Right, well, what can I say about the Christmas two-parter?

Along with many others I have commented in the past about Russell T. Davies’ series endings, and how he’s seemed to rope in extra characters for sheer sentimentality, and not because they actually do anything to benefit the plot, and how there is a tendency for an ending where someone suddenly comes up with the idea with ten minutes to go, and the baddies manage to be defeated, and Doctor Who saves the universe again.

And having heard Jack Harkness, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler and Donna Noble were all due to feature in the final episodes, I had dire feelings of characters being shoe-horned in for sentimental reasons at the expense of the plot. And probably bloody Davros coming back too.

I had no objection to Wilfred Mott featuring as the Doctor’s companion; partly because I’ve enjoyed him as a character, and he brings a different dimension to the Doctor’s adventures — someone who at least thinks he’s older than the Doctor — and partly ‘cos, well, it’s Bernard, and you’ve gotta love Bernard, haven’t you?

The rest of this review may contain significant plot spoilers, so if you haven’t already seen it, you may wish to look away now…

Episode one saw the reintroduction of the Master, who was revitalised through some big secret ceremony by the cult who had supported him; his wife tried to spoil the ceremony and managed to put a bit of a spanner in the works, but basically the Master was back, and although he had gone blond and kept flashing into a skeletal figure and back again, was enormously hungry, and seemingly only had a matter of time until that body fell apart (and not for the first time), he was back.

Gloriously, full-on Master, now with extra insanity. John Simm’s portrayal of the Master — particularly over these two episodes — should be seen as definitive. The main problem with the Master in the old series (irrespective of how well Delgado or Ainley played the role) is that he was never properly fleshed out: you knew he was a contemporary of the Doctor’s, but never what had made him into the Master. With the backstory that started to be introduced in The Sound of Drums, the Master was becoming a much more rounded character, but still as marvellously megalomaniacal as before.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the crackling electricity bolts he could fire out of his hands, mind you. I always thought he was supposed to be a Time Lord, not a Sith Lord…

The Doctor’s and the Master’s destinies always seem somehow to be intertwined: to some extent they appear to define themselves as standing against the other, and the Doctor’s obvious admiration for the genius and general non-homicidal bits of the Master is obvious.

Also, it is worth noting that the Doctor and the Master don’t appear to have names, even when other Time Lords refer to them; this seems suggestive that the Doctor and the Master are something more than just individual Time Lords; they are almost a Time Lord archetype, some sort of primal Time Lord force personified, perhaps. Hints of the Cartmel Masterplan leaking through, after all this time?

But it can’t be ignored that Part One took quite a long time to build; that the Naismiths seemed to be being built up to be quite a sinister oligarch-and-daughter pairing who could pose a threat in future only to be dismissed once he’s served his purpose in the plot, and that the spiky-headed aliens again seemed to be there more as a useful plot device than for any real reason of their own.

But if my main problem with Part One was the slow build, there was certainly enough to keep you occupied while you waited for things to actually happen: some little amusements with June Whitfield reflecting on her past as a provocative young minx — and rather suggesting that it was only the ‘young’ bit which had changed; the whole bit where Wilf was using Fogeyscope (his collection of pensioner mates) to track down the Doctor, and of course the Master.

The Immortality Gate was originally designed to convey immortality on Abigail Naismith, but what Naismith Senior didn’t seem to be aware of was that it was not set to work on the individual within the field but on a planetary setting (bit of a miss this, how could he have worked out it could be used to convey immortality but not on who?). And of course, he got the Master to fix it, which meant that it didn’t do exactly what he’d wanted.

Instead, everyone on earth got turned into the Master, which meant no doubt that John Simm had to get dressed up in a lot of different sets of clothes for filming, as there’s presumably a limit to what you can do effectively with CGI (I wonder if he got paid at six billion times his normal rate, given that he theoretically appeared six billion times?).

So, with the Earth full of Masters (not so much clones, as they seemed to be willing to defer to the original Master — more of a Queen Bee affair?) there was only Donna Noble, Wilfred Mott, the Doctor, and a pair of aliens left to somehow try to resist the Master’s plan.

And that was the end of Episode one, although we knew the Time Lords would feature in the second…

If Episode One had been mostly building to the point where there was an Earthful of Masters, Episode Two was about the Time Lords seeking to return from inside the time-lock where they had been placed by the Doctor, along with the Daleks and others, at the height of the Time War. They had seeded a way to communicate with the Master because it was they who had planted the sound of drums in his head as a child.

So the Master was calling the Time Lords back (normally, you’d think a good thing, but the Doctor explained that the Time Lords from the time of the Time War weren’t Time Lords as he would prefer to remember them, suggesting that they were ruthless and warlike, and they had to be stopped — and he would take a life if necessary to stop them.

The Final Showdown — the Doctor caught in the middle between the Master and the Time Lords and knowing his final act could be to kill one of them — Dalton’s Time Lord President, or Simm’s Master. In the end though, he found himself unable to shoot either and got the Master to dive out of the way to shoot his machine, breaking the Master template on all other earth-beings by destroying the machine, rather than the Master.

