured angels, and who wouldn't sympathise with his eventual rationalization about the hosts “They've got nothing in common with weeping angels”.  Of course they haven't.  Apart from being angels.  Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain. Even Davies sounded stunned by that.     Later on both Gardner and Collinson murmured supportively as Davies explained his technique for rescuing his original ending “He's got to be a cyborg and she's got to attack him in a fork-lift truck”.  Somebody get them a holiday!

camp frothy nonsense

So it's all about context in the end. A creative decision has been made: “Christmas specials must be about spectacle” and in stretching to achieve that some of the holes show through.  The script looked rushed and didn't make sense a lot of the time, and some of the effects (especially Astrid and Max toppling into the engines) looked poor.  Apparently the BBC wanted an extra ten minutes, whereas the whole thing would have been better over fifty minutes at most.  But in many ways (despite Davies's weird messiah stuff – I'm not even going there as doubtless we'll be wading through it in series 4) Voyage of the Damned was still an achievement.  When it worked it was engaging, funny and spectacular which made its many lowpoints all that much lower.  I'd still rather have the nation watching Doctor Who on Christmas night than Holby “It's a Wonderful Life” City, but I suspect, a la Ricky Gervais, a lot of the nation is saying “Did you see Doctor Who on Christmas Day?  Just what we wanted – a bit of camp frothy nonsense.”  And as between Christmas 2008 and Christmas/New Year 2009/10 we'll only be getting specials, I do hope that they aren't all in the vein of Voyage of the Damned as that'll mean for a whole year Doctor Who really will be nothing but camp frothy nonsense.

Now where's that Day Nurse?  None left. OK – pass the Vosene, that'll do.