BBCHD - 27 August 2011 - 7.10pm

"I'm getting a sort of banging in my head"
"Yeah, I think that's Hitler in the cupboard"

The opening of Let's Kill Hitler, where Amy and Rory drive their mini across a field to provide a crop circle shout out to the Doctor, is of course yet another reiteration of Moffat's idea of imparting messages to the Doctor that has already seen active duty in Time of the Angels, The Pandorica Opens and The Impossible Astronaut. And usually when they call the Doctor, River tends to go along for the ride.

"Hello, shoppers!"

Yes, that's the salutation from the Doctor that will greet you once you've been enticed into the dark recesses of BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who Experience currently occupying Kensington Olympia this summer. It's an impressively scaled interactive exhibition, offering a cornucopia of props, costumes and behind the scenes ephemera from over 40 years of the good Doctor's adventures and a prefect day out for Doctor Who fans young and old.

My journey on this half hour 'walk-through' experience was in the company of several fanboys and fangirls, all nervously lining up and waiting for the show to begin, unaware of what to expect. Surrounding us were the merest hints - a new series Silurian on guard and a rather fabulous tableau featuring one of Churchill's khaki Daleks - to the feast that would greet us once we'd been given a video pep talk by the Doctor himself.

As the Doctor's introduction concluded, advising us of the terrible threats to our safety that the crack in the universe would disgorge, the huge video screen we were watching thrillingly split open and our little party found itself in the National Museum aboard Starship UK. All the visual and aural details of The Beast Below surround you, highlighting each of the objects in the museum. It's at this point that the 'experience' cranks up and the walk-through proper begins with the Doctor interrupting the broadcast to advise us that he needs our help to free him from imprisonment in the 'spare' Pandorica his deadliest enemies had lying around (a cheeky bit of knowingness that's one of many instances where you'll detect Steven Moffat's hand in the general tomfoolery).

His plea for help concludes when the TARDIS materialises and, if you're a sad old bugger like me, it truly is a shiver down the spine moment when it appears and the Doctor invites us in through the front door. The police box doors lead into the lofty vaults of the current TARDIS interior, impressively re-mounted for the show. And what's even better, you get to navigate, run the diagnostics and take off and then land the old girl with the Doctor's help! Some nifty hydraulics under the floor make the journey a physically real event to his not-so-reluctant passengers too.

Just a quick mention to readers and followers of Cathode Ray Tube's Doctor Who reviews that yours truly can be heard in conversation with Chip Sudderth and fellow writers and critics Kyle Anderson (nerdist.com and battleshippretention.com) and Teresa Jusino (Tor.com and Newsarama) on Chip's Two-Minute Time Lord podcast this week.

Our roundtable discussion looks at Doctor Who Series 6 (so far) and examines the changes brought to the show since Series 5, Moffat's women characters such as Amy and River and the how the latest episodes have been received by audiences in the UK and US.

It was a delight to take part in, to meet my fellow roundtable pundits and I hope you enjoy listening.

And don't forget... if you like the reviews here then my book on Series 5, The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor is still available either direct from the publisher or via Amazon and other retailers.

BBCHD - 4 June 2011 - 6.40pm

The mid-season finale A Good Man Goes To War is a curious beast. Like The Pandorica Opens, Moffat structures the episode in a very particular way. A series of flashbacks and forwards are a typical device from the writer, with the similar time-jumping elements and brief character sketches of last year's finale here replicated in order to show us how the Doctor calls in his debts with those we know well and those who are entirely new to us. The danger here is that with those we know nothing about at all the episode has to work very hard to ensure these characters have an instant impact because down the line that is what will matter. If they are to succeed as characters the audience will need to emotionally engage with them.

But it's also about the expanded universe of Doctor Who with Moffat using the vernacular of Star Wars and more importantly the western, The Magnificent Seven particularly, and their original templates that can be found in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, to give us glimpses into areas of the Doctor Who universe that are usually the provenance of original novels and comic strips. A Good Man Goes to War therefore offers a good example of how the current television incarnation is willing to entertain the influence of these texts (from the Virgin New Adventures to the output of Big Finish) and not merely replicate some of them, as Russell T Davies did with Dalek and Human Nature, but to suggest new ones. Therefore we get a set of characters, in debt to the Doctor from previous, unseen adventures, taking up a significant portion of the first twenty minutes of the story, a whole chunk of the episode in which the Doctor himself does not appear but where his influence, his status as myth is keenly felt.

... storytelling is dependent on indeterminacy, open-endedness and multi-voiced narratives 

There's a rhythm to the storytelling here, again in the Lucas and Spielberg tradition, which is another iteration of what I described in my review of The Pandorica Opens as the ancient literary tradition of menippea - a form of satire that signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. Here it's the western, the samurai and war film genres that represent that Bakhtian 'carnival of life' experience. As Andrew Horton points out in his analysis of screenwriting, Writing the Character-Centred Screenplay, "George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy comes much closer to the realm of the epic as described by Bakhtin" and Bakhtin's observation that this form of storytelling is dependent on indeterminacy, open-endedness and multi-voiced narratives is reflected in Moffat's own ideas of the epic form.

BBCHD - 28th May 2011 - 6.45pm

"I've reversed the jelly baby of the neutron flow"

An interesting conclusion to Matthew Graham's two part story, The Almost People certainly opens up much of the debate about biogengineering ethics and identity that last week's episode introduced in the form of the flesh gangers and their increasing sentience. To spark much of this debate, and to raise our awareness that the narrative here is actually a significant part of the series arc of which the Doctor has a greater awareness than we first thought, Graham uses a series of ganger/human parallels embodied in the back stories of his characters.