Despite having turned him into their tool, and messing up pretty much his entire life by implanting him with the sound of drums, it turned out that now he was a bit messed up and insane, the Time Lord Council didn’t want anything to do with him, which made him a little cross. He then returned the favour to the Doctor — after all this time, were they finally coming to understand one another — and got the Doctor to dive out of the way so he could electrozap the Time Lord president.

Little aside about President Dalton here: the Doctor referred to him as Rassilon at one point, which would seem to suggest that he is an ancient and powerful mysterious figure from very early in Time Lord history (who was immortal, but seemingly sleeping in a stone form when encountered in The Five Doctors). It’s interesting that he was brought back as when encountered before he always had a certain menace about him, so if anyone could lead the Time Lords into a bloody war which would change them, I’d imagine he would be the chap. But with the Doctor being the other standing against him, and previously against Omega, it’s a bit more Cartmel Masterplan leaking out of the time lock…

With a zapped Pres, and a broken machine, the Time Lords didn’t return, and Gallifrey didn’t land on earth, so everyone was saved. Not entirely sure where the Master went, mind you. Was he just “dead”, did he follow the Time Lords into the time-lock, or did everyone just forget about him? Never mind, I’m sure he’ll tell us next time (hint: please get John Simm to agree to take on the role at least once every two or three years).

The only problem was Wilf. Going back into Naismith’s lab to rescue the Doctor, he ended up rescuing someone else at the expense of trapping himself inside a containment area. And when all the baddies were gone, he knocked on the wall to ask the Doctor to let him out. He knocked … four times.

So in order to save Wilf, the Doctor had to go and let Wilf out and wait in the containment area while the nuclear loop — or whatever it was called — blew up and fired a big lot of radioactivity into his body. Thus the David Tennant era was to end.

But it didn’t end right there: first he had time to pop along and visit various characters he’d encountered before: Jack Harkness — who he set up with Midshipman Frame from Voyage of the Damned — Martha Jones, who was by now married to Mickey Smith and fighting as a mercenary against the Sontarans (presumably for the Rutans? — also no idea whether this was supposed to be in Mickey’s parallel world or the ‘real’ one), called in to see Donna Noble finally get married, met the grand-daughter of the woman he was going to marry in Family of Blood, and finally bumped into Rose Tyler, three months before he first met her in Eccleston guise.

Then he turned into Matt Smith.

So we had a good ten to twenty minutes of extra free sentimentality, the loss of which would not have damaged the story in any way. However, and I have to give full credit to Russell for doing this, unlike Journey’s End where characters seemed shoe-horned in for the final encounter, he kept them out of the main thread of the story, so they didn’t interfere, and certainly didn’t damage the story. They were just there so the Tennant Doctor could say goodbye in his own way.

And I don’t think anyone good begrudge the Doctor a few goodbyes first. In my mind, this is the best series finale yet: there was no sleight-of-hand about the ending — we knew about the Master, we knew about the Master’s machine, we knew about the Master’s jedi electricity bolts — and the whole thing was nicely sewn together (and combined with fine performances from the cast).

If that is to be the last Russell ever writes for Who, or Tennant ever appears in, they can feel very proud of the way they’ve bowed out. But maybe a Three or Five Doctors style reunion would be interesting at some point…

So Moffatt and Smith have a lot to live up to when they appear in Spring. But the taster of their series that I saw has already left me wanting more. And so it goes:

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

The new Doctor Who adventures are at a much higher level than most of the previous adventures. Okay, in some respects this is only natural — technological advances between Patrick Troughton’s tenure and David Tennant’s mean special effects and costumes are so much better that it’s not even fair to make a comparison, but in some other key areas — characterisation, plot, dialogue and so on — it’s perfectly fair to make the comparison.

Look at the way Russell has handled various story arcs, for example — the Bad Wolf motif running through the first series — and you’ll see the clues in retrospect. They were there, but we didn’t pick up on ‘em all first time round. Yes, the denoument to the Master’s story was a bit deux ex machina (planet helps Doctor develop enormous psychic powers) but the backstory given to the villains of the piece is far, far better than it ever used to be.

The Master is no longer just a pantomime villain who happens to be a rogue timelord: he actually has a history, a reason for developing the way he did. I am very much a fan of old-style Doctor Who, but all too often a particular baddie was just churned out without a sufficiently good reason as to why they were there.

Let’s not forget that the original Doctor Who series weren’t all storming successes: for every story with the brooding atmosphere of The Horror of Fang Rock, you’d have something a lot less credible, such as The Invasion Of Time; let’s not forget that while people (including myself) have criticised the new episodes for being at times formulaic and with a tendency for the Doctor to hit uponn the right idea at just that specific point in time necessary, the old Doctors were just as bad.

After all, how many of the classic Doctor Who serials fell into that “base under siege” sort of a story? Loads of the buggers. This didn’t stop good examples of the genre — The Moonbase and The Horror of Fang Rock, for example — being seen as classics. For each original and particularly well-crafted story you can think of for one Doctor, you can probably point to another which was a bit of a stinker… (Pertwee – The Green Death vs Carnival of Monsters, for example).

