Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
BBC One HD
27 April 2013, 6.30pm

The review contains spoilers. 

The Red Queen of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass probably best sums up the flavour of Steven Thompson's script with her view, 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.' And my, the Doctor and Clara do a lot of physical and temporal running around in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. Thompson's second script for the series after the rather disappointing and one-note The Curse of the Black Spot back in 2011, like Neil Cross's sophomore outing Hide, is something of a revelation. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS evolves from a basic premise - the TARDIS is hauled aboard a huge space-faring salvage vessel and the Doctor connives three brothers, Gregor, Bram and Tricky Van Baalen (Ashley Walters, Mark Oliver and Jahvel Hall) into rescuing Clara from the damaged time machine.

From this Thompson has crafted a narrative which works on several levels: as a fan-pleasing glimpse into the unseen and previously mentioned areas of the TARDIS, as a predestination paradox which defines a number of characters, particularly Clara, through their relationship with time and memory and, finally, as an exploration of machine personality and the authentically human. It's an intriguing mix of science fiction sophistry about time and relativity and a voyage of self discovery couched, for Clara, as both Alice's journey into Wonderland and Dante's descent into the Inferno when she is lost inside the TARDIS.

Hide
BBC One HD
20 April 2013, 6.45pm

The review contains spoilers.

The first of Neil Cross's two scripts for the series, but the second to be transmitted, Hide finds the writer in several familiar territories at once. In an SFX interview, Cross discussed the influence of Nigel Kneale's work on the episode, particularly the Quatermass stories and a Christmas ghost story, the legendary television play The Stone Tape (BBC, 25/12/1972). In fact, Hide was supposed to feature an on-screen meeting between Professor Bernard Quatermass and the Doctor, bringing to fruition a slow osmosis between these two post-war British science fiction worlds which began, for Doctor Who, in the Quatermass-influenced Season Seven, featuring the Third Doctor's exile to Earth and his fight against all manner of Home Counties invaders. Later, the link continued to be acknowledged and Bernard and his British Rocket Group also got on screen mentions in Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) and 2005's The Christmas Invasion.

Rights issues seem to have scuppered Cross's ambitions to properly bring these two cornerstones of British television science fiction together. Though Kneale would hardly thank you for labelling Quatermass as science fiction and also held a rather dim view of Doctor Who itself, accusing it of frightening children with its intention to 'bomb the tinies with insinuations of doom and terror', in Hide, if you'll forgive the pun, the spirit of Kneale lives on.

'You call this a screenplay? I don't know who these people are, I don't know what their background is, I don't know what they're doing, I don't know who's doing what and why, I don't know what they want, I have absolutely no idea what is going on, how can you call this a screenplay?' said perplexed producer Sam Spiegel to Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey when he called them into his office to discuss the script for 1967's Accident.

The director and the writer assured Spiegel they knew what the screenplay was about and yet, he blustered in reply, 'You two might know what's going on but what about all the millions of peasants in China?' (1) Spiegel had bought the rights to Nicholas Mosley's 1965 titular novel on the advice of Losey and his fellow Horizon Pictures producer Jud Kinberg. Losey turned to Pinter to undertake the screen adaptation shortly after the writer had completed work on Michael Anderson's The Quiller Memorandum (1966) in the summer of 1965.

While he completed the drafts of the script with Losey's input, a first draft arriving July 1965 followed by a second draft in September, a number of intense meetings between Spiegel, Pinter and Losey took place in Amsterdam and Sicily during Losey's shoot on Modesty Blaise (1966). When Spiegel attempted to isolate Pinter from Losey by inviting him to write on his yacht it became clear to them both that Spiegel wanted to not only interfere with the screenplay but also have his say on other aspects of the film, including casting. (2)

Their early suggestion for Dirk Bogarde as the lead baffled Spiegel: 'What do you want Bogarde for? Who's ever heard of him?' BAFTA begged to differ in the Spring of 1966 when Bogarde picked up a Best Actor gong for his work in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965). Spiegel insisted he could get Richard Burton but that the production would have to wait a year for him. Meanwhile, Bogarde received the script in January 1966 as a courtesy but was so concerned at the suggestion of such an actor for the lead part, he begged them to at least try and get Paul Schofield to play the lead role. (3)

Cold War
BBC One HD
13 April 2013, 6.00pm

The review contains spoilers.

'Ultravox! I bloody love 'em!' exclaims David Warner's bobble-hatted Professor Grisenko as he bursts in on an extremely tense submarine nuclear attack scenario being run by grizzled Captain Zhukov and his hot-headed Lieutenant Stepashin. It's a wonderful comic anti-climax in the middle of a pre-titles sequence which establishes the nuclear fears and anxieties dominating the 1980s setting of Mark Gatiss' Cold War. 'This means nothing to me,' he croons, badly, as Zhukov and Stepashin hover over the button which could plunge the world into a winter significantly more devastating than the one raging above them at the North Pole.