Primarily, he takes the initial idea of Jimmy's role as father, which his duplicate has awareness and memories of, and uses this to, pardon the pun, flesh out the exploration of sentience, consciousness and will at the heart of the story. He then adds further to this with what we discover about Miranda Cleaves. When the Doctor scans her he diagnoses an inoperable blood clot, the symptoms of which both her human and ganger form share.

What Graham seems to be saying with these two sub-plots is that for the gangers to truly become sentient they must accept the burdens of human emotions, specifically their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and the body's physical frailty. With sentience comes responsibility for the self and others and an acceptance of mortality, as we see both in Cleaves's challenge to her duplicate with, "Of all the humans in all of the world you had to pick the one with the clot. But, hey, them's the brakes. Welcome to the human race" and Jimmy's death by acid where the flesh-Doctor hands over the symbol of patriarchal rebirth, the ring, to the ganger version and confirms, "Jimmy Wicks... you're a dad."

BBCHD - 21 May 2011 - 6.45pm

"I've got to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose."

Let's face it, Matthew Graham's Fear Her didn't exactly set the world on fire back in June 2006. So, while it is great that he gets another chance to write for the series I'm sure a number of fans were holding their collective breaths about the The Rebel Flesh, the first installment of his latest two part story for Doctor Who, and hoping for something bolder and better. Fortunately, Graham really gets his teeth into this script, perhaps to such a degree that this really does feel like a base-under-siege 'trad' Who story more than any of the episodes in the last two years, especially with Matt Smith in glorious Troughton mode. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it makes a very welcome change from the rest of the episodes transmitted so far. As his sophomore engagement with the series, The Rebel Flesh certainly turns out to be a far better Doctor Who story than Graham's 2006 effort, perhaps by dint of its association with a number of classic Who tropes and is certainly one of the most explicit explorations of that central theme in the series: otherness.

BBCHD - 14 May 2011 - 6.30pm

"I'm a madman with a box, without a box!"

"She's a woman. And she's the TARDIS."
"Did you wish really hard?"

An eagerly anticipated episode, The Doctor's Wife manages something pretty extraordinary. It breathes new life into the origins of the mythology at the heart of the series, particularly the Doctor's long relationship with his ultimate of companions, the TARDIS. It very carefully enhances and enriches the accepted folklore of the Doctor stealing the TARDIS and his erratic ability to control it while delivering the results with a heartbreakingly emotional sophistication. Oh, and Neil Gaiman's a very wicked man. The episode's title was clearly enough to get some fans in a bit of a dither but in hindsight it effectively combines the artistry of misdirection coupled with the episode's specific allusion to that eternal partnership between Time Lord and time machine. For indeed, the Doctor and the TARDIS are like an old married couple. She always was "the old girl" who took him to the trouble spots of the universe and in Gaiman's lovely script we find out why when the Doctor meets her in the flesh and has a bit of barney with her.

The long understood personal bond between the Doctor and the TARDIS - the madman and his box - forms the singular framework of the story here as the Doctor receives a psychic message from a fellow Time Lord and goes in search of the messenger.  There was much teasing prior to the episode that we would see something that we hadn't seen since The War Games in 1969. Naturally, fans went into overdrive and convinced themselves that Gaiman's script was about to feature the return of the War Lord. While being true to his word, Gaiman clearly was being less obvious than that. It was therefore delightful that, as such a fan, he would reintroduce the idea of the Time Lord's ability to send for help telepathically in boxes that could travel through time and space.

BBCHD - 7th May 2011 - 6.15pm

"Yo, ho ho! Or does nobody actually say that?"

It seemed rather inevitable that Doctor Who would return to the action-adventure of the pirate genre at some point in the course of its revival since 2005. Naturally, it is no stranger to this type of action-adventure, having dabbled with this staple of adventure fiction in the past.

Most notably this takes us back to 1966 with The Smugglers, one of the last straightforward period adventures (or 'historicals' as we fans like to regard them) produced for the series, and then the mash-up of pirate and science fiction genres in the likes of The Pirate Planet and, more recently, The Infinite Quest. Pirates are of course still flavour of the month because of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the latest of which Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, is just a week away from release as I write and so this episode arrives with uncanny timing.

With Doctor Who now firmly repositioned as family viewing on Saturday night, it's no coincidence that Moffat and his team, building on the popular success of the series engineered by Russell T Davies, would continue to look at successful cinema franchises and classic adventure texts to ensure that the series kept its finger on the pulse. In the past year alone we've had fairy tale allusion aplenty tapping into a myriad of classic texts and mythology in the series.

BBCHD - 30th April 2011 - 6.00pm

It's fascinating that Steven Moffat chose the end of the 1960s as his setting and President Nixon as one of the key figures in Day of the Moon. One of the strongest themes here is about indoctrination and brainwashing, where the Silence control human society and its development through post-hypnotic suggestion. This suggests an exploration of the politics of the period, where the Silence represent the continuing paranoia about anti-democratic forces seeking to undermine US foreign policy and the dominant hegemony of the military-industrial complex, already battling for hearts and minds in Vietnam.

"there's always a bit left over" 

Not only taking his cue from such films as The Manchurian Candidate, where American POWs were indoctrinated by other regimes and brainwashed to carry out political assassinations, Moffat also seems to be influenced by a number of Cold War espionage thrillers where the American government is taken over by a new enemy within, the state-sponsored security agencies. Naturally, this finds its apotheosis in the Watergate scandal depicted in All the President's Men and where Moffat shows the Doctor demanding Nixon record everything to effect checks and balances on his own sanity when faced with an enemy like the Silence.