So it’s unfair and an example of the rose-tinted glasses stuff to think that Doctor Who in the past is something that has ever been let down by the new version, which has taken a lot more time over continuity and actually seems to care about the Doctor Who universe hanging together as a coherent whole rather than just reimagining it between one serial and the next.

And — thank Rassilon — we’ve not had to put up with more than a token appearance of a comedy robot dog.

Russell has taken the script writing of Doctor Who up to a new, particularly exacting high standard. He doesn’t always live up to that target level which he sets himself — and other writers — but he has done Doctor Who a great service by setting that standard there. So thank you, Russell. I may be critical from time to time, but that is only because you have set the standard at such a high level.

David Tennant will also be leaving Doctor Who this winter: having reinvented the role in his own particular image more than any Doctor since the Baker/Davison era (although Eccleston’s part in the revival cannot be overlooked either). I can’t say I’ll be sad to see the end of “allonsy” although despite my initial misgivings (“David bluddy Tennant? who the hell’s he? Oh, that’s him? I can’t imagine him being any good…”) he has proven to be one of the best ever Doctors, bringing real emotion and pathos to the role instead of just furiously muggin his way through the latest script.

Indeed, for the new generation, he will probably define Doctor Who in the way that Tom Baker did for a previous one…

Whether or not he’s the best Doctor to date I’ll leave aside — this is more a question of age and personal preference than some definable ‘best’ — but in my opinion what he has done is provide the highest quality acting seen in Doctor Who to date.

Like Russell, he too has ramped up the popularity of Doctor Who, and I think that the role of Doctor Who is now very much seen as a heavy, important role, as opposed to some minor kids show, which is certainly the impression given in the mid-80s. The whole thing seems more serious; it’s a lot less frivolous; and it actually delivers some quality programming.

I just wanted to put on record my thanks to them for all the good work they’ve done, and to wish them both all the best in the future. Of course, if I don’t like the christmas finale, I’ll still feel entirely free to attempt to tear it to shreds…

…and then next year I can cast my critical eye over Stephen Moffatt and Matt Smith!

Teletext’s news and information service is switching off on December 14/15. Teletext.co.uk “Untitled Page”

For readers outside the UK, teletext is — was — a text based service available through the telly. It had TV listings, news, sport and stuff all available to read, in chunky 1980s era graphics (which haven’t changed, scoring it bonus nostalgia points). If I recall correctly, Oracle Teletext was also specifically the service provided by ITV on their channels: the BBC’s equivalent was called ‘Ceefax’, but basically the name ‘Teletext’ was the one which caught on.

And it looked something like this…

(This is BBC’s Ceefax page 302 represented on-screen, taken from the appropriate Ceefax.TV page — although to be honest it does look as though it’s not updated as often as the real Ceefax. If you’re from Ceefax TV and you’d like me not to use your image, let me know and I’ll take it down)

Basically, you switched the TV to ‘text’, which presented you with a black screen with the text on, although still provided the audio for the channel you were on, and then used your remote to enter the page number you wanted (theoretically 100-999, although in practice there were only a few hundred pages in use), and then the text appeared on the screen (although of course you couldn’t see your programme). Some TVs had a ‘mix’ option which allowed you to view the teletext as on overlay to the current programme, effectively rendering the program unwatchable and the text unreadable at the same time, in what was seen as a ‘feature’.

You could waste time reading all sorts of crap when you should have been doing something else. In this way, it’s possible to see teletext as a sort of a proto-internet.

Anyone who has owned a TV with teletext will probably remember certain of the numbers without ever needing to be prompted: the BBC’s football pages were on 302; subtitles could be available on any channel by pressing 888, News was 101 on BBC or 301 on ITV and so on.

The Gary Lineker quote above was a reflection of standard practice for the legions of football addicts around the country. You simply key into the text page for the scores of the division you were interested in, and the page would update regularly so you would be kept in touch with any changes to the scoreline. This was of course in the days when live sport was frequently shown on telly on a saturday afternoon, instead of talking heads like Matt Le Tissier pulling faces and regularly trying to describe the sitter Didier Drogba’s just missed.

And so all of us, most of us, or at very lesst many of us who weren’t actually at the match would regularly check the scores of our favourite teams (and the others in the division, natch’) on the teletext service to see if, despite years of evidence to the contrary, your team was going to manage to come back from 3-1 down.

And, in reference to the beautiful game, and how it should be played (for the Allardyces and Sounesses out there, I’ll explain: passing the ball to one another rather than just randomly lumping it downfield and hoping someone would score), Gary Lineker actually made a rude and hurtful remark about Wimbledon (as was), indicating that their style of play was so boring to watch that:

I’d rather watch them on TeletextGary Lineker

…hence the post title.

