The Snowmen
BBC One HD
25th December 2012, 5.15pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

Victoriana. From the alchemical time-travel of The Evil of the Daleks to Weng-Chiang's pastiche of Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle, Doctor Who has often plundered these and its Wellsian roots.

Of late, it has been with increasing regularity and has taken in that quintessential Christmas narrator, Charles Dickens. Television's current obsession with nostalgia tends to acquaint 'ye olde Christmas' with stove pipe hats, the Industrial Revolution, cheeky Cockney flower girls, snow or fog enshrouded streets, orphans and urchins, moral strictures and sexual repression. The Snowmen finds Steven Moffat retracing his steps down those familiar streets. Where before we saw him raid Dickens for A Christmas Carol, in this year's Christmas special we're also plunged into Henry James and Conan Doyle territory.

The story opens in 1842, where a snow bound walled garden and pond is filled with the laughter of children and we find the lone figure of Walter Simeon building a snowman. He's the typical lonely child in Moffat's oft-used signature and one of the symbolic figures that occupy several representations of the family or its absence in The Snowmen.

Moffat's Christmas offerings always seem to highlight the dysfunctional or transnormative family, with the wounded and repressed father or mother figures of Kazran Sardick and Madge Arwell the focus of attention in previous editions, and the rejected and emotionally crippled Simeon the lynchpin of the story here. As his parents look on and bemoan their child's introverted life ('he's so alone. It's not right, it's not healthy'), Simeon converts this canker at the heart of the Victorian ideal into a full blown steampunk powered attempt to conquer the world.

"When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn't you, Romana?"

"Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect. I'm trying to have it banned."

Shada, the untransmitted six part story that was to have closed Doctor Who's seventeenth season, continues to generate a certain mystique even to this day. Prior to the release of this three disc DVD set that includes the 1992 version of Shada and the 1993 documentary More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS accompanied by a wealth of often quite eclectic special features, Douglas Adams's season finale has enjoyed something of an extended life.

Many elements from Shada would eventually find their way into Douglas Adams' 1986 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency despite him not thinking very highly of the original scripts he wrote in 1979. On this DVD release, you'll even find the Big Finish version of Shada, an adaptation that swaps the Fourth Doctor for the Eighth with the Flash animation that accompanied its original publication on BBCi in 2003. Over the last year, we've also seen the publication of Gareth Roberts' adaptation of Douglas Adams' scripts into a novel that realised much of the potential of the television version. And there was the privately funded project from Ian Levine which saw the ill-feted production completed with animation but couldn't be accommodated by BBC Worldwide when Shada's turn came in the DVD release schedule.