BBCHD - 23 April 2011 - 6.00pm

"It's like he's being deliberately ridiculous, trying to attract our attention" suggests Amy as she reads from a history book and the pre-titles of The Impossible Astronaut bounce from the Doctor's encounter with Charles II, where he hides (in a state of undress) under a woman's skirts, then to his escape attempt from a German POW camp and back again to the domesticity of the Pond residence. Amy could also be refering to Steven Moffat, with the episode's author gleefully mocking himself, as he throws the Doctor into increasingly absurd sequences to usher in the first episode of Series 6. However, it seems that the Doctor has been doing a bit of temporal stalking (even managing to haunt Rory's Laurel and Hardy movie without him even noticing) in order to gather together his erstwhile companions. We see mysterious invitations arriving in the post (even River's Stormcage Facility can't defeat the Royal Mail), their TARDIS blue envelopes evoking the "something borrowed, something blue" epiphany of The Pandorica Opens. With River packing for "some planet called America" director Toby Haynes magnificently ramps up the scope of the series with his widescreen, cinematic panoramas of Utah, following a bus as it travels down a highway and drops Rory and Amy onto a stunning vista of blue skies and burning desert.

Thanks to those lovely folks at BBC Books I'm delighted to present details and covers for the three new Doctor Who novels due to be published on 28 April 2011, at £6.99 each.

Dead of Winter - James Goss

‘The Dead are not alone. There is something in the mist and it talks to them.'

In Dr Bloom’s clinic at a remote spot on the Italian coast, at the end of the 18th century, nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Maria is a lonely little girl with no one to play with.  She writes letters to her mother from the isolated resort where she is staying. She tells of the pale English aristocrats and the mysterious Russian nobles and their attentive servants.

She tells of intrigue and secrets, and she tells of strange faceless figures that rise from the sea. She writes about the enigmatic Mrs Pond who arrives with her husband and her physician, and who will change everything. What she doesn’t tell her mother is the truth that everyone knows and no one says – that the only people who come here do so to die.


Hunter's Moon - Paul Finch

‘There's no end to the horror in this place - it's like Hell, and there are devils round every corner.’

Welcome to Leisure Platform 9 – a place where gamblers and villains rub shoulders with socialites and celebrities. Don’t cheat at the games tables, and be careful who you beat. The prize for winning the wrong game is to take part in another, as Rory is about to discover – and the next game could be the death of him.

When Rory is kidnapped by the brutal crime lord Xorg Krauzzen, the Doctor and Amy must go undercover to infiltrate the deadly contest being played out in the ruins of Gorgoror.

But how long before Krauzzen realises the Doctor isn’t a vicious mercenary and discovers what Amy is up to? It’s only a matter of time. And time is the one thing Rory and the other fugitives on Gorgoror don’t have.

They are the hunted in a game that can only end in death, and time for everyone is running out…

The Way Through the Woods - Una McCormack

‘The motorway bends around the woods. So did the old road. So did the Roman road. As long as people have lived here, they've gone out of their way to avoid the woods...’

England, today. Between the housing estate and the motorway lies an ancient wood. The motorway bends to avoid it. Last week, teenager Laura Brown went missing.

Tonight, Vicky Caine will miss her bus and take a shortcut through the wood. And she will disappear too. England, 1917. Between the village and the main road lies an ancient wood. The old Roman road bends to avoid it.  Tonight Emily Bostock and a man called Rory Williams will go to the woods. Investigating events in the present day and back in 1917, the Doctor and Amy are desperate to find out what’s happened to Rory.  He was supposed to look after Emily – and now they’ve both vanished.

Something is waiting in the woods. Something that’s been there for thousands of years. Something that is now waking up...

Three more novels will follow in June 2011: Doctor Who: Borrowed Time by Naomi Alderman, Doctor Who: Paradox Lost by George Mann and Doctor Who: Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris. BBC Books first non-fiction title of the year The Dalek Handbook by Steve Tribe and James Goss will also be published in May 2011 at £9.99.

I'll have reviews of the three April releases soon.

Moffat's pastiche of the Star Trek universe - old and new - opens the episode in atypical fashion. The ultra-modern cruise ship on which Amy and Rory are spending their honeymoon is captained by a Janeway clone ("Christmas is cancelled" she decides, after a spot of turbulence) and features a blind navigator who really can't see where he's going despite the whopping great bionic, infra-red whatsit over his right eye ("I'm flying blind" certainly raised a chuckle). Director Toby Haynes also cheekily emulates all those gratuitous J. J. Abrams lens flares into the camera that bedeviled the Star Trek summer blockbuster of 2009.

It deliberately wrongfoots the viewer. For a moment this looks like a tale set most determinedly in the future with Trek-like sleek, anti-septic spaceships crewed by folk running around in crisp white uniforms (very Nerva Beacon for us Ark in Space fans). But mark it as yet another change in attitude from the grungy futurism that Russell T. Davies preferred in his own depiction of science fiction vehicles, bases and technologies. It may well be a parody but perhaps Moffat is now happy to show that a BBC budget can provide more of a Galaxy Quest rather than an Alien when it comes to production design and cash on the screen.

COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. Congratulations to our winner Thomas Mills!

To celebrate the publication today of my new book Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, I'm offering not only a copy of the book but also a copy of Silva Screen's Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack album, featuring Murray Gold's fantastic music, in the latest competition on the blog.