Grisenko's reaction, as the sub's laconic zoologist, sums up his attitude to all of the testosterone flying about in confined spaces. Although, you do wonder why a Soviet nuclear submarine on a nuclear war footing would be carrying a resident zoologist among the ICBMs. However, we instantly get the measure of the antagonism between Zhukov and Stepashin too. Stepashin can't wait to loose off those missiles while Zhukov is more conciliatory about the NATO exercises the Soviets are getting jumpy about. These positions are continually in the foreground and feed into the negotiations that eventually have to be conducted with the intruder, frozen in a block of ice, waiting in their hold.

'I'd like you to know how moved and impressed I was by your play, A Night Out, this past Sunday. It has an intensity and inner truth both horrifying and purgative. There are few things, if any, I have seen on British TV that can compare with it. Congratulations.' (1) An extraordinary collaboration between writer Harold Pinter and film director Joseph Losey, one which would eventually stretch across three film projects, was initiated with the above letter sent by Losey to Pinter.

It was despatched after the transmission of the play in ABC's groundbreaking Armchair Theatre series on 24 April 1960, three days before the opening at the Arts Theatre of what was considered Pinter's breakthrough success in the theatre, The Caretaker. Up until that opening, Pinter's reputation for crafting his signature 'comedy of menace' had been formed in a handful of plays including The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter.

It would be two and half years later before Pinter and Losey worked together on The Servant, an adaptation of Robin Maugham's sixty-two page novella published in 1948. The rights to the book had been purchased by director Michael Anderson who then commissioned Pinter to write a screenplay in 1961. Losey had also expressed an interest to Maugham about a stage adaptation as early as 1955. Anderson failed to raise the necessary finance and, in the meantime, Dirk Bogarde had received and read the first Pinter screenplay. Writing in his biography Snakes and Ladders, Bogarde recalls his excitement about Pinter's script, declaring it had 'the precision of a master jeweller... his pauses are merely the time-phases which he gives you so that you may develop the thought behind the line he has written, and to alert your mind itself to the dangerous simplicities of the lines to come'. (2)

The Rings of Akhaten
BBC One HD
6 April 2013, 6.15pm

This episode's writer Neil Cross has a bit of a mixed pedigree. On British television, he's currently lauded as the creator and writer of the award-winning Luther (2010-) and was former lead writer on two seasons of Spooks (2002-11) and in Hollywood he recently improved his science fiction cachet by rewriting a draft of Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming Pacific Rim and signing up to script the Sam Raimi adaptation of The Day of the Triffids. Cross has indicated his affection for Doctor Who and a long held desire to write for the series and Steven Moffat has generously provided him with two opportunities this year. The Rings of Akhaten is the second of two scripts but the first to be screened, with haunted house thriller Hide a fortnight away.

The clues to why it's worth sticking with this episode, despite some major flaws, are provided in the opening three and a half minutes. The flashback is fast becoming a common trope in the series, usually a way of embedding in a predilection for revealing memories, a character's past or underlining a bit of non-linearity in the story. However, here the Doctor's stalking of Clara's past posits him as an active witness to memory and of her parents' first meeting in 1981 if an ironic inclusion of The Specials 'Ghost Town' on the soundtrack and the Summer Special of the Beano are anything to go by.

The Bells of Saint John
BBC One HD
30 March 2013, 6.15pm

Steven Moffat's departure from Twitter seems to have inspired a rather bitter reflection about his experience on the World Wide Web of fear in The Bells of Saint John, the opening episode of the second half of Series 7 of Doctor Who. Apparently at producer Marcus Wilson's suggestion, he decided to return to the modern thriller format and set this re-introduction to Clara 'Oswin' Oswald (three versions and counting) in contemporary London. There's a dash of Partners in Crime and Smith and Jones by association and a brief nod to a post-Skyfall milieu as Clara and the Doctor dash through the capital to rescue those trapped in the alien wi-fi.

It also features several televisual hallmarks of modernity - the Shard (yet another in the long line of threatening London landmarks and the equivalent of The War Machines' Post Office Tower or Rose's London Eye) and scrolling on screen web code gibberish to suggest evil is but one click away. London and these visual representations of communication are stock in trade for Moffat's other day job, Sherlock. Cue lots of concerned people sitting at laptops or on smart phones at the mercy of a great hacking intelligence. However, this is window dressing to a darker vision of modernity at the centre of The Bells of Saint John.