I’m not the only one who’s going to miss teletext either:

Teletext boiled football down to its essentials, the scoreline. Romance, florid descriptions and tactical analysis counted for nothing next to the result. It couldn’t tell you anything about performance or players and in those days you were unlikely to find team line-ups anywhere unless you bought the Sunday People. Before such information became commonplace, it equally satisfied the urges of football junkies and those for whom a Saturday afternoon would not be complete without a fixed-odds coupon.The Guardian: Sport Blog

And it’s all switching off in a couple of days. Well, technically, not all of it. They’re keeping some of the bits which were neither use nor ornament to me — such as teletext holidays — presumably because these actually might generate some revenue. But the stuff that I actually found useful will all be gone.

So farewell then teletext. We salute you.

…but not that much (yet) as fortunately the BBC Ceefax service was better for the football anyway, and I am led to believe that this will be clinging on grimly until the final demise of the analogue TV signals in 2012.

One of the things I discovered about High School Musical 3 was that I had no interest or sympathy whatsoever in any of the characters, and spent most of the film wishing they would contract some horribly disfiguring contagion and be wiped out by machine-gunners in some sort of protective suits. When it became apparent that this was not going to happen, I spent some time counting. I counted (well, part counting, part calculating) the number of seats in the screen, the number of tiles in the ceiling and also the number of pieces of ceiling furniture (sprinklers, light settings and so on). If it hadn’t been obvious that we were approaching the end of the film I may have considered clawing my own eyes out.

I’m not that cynical about kids films: I quite enjoyed Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther 2 (much to my own surprise), got quite a nostalgia kick out of Alvin and the Chipmunks and could pretty much tolerate Madagascar 2, so it’s not like I’m a complete grump about them.

But I had specifically been looking forward to Up, so this was actually carrying the ‘weight of expectation’ tag unlike the others. Would it live up to it?

For those of you who have not seen the advert at the cinema, it tells the story of Carl Fredricksen, who is a 78-year old retiree, who just happens to attach a lot of large helium balloons to the top of his house, thus sending him flying up high into the sky as he sets off house-ballooning to South America. Only he brings Russell along with him by mistake; an 8 year old ‘wilderness scout’ (think boy scout) who had climbed under Carl’s porch looking for something just as the house lifted off…

And that was about all I knew of the film before I went to see it.

Let’s start with what is wrong with the film… this is bound to upset some people, both the Pixar fanboi element and those people who aren’t in that category but simply loved the film. The film seemed a little on the short side to me, but it apparently clocks in at 96 minutes, so maybe it’s just that the storyline is pretty linear that gives it that impression. But criticising a kids film for being a little linear is a rather weak criticism: it wouldn’t work as a kids film if it was looking in depth at the political and socio-economic problems facing a 78-year old widower, so maybe I’ll let them off with that.

The only faults I can find from my point of view — being a little over-heavy on the ‘be nice’ message, the villain being a touch too ‘twirling moustaches’, the message being slightly formulaic, aren’t really inappropriate for a kids film, so I’ll just have to move on to what I liked about it…

Well, to start with, I liked the little animated short Partly Cloudy that they showed with it.

As for the film itself, there’s a sequence at the start showing Carl as a little boy, fascinated by stories of an explorer, meeting a girl with similar tastes, and then as they grow, a relationship developing between them, and them getting married, and both wanting to visit a waterfall called Paradise Falls in Venezuela, them being unable to have children, getting older, retiring, still being very much in love and the suddenly — and like most of this intro sequence done with an absolute minimum of dialogue — we see Carl’s Ellie suddenly become ill, him seeing her in hospital, and then suddenly him sat alone at a funeral service.

It might be laid on thick, but it manages to avoid being too tacky or schmaltzy, and for the first of two occasions in the film (the other being at the end — but I’ll leave that one for you to find) it brought a tear to my usually remarkably cynical eye.

Of course, while it was patently obvious to all adults watching what had happened, there was a large proportion of kids in the audience and I heard one ask his Dad in the row in front…

Dad, why isn’t that lady in the house any more?

…but fortunately either my kids managed to grasp what had happened (or possibly didn’t notice/care) so I didn’t have any questions to face myself…

Basically, and without giving too much away, Carl plans to take his house to Paradise Falls, where he and his wife had always imagined having a house, only to find Russell as an unexpected (and cheerfully enthusiastic) companion. And, as you can imagine, they get into scrapes and adventures. In the course of events and so on.

What I can say is that I found Carl to be a fun character. It’s not that he’s unbelievable as a 78-year old widower; he is totally believable in that role, it’s just the grumpiness and cantankerousness that pretty much make you identify with him… what? okay, well maybe that’s just me… and there’s some lovely little touches, such as the tennis balls he uses on his four-pronged walking stick thingy, or the fact that (if I’m recalling correctly) he starts out clean-shaven but towards the end of the adventure you can see a white stubble flecking his chin.

He obviously develops considerably more energy as the film progresses: at the start he’s using a stairlift to get up and down his stairs; near the end, after hiking across a high plateau, he’s capable of dragging wardrobes around and getting into a sword fight. But again, this fits: it’s been Carl’s (and Ellie’s) ambition to make it to Paradise Falls so it just seems to be perfectly reasonable that he’s feeling a bit more sprightly as he gets near it.