My book, published by Classic TV Press:

"reviews the relevant episodes of Series 5 of Doctor Who and looks at the series's character development, major themes, the use of design and music, references to previous episodes and the original series. The spine of each chapter is about themes and characters and that's where a lot of the research is included. So, I bring in cultural, literary, political, sociological and psychoanalytical material to inform my views of the episodes. Anyone who is interested in what the episodes mean on many different levels will I hope find the book fascinating"

Image ©Scott Frankton

I'm delighted to announce that after serious negotiations over a sweet sherry or two those marvellous people at Classic TV Press and I have decided you might enjoy a book signing for the forthcoming publication of Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor due 6th December.

And not just one signing, dear readers. Two! Yes, you'll have two opportunities to buy the book and have me scribble all over it.  So why not drop by if you're in London or Manchester. You'll all be very welcome. So get your diaries out or set your other time keeping devices for the following dates: 

11th December, 1.00-4.00pm @ The Who Shop, 39-41 Barking Road, Upton Park, London. I'll be in the fabulous company of Bob Baker - Doctor Who writer (The Claws of Axos, The Three Doctors etc) and K9 co-creator.

13th December, 6.30-8.00pm @ Blackwell University Bookshop, Precinct Centre, Oxford Road, Manchester

I look forward to to seeing you there. In the meantime you can catch up with me on a recent edition of The Thumbcast, nattering about the book and Doctor Who in general.

IT'S HERE!

Finally, my patient readers, I can reveal what I've been up to over the last five months and why I've not been posting and reviewing as regularly on CRT. My book, Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor is published by Classic TV Press in time for Christmas on 6th December. If you've been following me on Twitter then you'll know the full saga behind the writing of this book.

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor takes the original reviews written here about Series 5 and vastly expands them into lengthy analyses.

Here's the just issued press release from Classic TV Press:


Please feel free to download that if you wish to promote the book via your blogs and websites. 

I hasten to add this is not an episode guide. You won't find a minutiae of detail about the production of the series, nor will you find exhaustive cast and crew lists. It's not a 'making of', it's more of a 'what does that episode really mean' book and those of you who have followed the reviews of the series here and on Behind The Sofa will have a good idea of what to expect. It's also supplemented with some wonderful photographs, including a section of full colour plates, taken by fans who regularly visit filming in and around Cardiff.

Photo© Scott Frankton

If you're interested in the cultural, sociological and political significance and meaning of the episodes then this is for you. Each chapter places the episodes and Doctor Who within a whole spectrum of readings and seeks to contextualise character, genre, design, music, visual symbolism, history, nostalgia, gender, psychology and theology.

How much do fairy tales impact on the meaning of the episodes? Why does Amy behave the way she does? How realistically does the series depict Churchill and Vincent van Gogh? These and many more questions are discussed and debated.

You can order direct from the publishers Classic TV Press at the discounted price of £12.49 and get that delivered straight to your door cheaper and faster. It is also available via Amazon.

I hope you all enjoy your purchase and very much appreciate your patience during the last five months while this was written and your continued support over the last three years for Cathode Ray Tube.

Geronimo! 

And here we are again, two years later and another Doctor Who Prom. Much has changed since that last extravaganza and the series itself has undergone something of a transformation under the auspices of Head Writer & Executive Steven Moffat. We have a new Doctor too, in the beguiling form of Matt Smith. But some things haven't changed and one of them is the music composed for the series by Murray Gold. Proms 10  and 11 at the Royal Albert Hall provide us with an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of Gold's most successful pieces composed for the Russell T Davies era of the show and to get to know a whole new set of themes for the first series overseen by Moffat.

What I like about these Proms is that we get a chance to hear concert versions of the music composed for the series unshackled from the extremely busy sound mix that smothers many of the episodes we see on television. You can listen to the latest themes without all manner of sound effects, including explosions and weapons fire, and dialogue obscuring some of the best music being composed for a British television series today. The music is also presented within the world of Doctor Who as live too, with all manner of monsters prowling round the Hall and plenty of interactivity including clips of the series and special appearances. Hopefully, the children attending these Proms will be inspired by Gold's music for the show but also will come away also having had a taster of some of the more accessible classical pieces within the programme.


This year's Proms get off to a gorgeous start with 'The Mad Man With A Box', an ethereal piece, almost mystical in quality, that, with its beautiful solo vocal from Yamit Mamo, manages to capture some of the magic of the man that we all know of as the Doctor. Onto the stage comes one of the hosts for our show, Karen Gillan, resplendent in a gold and black gown, who then introduces us to the pizazz of 'An Untimely Arrival' which covers the pre-titles to The Eleventh Doctor as the TARDIS crash lands in Amy's garden. Full of energy and vigour, Gold uses it as a bridging motif between the RTD era and the new adventures of a new Doctor. Familiar but also preparing the way into the new series without frightening the horses too much. It complements the John Adams piece, Short Ride In A Fast Machine quite wonderfully, itself full of syncopation and looping, repetitive rhythms and, for these Proms, it is certainly one of Adams more accessible and audience friendly pieces.


One of my highlights of these Proms is Gold's new theme for the Doctor, 'I Am The Doctor'. It's an epic signature tune for one of the most mercurial of the Doctor's incarnations and sets out to remind us that although the Doctor has changed, he is still very much the hero. The melody sticks in the mind and is instantly addictive and it's been used throughout the series but most significantly in The Pandorica Opens as he gives his speech to the amassed ships of his deadliest enemies above Stonehenge. A superb composition, a Gold standard if you like, and musically one of Series Five's greatest achievements. As this played, the Hall was invaded by all manner of alien foes - Saturnynians, Silurians, Cybermen and Judoon - and children everywhere, even those of us who are 48 years old and still refuse to grow up, were left grinning with delight.



