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?
The results are in for the Christmas special blog poll for 
Take a slice of Goldfrapp, channel the spirit of the KLF, turn Murray Gold into a set of human sleigh bells, ram in some Grainer and a house key being dragged up and down a piano wire and you might have something that could wipe the grimace off of Simon Cowell's chops this Christmas. 
Experimenting with tried and trusted television formats is often asking for trouble. Moving Sunday Night at the London Palladium to Wednesday Morning Before The Binmen at the London Palladium didn't work and only succeeded in disturbing the vagrants dossing round the back of the kitchens to such an extent that in their sleep deprived state they would accost grandly dressed ladies of society, in their glittering finery, who'd just enjoyed Val Doonican slipping them a length of tune.
Often mistaking them for a glittering array of spirit bottles, they would paw and grab for their gowns, making off with them at speed. And for the rest of the day they would terrorise shoppers in fashionable Knightsbridge with designer dresses and the sort of aroma you'd normally associate with the rotting stench of an ethnically cleansed mass body trough. I wonder whether this sort of scenario passed through the minds of the Doctor Who production team when they decided to turn season sixteen into one long story arc? I'd be surprised if it didn't.
It is this that is the most startling part of the entire opening episode. Not the rotting death smell, no. But that dress. And that upward pan. Where's Lovett Bickford when you need him? Just how tall is Mary Tamm? He'd probably linger on that shot for most of the 26 episode story arc. And well worth it that would be too. Parts 5 to 8, the shin to the lower thigh. Parts 9 to 11 the rest of the thigh. And part 18.... what can I say! I'd probably end up wearing out the DVD.
I've witnessed late night television, from satellite channels whose number is so high up on the dial they only exist as hypothetical constructs in a multi-dimensional TV Guide hyperspace, less erotic than this. Although, Bulgarian porn has come a long way in terms of quality, consistency and body hair. As has the quality of assistant, if this is anything to go by. As the camera moves slowly across the new assistant, K-9's servos waggles his ears, all that was really needed to finish the shot off was for Mel Blanc to momentarily voice K-9 in the style of Twiki and say "Hubba Hubba".
The Probic Vent. Fancy having an Achilles Heal on your neck. A design flaw greater than the exhaust vent on-board the Death Star. Wrap a warm winter scarf too vigorously around your neck and you'll experience temporary paralysis before you can say "Womp Rats". Manly hugs are completely out of the question, just in case a slap on the back creeps above the shoulders. Fine, designer collars are completely ruined by the presence of a flange more befitting the plumbing end of a garden hose.
Just like their hero, Tim Brooke Taylor.
Linx has stolen just enough cutting edge equipment from the 20th century to enable a branch of Specsavers to be opened up in the middle ages. 
Not only is he royally screwed and having to grab himself some sweet boffin ass from a nearby century, he's also about to get confused by the female of the species. You almost want him to dissolve into some gibbering fool as the first woman he's ever clapped eyes on walks into the room. Stumbling for words like a spotty teenager, hormones coursing through the erupting pustules on his face as he attempts to impress her with his best Sontaran chat up line: "You have a primary and secondary reproduction cycle, it is inefficient."
The evil she-cow in charge of this old folks home looks like she's basically constructed from one long length of neck, wrapped in an Argyle cardie like some repellent woollen sausage. With no chin to speak of, and hair sculpted from hand picked ginger pubes from the Barnstaple Municipal Baths filtration system, this old crone appears to be running a retirement home for old Blake's 7 actors. Didn't you see Rog Blake and his stick in the first scene she was it?
And speaking of wizened old crones, Maria's mother. Without a doubt my most despised character in the show. Her low rent Lowri Turner act is getting on my tits. At one point she emits a close approximation to a laugh that is the single most disturbing sound to have ever been broadcast by the BBC (and that includes the time a rat ran into Moria Stewart gob live on the David Frost Sunday morning show, during her news bulletin, and for a full 5 minutes all the microphone picked up was the noise of her teeth grinding the rodent apart in her mouth and the production crew being repulsed and projectile vomiting all over Javier Pérez de Cuéllar).
Final words have to go to the behind the scenes team, from Phil "New Captain Scarlet" Ford's script, to Alice "No Relation" Troughton's direction - and everything in between. In all the recent talk about the poor standards of kids TV they completely failed to mention this show at all. Thanks to the Who production facility, SJA probably boasts the highest production values of anything kids TV has to offer. But why were there so many swooping camera angles? Have they saved cash on the production by using a special squadron of camera mounted pigeons instead of human operators? Could this be in preparation for the long awaited reboot of Pigeon Street...?
Even by UNIT's increasingly questionable standards, this one takes some beating. Scientists are disappearing, so why not gather them all together one handy location and present a one stop shop braniac convenience store for whoever is taking them. While you're at it, why not make it even easier and construct several large straws so that the alien menace can simple drive one through the top of the building and suck out all the boffiny goodness inside, like some brain-flavoured Kia Ora.
Investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith would be more productively employed investigating the shambolic state of UNIT's security services, rather than blagging her way into a top security establishment like a 3AM Girl getting into *the* VIP party of the year. I was astounded, given the evidence of this first episode, she became the Queen Mother of the franchise, given how she attempts to make the story by playing one party off against another. Sarah Jane Smith: Investigative Reporter and Professional Shit Stirrer. Woodward and Bernstein this isn't.
The other thing is the Doctor. Or more specifically, when they Doctor is seen walking in his green velvet jacket. The man's displaying all the confused body language of someone who's had a pineapple thrust up his flue to prevent escape of noxious gasses. He seems to rotating at his middle as he walks and I simply can't watch it without hearing Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman's Kinky Boots and seeing Matt Lucas' character from Catterick.
Seconds out. Round two! The second and final part of our end of season, last ever*, podcast commentary comeback has just been unleashed, it's time for Last of the Time Lords
UPDATED (0715 17 July)...
Smashing all records yet again, blah blah, more votes than ever, blah... 1394 votes cast, the results are in for the final blog poll for 
Not only that, but lets top off the shitpile with Mrs Saxon jigging around like a spastic eel on the end of a rusty nail. Dancing that's not been seen outside of a 1997 Labour Party election party, you know, the one where Mandelson, Prescott and Kinnock were getting down on the dance floor. I say getting down, but you could tell that they'd tired of the dance scene some years previous.
The Master driven insane I can live with, anyone who's done as much as this character to survive in the past must have gone a little ga-ga over time. But to apparently model Saxon's identity on the life of Jeffrey Archer is the mark of a weapons grade mentalist. We find out that he was only resurrected by the Time Lords because they knew he would be the ideal weapon for a Time War. All that ponderous and sentimental guff the Doctor's locked mockney jaw pukes forth about Gallifrey, and all we see is a snow globe and some bloke in a neck brace (sorry, Gallifreyan collar). Ah yes, Gallifrey... The sky's a burnt orange, and when you shook the citadel it snowed. Hasn't anyone told him Gallifrey always looked like a cross between a defunct pizza restaurant chain and dentist's waiting room? Which forces me to pose the obvious question? Is Colin Meek writing all this twaddle? Incredible.
And with the cloister bell banging away like a prozzie in a discount cock warehouse, the TARDIS turned into a "when this gauge goes into the red" peril generator and the Terrahawk Zeroids about to sue for copyright infringement we realise precisely where the drums are coming from. As a child Russell looked into the untempered schism of the Mysterons glowing circles and now all he can here is the constant sound of the Barry Gray orchestra in his head as the kettle drums go; "dum dum dum dum-dum-dum-dum".