If you liked Bee Movie, and High School Musical 3, you’ll love this. Mostly because it’s apparent that you’ll enjoy any hogwash projected onto a screen in front of you while you autoconsume popcorn. But even if you didn’t like Bee Move and High School Musical 3, you’ve got a pretty good chance of loving this, because if you accept it for what it is — a kids film — and don’t lay on unrealistic expectations, then you will bloody well enjoy it.

And it is a very, very good example of the ‘kids film’ genre. Don’t expect it to be too complex, or clever. Don’t expect much (anything) in the way of plot twists. Do just enjoy the action, the dialogue and the humour. Up is a film which stands as an excellent example of the kids film genre, and it’s not too shabby when considered as just a plain “film” either.

Do go and see it.

Dating back to 1983, the The Black Guardian Trilogy has just been released on DVD. It features three stories from the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who, including the companions Tegan, Nyssa and of course Turlough.

For me, Peter Davison was my childhood Doctor Who as I remember it: I was too young to properly appreciate the Tom Baker era (although later, and with repeats I did come, like so many others to install him as my favourite) and so for me Peter Davison was the benchmark against which all of the other Doctors were compared, much like David Tennant will be the benchmark for many of today’s kids.

I think one of the things that particularly worked during the Davison-era Who was his companions: Tegan, Adric, Nyssa, Turlough were all interesting characters who bounced off one another well, although I personally couldn’t be doing with Peri.

The Black Guardian trilogy opens with Mawdryn Undead, in which the TARDIS gets stuck on a starliner, and the Doctor needs to use the ship’s transmat beam to head down to earth, leaving Tegan and Nyssa on the TARDIS while he sorts it out. He beams down and encounters an old mate — Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now teaching at a school, as well as Turlough, a slightly odd and not entirely well-behaved pupil at the school.

Oddly enough, the Brigadier can’t remember the Doctor at all … but does remember encountering a Tegan Jovanka six years earlier, in 1977. The Doctor and the Brigadier have to try to piece together the Brig’s missing memory in order to get back to Nyssa and Tegan, and while Turlough goes with them to ‘help’, in reality he has been contacted by the Black Guardian and ordered to kill the Doctor.

It’s an enjoyable story — I’ve always been a great fan of the Brigadier, and his appearance in both 1977 version and 1983 versions together is rather integral to the plot. Valentine Dyall, with his very distinctive voice is excellent as the Black Guardian, and it’s always nice to have a companion that you don’t entirely trust…

There’s also some interesting extras on the DVD including an interview with the Brigadier (not Nicholas Courtney the actor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the character) which is a little different and quite an interesting retrospective, although it does rather remind you of the disappointment that then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s first screen appearance (in the Troughton plus Yeti serial The Web of Fear) is one of the serials butchered and deleted by the BBC.

After Mawdryn Undead, we have Terminus, where after the TARDIS is sabotaged by Turlough on the instructions of the Black Guardian, it is forced to make on an emergency landing on a ship that docks with a deserted space station. Only it turns out that the station isn’t quite as deserted as they had first thought…

…it is in fact a plague ship where the inhabitants have a leprosy-like disease and are basically left to die, although it is purported that some can be cured. The TARDIS crew have to somehow find their way off the ship without being infected, only to encounter the station guards — the Vanir — who don’t want to let potential sources of infection leave.

But there are further questions to be answered — how come the space station Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe? Has Nyssa contracted Lazar’s Disease? And who, or what, is the Garm?

While the stakes seem considerably higher in this one — as opposed to simply the Doctor’s life, it turns out that indeed the future of the entire universe rests upon the actions of the Doctor — it is also less polished and possibly a little more disjointed than Mawdryn Undead (although this can possibly be explained by the production problems which are detailed if you view the title with the information text on).

Terminus is however notable for being the last story to feature Sarah Sutton’s character Nyssa of Traken, whom I had always liked as a companion (although not as much as the Brigadier, who unfortunately does not feature in either Terminus or the final Black Guardian story Enlightenment).

Enlightenment returns to the highs of Mawdryn Undead although it is a very different story. While Mawdryn Undead is a contemporary story (set mostly in 1977 and 1983), and Terminus very much a ‘future’ story, Enlightenment has a touch of period drama to it, even though it too is set in the future.

The Doctor and his companions find themselves on an Edwardian sailing ship, taking part in an interplanetary race against other period ships — including a pirate ship captained by Captain Wrack (who you might recognise as Nurse Gladys Emanuel from Open All Hours). The ships officers are beings from outside of time called the Eternals who refer to everyone else as Ephemerals.

The race is to be the first to reach The Enlighteners and gain enlightenment as their prize, with the pirate Buccaneer resorting to various underhand methods to ensure that they win (although this does expose a minor plot hole — it appears that the Buccaneer is by far the fastest ship, easily capable of outstripping all the others — so one does wonder why the need for sabotage…!).