Two classical pieces follow with the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales under the brilliant conductorship of Grant Llewellyn. If the Adams piece was a bit of a warm up, then Llewellyn gets the Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir to really give it some welly here. William Walton's Overture 'Portsmouth Point', a crafty nod to Murray Gold's home town, is a jaunty, perky work, full of gorgeous melody and rhythm. The mood undergoes a startling change with the second piece. An all time favourite, Holst's 'Mars', from The Planets gets a stunning rendition here and much kudos must go to the Choir and the percussion section of the Orchestra for really getting their teeth into this. Another highlight of the two Proms, it's brilliantly performed and Llewellyn conducts like a man possessed. The boiling, doom laden aggression and pounding military crescendos sent tingles down my spine. Now, if they could have shown a few clips of Quatermass whilst this was playing then I'd have been an extremely happy telefantasy fan boy.


Back to Who with 'Battle In The Skies' from Victory Of The Daleks. Amusingly, Gold's homage to the scores of Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare) and Eric Coates (The Dam Busters) is heard as an ARP warden yells across the Hall, 'Put that light out!' as one of Bracewell's 'Ironside' Daleks rises from the floor of the Hall and asks everyone if they want a cup of tea...and a biscuit (courtesy of Nick Briggs). The poor old Ironside is then bluntly interrupted by the white Dalek Supreme, arriving on stage in a blaze of light and dry ice. It sends the Ironside Dalek packing and then orders conductor Ben Foster to play the music of the Daleks or else! Foster teases the Dalek and on the matinee performance threatens it with his baton only to be told not to interfere with its sucker. The Supreme (aided and abetted by Barnaby Edwards) patrols the stage as Foster whips the Orchestra Of Wales into a stirring accompaniment to the episode's dogfight sequences.



After a swift ice cream in the interval, it is back to the second half of the programme. Grant Llewellyn returns and once again he wrings as much drama as he can from the Choir and the Orchestra with 'O Fortuna' from Carl Orff's Carmina burana. A medieval eruption of choral power, this iconic piece is stirring and epic, summoning up the very essence of raw nature, of life and death. And Old Spice. Yes, I'm old enough to remember those ads.

Karen begins to introduce one of her favourite themes, Amy, but suddenly receives a very special message. In the spirit of Music Of The Spheres back in 2008, where David Tennant's Doctor attempted to stop a Graske from disrupting the Prom, Matt Smith pops up on the video screens around the Hall, greeting the audience from some very odd angles, even upside down at one point, in fine panto tradition. It's a lovely, witty piece, "Sir, careful with that wig. And you sir. And you. And actually most of the violin section. Oh, and ladies mind those skirts. And selected gentlemen."


He's got to fix an overloading fold-back quasar do-dah, thingumy that will turn into a "wibbly wobbly explody wody thing". And he tries to defuse it with an electric tooth brush! But here he goes one better than Tennant. He disappears off the screen and emerges, for real, in the centre of the Hall, looking for someone to help him defuse this bomb. Smith's comic timing and physicality is much to the fore and when he actually does turn up in the Royal Albert Hall for real, interacting with children from the audience, he's in his element and ad-libbing away like a good 'un. Children clearly adore him (he captivated Ellis and Ben in these performances) and he completely confirms that of all the things about Series Five, he is quite simply the series greatest asset right now. Judging by the way he handled all the gobbledegook of the script he's also fast becoming the Stanley Unwin of all of the Doctors! "ITV's been blown off the air!" he naughtily concludes after deactivating the bomb.


We return to the music from the series with 'Amy' and this time Arthur Darvill comes on stage to introduce the music. This is again one of Gold's major triumphs and definitely a high point in the Proms. Yamit Mamo returns for solo vocal duties and with nods to Danny Elfman, Gold offers a heartbreakingly lovely tune for the new companion in the series, deftly capturing the frailties and weaknesses of the woman as well as her sense of wonder and bravery. Quite stunning. It's back to more monsters with a suite of themes, 'Liz, Lizards, Vampires And Vincent', covering the music to accompany the battle between Liz 10 and the Smilers on Starship UK; the return of the Silurians (with Ben Foster surrounded by three of them as he tries to conduct); the marauding vampire Sisters Of The Water and the tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Of these, the standouts are certainly the motifs and themes for Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor.

The vampires get a memorably unearthly melody to accompany their sojourns into Venice and into the Hall itself as a group of the Sisters way lay a member of the audience during the matinee performance, dancing around him, much to his bemusement. The magnificent music that featured during Vincent's journey into the future and his visit to the gallery to hear how his work had affected millions of lives is presented here. Full of joy and sadness, it remains a very special, emotionally powerful theme.  The medley concludes with the nerve jangling incidentals, using a lilting piano riff, pounding chords and choir, that accompany the Weeping Angels and one of them pops in for a quick visit, scaring the bejesus out of most of the kids in the audience.



Karen and Arthur return to introduce Wagner's 'The Ride Of The Valkyries' and Grant Llewellyn gives the Orchestra Of Wales yet another energetic work out with the swirling strings and strident brass of this stirring classic. It again truly shows what a class act this Orchestra is. Karen then introduces, to several whoops from the audience, 'This Is Gallifrey', as featured in Series Three, and 'Vale decem' from The End Of Time. 'This Is Gallifrey' is here used to wonderful effect as, in the evening performance at least, the video screens show all the regenerations of each Doctor.