Turlough’s character gets the opportunity to develop a little more as he chafes under the yoke of the Black Guardian — who isn’t exactly pleased that the Doctor is still alive — and instead of looking to obey the Black Guardian tends to spend his time looking for a way to escape from his service. The mood of this story is excellent, and in particular the sets and costumes need a great degree of credit, adding a considerable amount of authenticity to the episode.

You also get to see Peter Davison replace the stick of celery pinned to his lapel for a fresher one, but I’d have to describe that as a quirky little ‘touch’ rather than any sort of significant plot element.

The three stories hang together very well, with the best two setting up and finishing off the story, and while in contrast Terminus is not up to the same high standard, it’s not a bad story as such (some great costumes in there as well). If you’ve been away from Doctor Who for a while, or you’ve not seen any of the old-era Doctor Who, this boxed set might be an ideal jumping-in point…

…a “dominant” BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK. [...]

“The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision,” he told the Edinburgh Television Festival. The scope of the BBC’s activities and ambitions was “chilling”, he added. Organisations like the BBC, funded by the licence fee, as well as Channel 4 and Ofcom, made it harder for other broadcasters to survive, he argued.

BBC News: Murdoch attack on ‘dominant’ BBC

And this sums up precisely why we shouldn’t listen to James Murdoch. Let’s look at the scenario: he is publicly critical of the BBC, and the BBC report it. Not only that, but when the BBC report it, they give more space to reporting James Murdoch’s anti-BBC views than they give to the BBC’s Greg Dyke giving an alternative viewpoint. Compare this to News Corporation. I can’t think of an example (I’m not saying there isn’t one, merely that I can’t think of one) where News Corporation has given such prominence to criticism of companies it owns within these companies.

Indeed, it’s so famous for promoting the Sky TV channels through its newspapers that Private Eye used to (possibly still do?) feature obviously promotional mentions of Sky TV within these other channels.

Nor does James Murdoch seem to see that, while he is critical for the BBC’s perceived dominance on TV and on the web, that News Corporation could be reasonably well considered to be dominant in on TV and in print media. I didn’t see James calling for News Corporation to dispose of all of their shareholdings in print media.

Of course, the main problem with the BBC as far as News Corporation is concerned is simple:

Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it “incredibly difficult” for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.BBC News: Murdoch attack on ‘dominant’ BBC

…and obviously as News Corporation want to charge people for looking at their news on the web, they are going to have a hard time selling this if you can get high quality news content online for free elsewhere.

For me, the worst part though was James Murdoch’s suggestion that the only way you get a truly independent media is through media driven by profit. I disagree. I think a profit-driven media gives you profit-driven news, which isn’t necessarily the same as public interest news. If you are driven by profit, there is an incentive to run puff-pieces (or spike critical stories) of major shareholders or sponsors. You also will run the sort of news — the celebrity gossip stuff — which attracts the most interest, which while it may be want the public wants, isn’t the same as the news the public ought to know.

And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society’s got…The Jam: Going Underground

Because of the unique way the BBC is funded by the taxpayer, the BBC is able to some extent to focus their news on what is important rather than simply what would be the most populist news. I’m not going to claim the BBC is perfect in this regard — the BBC’s coverage of events outside London is pathetic (it’s national news if there are floods in the south-east, anywhere else it will only make the local news), but let’s look at the way it works.

The BBC is paid by the taxpayer. The BBC therefore has an ethos where they are responsible to the nation, not the shareholder, and certainly not the owner or the government of the day. They see themselves as answering to the nation. Of course, like any organisation, they also have a degree of loyalty to the organisation itself, but you’re not going to get a situation where the BBC’s political reportage is slanted in favour of one particular party because the director general wants to see them elected.

The BBC does not have any axe to grind in this manner. They can — and will — tear down anyone from any political party if they have the relevant information about them.

[As an aside, I note that many people -- particularly those from a right-wing background -- see the BBC as tending towards left-wing. I don't necessarily agree (I fail to see how any organisation that pays and promotes Jeremy Clarkson can be seen as right-on liberals), but I do acknowledge that some people do believe this. Perhaps an external independent body (independent of parliament also) ought to run alongside the BBC to monitor for bias -- OffBeeb perhaps...]

…but for me the key points are trustworthiness and quality. I trust the BBC. I presume they will get it wrong from time to time, but I trust that their intention is to lay out the facts in a plain and clear manner, and not present things with a bias that suits their own political agenda. Compare this to Fox News which has been accused of bias. I don’t want to hear the news that News Corporation wants me to hear.

I want to hear the news that News Corporation doesn’t want me to hear. I want to hear the news that the BBC doesn’t want me to hear. And the only news source I would trust to tell me both of these is the BBC. Over the Ross/Brand/Sachs furore, over allegations of phone-in competitions being mis-run, you get to hear a lot of people being critical of the BBC on the BBC.

And, having watched Sky News quite a bit whilst on holiday, I have to say that it is also my personal belief that the quality of the BBC news is better, but as they are presenting slightly different news styles, this might simply boil down to a matter of personal preference.

For me, the BBC, and in particular BBC news is a well-respected national institution. The British public were up in arms when the US right were critical of our NHS recently to promote an American-right political agenda, and I feel exactly the same about the BBC. Any political party who dares to fuck with the independence, the quality, the institution of the BBC, is fucking with a national institution that is extremely highly valued by the British public. Leave our NHS alone, leave our BBC alone, and take your profit-driven news idea somewhere else.

If the BBC licence fee could be trebled and everything currently within the Murdoch stable within the UK could be brought under the BBC umbrella in the UK, then this would be a good thing, and a price well worth paying. The BBC are rightly and generally seen as the most trusted news provider in the UK, and while I would rather they employed a few more cameramen and standard reporters than paid celebrities huge salaries, I trust them to get the balance right (after all, I’m quite a fan of that Jonathan Ross chap, after all). And it’s not just news; the quality of the BBC programming is generally very high (and they allow for experimental stuff on BBC3/4 which might not be so good, but if it does work will generally be transferred to the more mainstream channels later).

Oh, and that’s before I’ve even mentioned Doctor Who, the quality of local radio, the fact that their website is bloody brilliant (whether you want sports, news, programme information), or even Doctor Who. And did I mention Doctor Who?

In short, the BBC is brilliant and I love it. It’s not perfect, but it is far, far, far better than any of the alternatives.

And, as I intimated a few days ago on twitter, if you’re upsetting the Murdoch empire, then in my book you’ve got to be doing something right…

More reasons to like the #BBC no 17: the Murdoch empire isn’t keen on them.@ThePickards

Basically, it allows you to choose from a series of clips, intros, pictures and sounds from David Tennant era Doctor Who and combine them as you wish (allowing multiple samplings of the same clip, sampling only some parts of a particular clip and so on) to form a 30-second long Doctor Who Trailer. It’s the sort of thing that is fun for all the family. Just make sure you’ve had your turn before the kids get started otherwise you will find yourself unable to prevent yourself from interfering.

Stephen Lang’s version is more of a homage to the show itself, featuring clips from many different episodes and although he described it as a rather humble effort, I quite enjoyed watching it. I took a slightly different tack, focussing on one particular episode, but whether or not you like my version, the key thing to remember is that it really is remarkably easy to put together something like this.

The BBC really have done a grand job with the Doctor Who Trailer Maker, and I’d urge you to wander over and have a play… (although to achieve the perfect viral, they’d need to allow you to at least download as a video so you can share it, although embedding would be even better).

I’m then supposed to tag a further fifteen people with each list, but I can’t be bothered to do that. Instead, I’ll offer it up as a meme for anyone to take part in and will suggest that maybe Stephen Lang, John H and Chartroose might want to give either or both parts of it a go, but anyone else is welcome to as well.

It’s important to note that you do not have to define why a particular book or film has stuck with you. For reference, any book marked with an * is non-fiction, and they are in no particular order…

Books

1. Lord Of The Rings — J. R. R. Tolkien
2. The Mismeasure of Man* — Stephen Jay Gould
3. Fire And Hemlock — Dianna Wynne Jones
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
5. The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins
6. Freakonomics* — Levitt & Dubner
7. The Black Widower Mysteries — Isaac Asimov
8. The Legacy of Heorot — Niven, Pournelle and Barnes
9. The Belgariad — David Eddings
10. The Blind Watchmaker* — Richard Dawkins
11. The Demon Haunted World* — Carl Sagan
12. Bad Science* — Ben Goldacre
13. The Riddle And The Knight* — Giles Milton
14. Left Foot Forward* — Garry Nelson
15. Notes From A Small Island* — Bill Bryson

Films

1. The Ghoul (1975 Hammer Horror version)
2. Lord Of The Rings (Peter Jackson)
3. Moulin Rouge
4. The Mummy Returns (film for first ‘date’ with my wife)
5. Goldeneye
6. Dark Star (John Carpenter)
7. Way Out West (Laurel & Hardy) — notable for the ‘Lonesome Pine’ song.
8. Ring (the Japanese version)
9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10. Alien
11. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
12. Star Wars
13. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
14. Trainspotting
15. Heat (1995)

I’ve deliberately chosen the post ‘Social Media Advisor’ because I feel it’s an area which Reynholm Industries need some more advice and support. They are not accessing the full potential of social media, and have even blocked employees from accessing sites such as Friendface.

Obviously, in most circumstances, I cannot condone or advise logging into things where you don’t have a valid account, but Reynholm Industries is a notable exception. Those of you who know Reynholm Industries will know why. For those of you who don’t, I’d advise checking out the documentary fly-on-the-wall series set in Reynholm Industries.

UPDATE: for those of you coming here searching for the Reynholm Industries intranet password, I’m not going to tell you. I will however give you a clue. It is through the legendary Maurice Moss that you will find what you seek.