All the Doctors get their fair share of applause and this slightly distracts from what is one of Gold's finest pieces for the series. Naturally, the greatest response is reserved for Tennant and Smith. On the matinee, either through a technical fault or by decision, the roll call of Doctors wasn't shown and 'This Is Gallifrey' was allowed to soar, full of loss and pride for an ancient society. 'Vale decem' is an amazing choral work with counter-tenor Mark Chambers beautiful voice at the centre of a moving, elegiac piece that sees the regeneration of the Tenth into the Eleventh. Both pieces are guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house. Superb.


Matt then arrives on stage to describe Gold's response to Moffat's two part series finale, a specially arranged work, 'The Pandorica Suite'. To be honest, it's not my favourite of Gold's recent work as it tends to resort to emotionally colouring the scenes it covers, particularly the comedy time travel bits, rather than develop big, memorable themes. There's little to remember or to hum here as it rather is incidental music and only until he gets to the conclusion of the suite with a thrilling reinterpretation, signposted with some great brass sections, of 'I Am The Doctor' does it come alive with crashing percussion and insistent woodwind.


Smith, Gillan and Darvill come back to introduce 'The Song Of Freedom', from Series Four and all three are clearly having the time of their lives, equally sending each other up and overwhelmed by a packed Hall. Personally, 'The Song Of Freedom' is not one of my favourites but Mark Chambers voice is again extraordinary and Foster gets a tremendous performance from the London Phiharmonic Choir and the Orchestra for this anthemic theme. Murray Gold guests on keyboards during this and the arrangement of the 'Doctor Who Theme' and I'm still not particularly fond of his latest arrangement of the series theme, especially those very non-Ron Grainer opening orchestral tags and brass sections. That said, fortunately enough of Grainer's original composition and Delia Derbyshire's realisation remains and it's lovely to hear the old theme in such a setting driven by especially powerful bass and percussion. Both Proms rightly received a standing ovation and it is still pretty amazing to think that the little series we all love has been transformed into an unstoppable multi-media attraction. To paraphrase the Ninth Doctor, 'Fantastic!'

Proms 10 & 11: The Doctor Who Prom - Saturday 24 July / Sunday 25 July 2010, Royal Albert Hall

Listen again on BBCiplayer

With the new series of Doctor Who now over it's back to BBC Books and their Doctor Who novels to keep us entertained until we get to see this year's Christmas Special. For the latest three books the character of Rory has now joined the printed adventures of Doctor and Amy.

Sadly, Gary Russell's The Glamour Chase just doesn't match his last novel for the range, the rather fantastic Beautiful Chaos. It has a lot going for it, undoubtedly, but the sum of its parts left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. He's clearly aiming to use the plot about shape changing aliens, the Weave, to unpick the aftermath of the First World War and explore the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on those men that survived it. It's sympathetically achieved but for me it doesn't quite fall into line with the rest of the story.

The alien Weave can grow themselves and their ship, literally knitting themselves into existence, and are being hunted down by their enemies the Tahnn. Their ship crash lands in pre-historic England and it is some thousands of years later that the final battle between the Weave and the Tahnn is initiated when archaeologist Enola Porter unearths the ship. In the intervening centuries the Weave have inculcated themselves into post-First World War England and the majority of the story takes place in 1936. The Doctor, Amy and Rory discover that the village they arrive in is not quite what it seems, particularly the identities of its inhabitants.

Russell - pardon the pun - weaves an interesting tale where you don't quite know who is who and even the Weave are not quite what they seem. For me it's an uneven book but packed with some terrific ideas and he does capture the Doctor, Amy and Rory very well. He perhaps slightly over-exaggerates his version of the Eleventh Doctor and it becomes irritating but I do like the way he gets Amy and Rory firmly involved in the various sub-plots. Rory is seen to be a very caring man, obviously with his background as a nurse, and his concern for the shell-shocked Oliver Marks is written with great sensitivity. I'm not going to discuss the denouement any further because the fun of the book is working out just exactly whose side certain characters are on.

If you want a good tale, well told with sympathetic characters then I'd heartily recommend Una McCormack's The King's Dragon. This is a very welcome change of scenery with the Doctor, Amy and Rory journeying to the city-state of Geath, the setting for a high fantasy reading of the Doctor Who format. This is a tale of dragons, magic metal, young kings, wise women and the power of storytelling. Fortunately, we're not talking about a door-stopping David Eddings sized book here and McCormack's prose is crisp and efficient and the book is laced with humour.

The Doctor discovers that Geath is in thrall to the Enamour, a golden metal that can heighten desires and bend the mind. It has turned the inhabitants into selfish, belligerent capitalists where once there existed a peaceful republic. But the Enamour's source is a golden dragon and the dragon is hot property and two forces arrive on Geath to claim it as their own. The Doctor, Amy and Rory are left to decide whether the Enamour and the dragon belong to the scary, dark Regulator or the shining Herald, ancient races still waging a long drawn out war. They call upon the help of a con-man storyteller, a young impressionable king and an old wise woman to work out who the Enamour belongs to and how to rid Geath of its influence.

It's a rollickingly good tale and a breezy read and it's just about edges out Nuclear Time as the most satisfying of the three books in this set. The characters are well defined and I think Amy and Rory are sympathetically re-created. In fact, the Amy in this book is less defensive than her television counterpart and she's actually more likeable for it. I think everyone must like writing for Rory because each of the books gets him spot on and again he's a thoroughly endearing character here. McCormack's version of the Doctor is likewise a little less frenetic than his television counterpart but all the requisite eccentricities are intact. Her supporting characters are attractive too, including the somewhat roguish Teller who sees the error of his ways using his tall stories to boost the young king's popularity rating and the wise woman Hilthe, cautious but willing to give everyone a fair hearing, whose diplomatic skills Rory sees as the solution to their dilemma. There is a lovely thread of political satire in the book too and a witty exploration of monarchy versus republic and a few broadsides at a society obsessed with mass consumption and greed.

The Glamour Chase - Gary Russell (Published 8th July 2010 - Publisher BBC Books/Ebury - ISBN: 978184607988 7)
Nuclear Time - Oli Smith (Published 8th July 2010 - Publisher BBC Books/Ebury - ISBN: 978184607989 4)
The King's Dragon - Una McCormack (Published 8th July 2010 - Publisher BBC Books/Ebury - ISBN: 978184607990 0)

The Pandorica Opens: BBC1 - 19th June 2010 - 6.40pm
The Big Bang: BBC1 - 26th June 2010 - 6.05pm

I'm not sure that experience of working on Spielberg's version of Tin Tin has rubbed off on Moffat. The Pandorica Opens more or less amounts to a gene-splicing of the Devil's Tower sequences of Close Encounters and the catacomb exploring of the Indiana Jones films and looks very pretty but I'm not convinced on this evidence he can do 'epic' in Doctor Who. The narratives that hold these glossy visual spectacles together are really what Moffat is interested in. The rest is a bit tokenistic. The two part story that concludes with The Big Bang also reflects an ancient literary tradition that you could say Spielberg himself has deliberately woven into many of his major films. It falls into the tradition of menippea - a form of satire that signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. Both The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang act as reflections of each other, at once proposing an anti-epic visual presentation in counter-point to an epic narrative.

From the sky full of spaceships above Stonehenge to the alliance of monsters with their rather ridiculously contrived plan to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, Moffat turns the whole thing on its head and in the The Big Bang simply has four people chasing around a museum whilst the universe shrinks outside the window and the Doctor cheats willfully with the time lines, bouncing around like a deranged cosmic Tommy Cooper. Bakhtin regarded menippea as 'the use of the fantastic internally motivated by the urge to create extraordinary situations for the testing of philosophical ideas'. Which sums up the finale for me and Moffat's own view of the entire Doctor Who series synthesised into a carnivalesque ambivalence for logic, an irreverent desire to break the rules and to cross boundaries. Sometimes it works spectacularly - not just in terms of visual spectacle but also in narrative complexity - and sometimes it's a way for him to cheat, avoid the implications of what he's done and refuse to answer questions left dangling by the preceding 11 episodes.


Thus we get no real answers to who was saying 'silence will fall', why the TARDIS was exploding and a reasoning for Amy's 'special' status. And presumably the missing ducks from the Leadworth duck pond ended up on the other side of the crack in time. Moffat knows his game and in the opening sequence with Vincent in 1890 he's clearly sending himself up rotten when the neighbour attending with the doctor looks at the painting of the exploding TARDIS and mutters, 'Look at this, even worse than his usual rubbish'.

Moffat's end game with this finale is to focus in on the triangular relationship between Amy Pond, the Doctor and Rory Williams. The messages carried through time via Van Gogh's painting, Churchill's telephone call, Liz Ten's meeting with River after she has broken out of the Stormcage facility are simply a means to an end whilst also cleverly rewarding the patient viewer with the pleasure of recognition in these pre-titles revisitations. They throw out a number of questions that in typical Moffat style aren't likely to be answered - why is Liz Ten still alive in 5154 and why is Bracewell still working for Churchill when it was more than suggested at the end of Victory Of The Daleks that he was off in search of his true love, Dorabella. These are, like many other sequences in the story, narrative conceits.


The Pandorica Opens is in effect one massive conceit. The significance of the Pandorica and the exploding TARDIS drive the story but in the end we never really discover the answer to the latter and the former is inevitably not what it seems with much of the episode heavily signposting the fact that it's a prison cell into which the Doctor is dumped by his enemies and not the home of an ultimate 'big bad'. The most effective twist in The Pandorica Opens is the resurrection of Rory, presumed erased from history at the end of Cold Blood. His reappearance is another layer to the themes of the series about remembering and forgetting and, significantly, he isn't the real Rory but a facsimile, a memory of Rory, created by the Nestenes. They presumably replaced the real Rory who did die at the end of Cold Blood. Or was he an Auton right from his introduction in The Eleventh Hour, then destroyed in Cold Blood, and then resurrected in The Pandorica Opens? It is narrative obfuscations such as these that Moffat deliberately ignores or refuses to clarify.

Rory is that most human of non-humans, embodying the crisis of subjectivity at the heart of this revelation. He struggles with his Nestene programming and conflicting human emotions, just as Amy evoked the same contradictions in the Dalek's android Bracewell back in 1941, to reaffirm his love for Amy, only to then destroy the object of his feelings. That this death takes place simultaneously with the Doctor's capture and imprisonment in the Pandorica, the destruction of the TARDIS and the death of the universe offers the spectacle a much needed emotional grounding. Rory's non-human status and his subsequent murder of Amy is the single most powerful scene in The Pandorica Opens and legitimises what is in effect a Doctor Who episode that resembles a Busby Berkeley tap routine performed by a sweating Steven Moffat sporting a fixed grin. It's hard to be 'epic'.