John Barrowman didn’t seem happy about the move:

Cutting the new series of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood to five shows from 13 felt like “we were being punished”, its star John Barrowman has said.BBC News: Torchwood cut ‘like punishment’

…and I can very much understand what he was saying. I missed the first few episodes of Torchwood series one (really didn’t think a Captain Jack spinoff would work) but from the moment I jumped into the Small Worlds episode I was hooked. It was like Doctor Who, Jim, but not as we know it. This was adult Doctor Who. Adult sci-fi drama. Much of it definitely not suitable for family viewing. It was top-notch, first-rate, cracking stuff.

So losing eight episodes of it felt like the viewers were being punished too: not just the cast.

However, the switch to every night for five nights and one single long story line: that most definitely did work. It made the show that much more intense — and with a plot which had you shuffling over to sit down next to out and out paranoia in the first place, it most definitely worked.

The story was grim. An overpowering, overwhelming alien force called the 456 (because of the frequency they broadcast on) turn up and make their demands of earth. They’ve been here once before, making similar demands, and Captain Jack was involved then too. Anyone wishing to read on beyond this point may be aware that there will be spoilers: so if you’ve not seen it, you might wish to look away now…

And of course, what the aliens wanted was 10% of the world’s human children. Handed over where they would be used almost as bio-grafts on to the aliens, so that these children would be trapped within the aliens’ bodies, producing some chemical which the aliens would get high on. 10% of the world’s children to be handed over, just like that, otherwise they’d wipe out the planet.

Last time they’d been here, it had just been 12 children that Jack Harkness had helped to hand over to the aliens: and they’d gone away for 40 years. Now they were back, wanting more “tribute”. And the government felt it necessary to silence Jack and anyone else who knew about it…

I’m not going to run through the plot much more, other than to say that the first four episodes were searingly brilliant; atmospheric, punchy, fast, tense, great sci-fi stuff. We got introduced to Jack’s daughter (now looking older than him) and his young grandson; we saw Jack blown up and then entombed in liquid concrete — which led to him spending most of an episode in the nudey, as Steve Pugh noticed. Darn. Why does that sort of thing never happen to Gwen Cooper?

Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Russell T Davies doesn’t do endings very well. Which is a shame, because he’s bloody brilliant at building stuff up: but the endings always feel a little rushed. Admittedly, we had possibly the most explosive piece of bureacratic dialogue I’ve heard in some time:

Give me a requisition 31!Peter Capaldi as John Frobisher

Obviously, when you find out what a requisition 31 entails, particularly in John Frobisher’s case, it changes the mood somewhat, but even so, this part of the story was extremely well done.

But then we get to the bits I’m not so sure about. There’s the the sacrifice of Captain Jack’s grandson. Precisely because the daughter was wary of him in episode one, you just knew that he was going to very badly let her down some way or other before the end of the series. I’m still undecided as to whether this was cliched and carried out clunkingly or whether the sacrifice was deliberately foreshadowed in the earlier episodes to try and make it more poignant when it occurred. Either way, it didn’t work. I never really believed that Jack Harkness actually felt the grief and sadness about his grandson: about Ianto, yes, but not the grandson: Captain Jack is simply too shallow for long term emotional attachments.

I’m possibly being a little picky in saying that the child’s head biografted onto the alien looked like some spare prop left over from the Toclafane — that’s actually fine if it was (after all, these things have to be made within a budget), but if it wasn’t, they ought to have put more effort into making it look more different.

And there’s Ianto. Did they forget what to do with him? Marching him into a room to try and shoot through a reinforced container? Why? Particularly when you know Jack is indestructible and Ianto isn’t. Had they just decided they wanted him out of the way by episode five, because there really was no good reason at all for him to go rushing in with Jack…

Oh, and while we’re on plot holes, if the aliens turned up once before in 1965, and after abducting them, discovered that they could use the children to provide chemical stimulants, why the hell did they want to abduct them in the first place in 1965? How could they have known that the kids would provide a drug for them? (Although I was quite happy to let this drop for the sake of the story, since I’m being critical, I’ll mention it).

The strongest part of episode 5 was probably Gwen and Rhys trying to keep the children safe: if you ignore the hammy to video ‘world-is-endings’ sequence from Gwen, anyway. The Bridget Spears sequences were also good (although I did guess what she was up to), and for the most part it was again another top quality episode. It’s just that the one little bit where it went wrong was pretty damn important.

There’s only a certain amount of times Russell can write the “how can we possibly defeat this alien? It’s so much stronger than us, oh, I know I’ve had an idea, yes, that works, the alien has gone, the end” without it looking shite. And that’s once.

The way in which to defeat the alien needed to be worked out — possibly surreptitiously tested — over a greater period of time. The idea that these ideas just “pop” into the head of the right person at the right moment and miraculously work first time (with twenty minutes to go in the final episode, you know an idea someone comes up with will work) seems to be RTD’s idea of an ending, but to me it’s the same deus ex machina time after time: this particular example nearly being as bad as the magic psychic Doctor force that defeated the Master at the end of Series 3…

Which really is a bloody shame because the rest of the episode, and the rest of the series, were of extremely high quality. I’m still hoping for a series four — and the sooner the better — but I hope by then Russell will let someone else have a go at the ending.