Moffat uses such conceits to again fuel the narrative expectation in The Big Bang where the audience is given a linear narrative - of the Doctor escaping from the Pandorica and the dead - now alive - Amy taking his place - that is broken into non-linear and often repetitive moments, planting visual and verbal information about scenes that haven't happened but will happen or that have happened and we don't know why they have until the explanation appears further along the narrative. He's testing our ideas about time and the use of empirical and metaphysical paradoxes in the science fiction genre. For me, however amusing it is, and - in the way Matt Smith performs these sequences - it is, it really amounts to more grandstanding, including the revitalisation of the Dalek as a token monster to chase our heroes down corridors, that delays the story getting to the roof of the museum and the ultimate fate of the Doctor, the Pandorica and the TARDIS.

What's more interesting in the story are the binary oppositions between men and women. Amy truly is the fairy tale figure of the mysterious Little Red Riding Hood that the series has been constructed around. She is not only the absent woman in search of her self, her journey starting as a girl, with the adorable Caitlin Blackwood returning as the younger Amy, and continuing through to impending womanhood and that wedding but the story is also a science fiction satire about getting the bride to the church on time, about getting the adolescent Amy married off.


Typically, the finale also underlines of some of the problems I've been having with this series. Firstly, the series as a whole has evidently suffered from a cut in budget. This is unfortunate because television is a visual medium these days and you need to spend money on it to engage audiences. Otherwise, you might as well do all this on the radio and a great deal of The Big Bang might as well have gone out as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4. No matter how much of a clever clogs Moffat is, he can't just rely on characters running around a museum engaging in time travel screw-ball comedy to define the nature of the threat to the audience. The difference here to Series Three or Four, for example, is the inward and insular way Series Five has been structured around Amy and the Doctor, including the world in which these characters are seen to exist and the way they counter the threats to this world.

There is less show and more tell in many of the scripts with, I'd argue, only The Time Of Angels/Flesh and Stone really achieving the winning mix of the epic and the personal that uses the visual medium of television well.  There are undoubtedly instances where location filming abroad has paid off, as in the Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor, and the threats have been placed on a broader canvas (unlike the exploding TARDIS which is only ever seen on a canvas). On the whole I get a sense that the world building that's so necessary for a high concept series like Doctor Who is being presented to us in shorthand.


If you look at The Pandorica Opens the money has clearly been spent on the Stonehenge locations and the visual effects. By the time we get to The Big Bang the Stonehenge location is gone as is the visual misdirection of the massing alliance space fleet and what was indicated as threat has, ironically enough, become as fossilised as the remaining Daleks (no doubt another addition to the Character Options range). The Big Bang tells us about the threat to the universe but never actually reveals why it is there in the first place, why it is happening and who caused it. It's an unsatisfying finale because we never have a 'big bad' on which to pin the focus of the story. That conflict is absent and the Doctor spends most of The Big Bang fire-fighting whilst Moffat brings the story of Amy full circle.

Much of the series has therefore been set within a self-referential bubble, with the effects of conflict on those outside that bubble all happening off screen. We're told about the consequences from the Doctor, Amy and Rory but we never really see it actually affecting other people. As the TARDIS burns itself out we get the barest indication through dialogue that Richard Dawkins is slightly concerned about the shrinking of history and the lack of stars in the sky. These are powerful concepts that Moffat is creating but I keep feeling I'm being placed at a distance from them and I am only allowed to hear about them,  never mind see them, through Amy or Rory. You have to have very strong, very identifiable supporting characters to be able to pull that switch from the broadest to the narrowest world view and to convince an audience that the apocalypse is mostly taking place off screen.


Although RTD's use of his characters families and the extended repertoire of supporting characters in Harriet Jones, Captain Jack et al might be seen as too much a reflection of soap opera, the audience accepted that world view because of its familiarity and because the conflict between the Doctor and the villain of the week was often staged on screen in familiar surroundings, often showing us the consequences. In the end we are left only with Amy and Rory as the audience identification figures and there isn't enough context to care about the threat to them and to us, as the audience. I've stopped caring, to be honest, because the series won't let me care.

Secondly, try as I do, but I don't much like Amy. I find her a rather unsympathetic character. It culminates with her finally waking up on her wedding day and getting married. How do we accept that Amy then casually waves goodbye to parents that she's desperately fought to bring back into existence, and who occupy a minimum of screen time, as she and Rory abruptly leave in the TARDIS. We don't even see them wave back! After all the reunions, I find it rather callous of her to reject that new world with her parents in it, and after restoring the Doctor through the power of suggestion, to spend her honeymoon with him in the TARDIS. Has this woman an obsession about father figures?


I'm afraid there's a whiff of a straight male fantasy (the kissogram's a bit of dead giveaway) deliberately being projected onto the character possibly as as an extension to Moffat's own fantasies of a woman who doles out a form of sadomasochism to the men in her life. Moffat and Moffat's analog, Rory, bask in the power of a strong, controlling woman. Amy as the idealised woman, ironically, may both evoke in them the feelings of safety and protection associated with childhood and likewise from which Rory, and by extension Moffat, may derive satisfaction from earning the approval of that figure. Very much a case of bringing yourself to what you write I think.

Amy spends a lot of time belittling both the Doctor and Rory, trying to dominate and to an extent emasculate them (her attempt to seduce the Doctor is clearly an extension of that but he's strong enough to reject it) and it is very telling when, at the wedding reception, the Doctor congratulates Rory with, 'From now on I shall be leaving the kissing duties to the brand new Mr. Pond' after Amy has ordered the Doctor to 'kiss the bride'. Here, the Doctor firmly rejects her dominance but also confirms that Rory is no longer Rory Williams but Rory Pond. 'No, I'm not Mr. Pond. That's not how it works.' 'Yeah it is' confirms the Doctor with Rory's status underlined as victim of his own self-defeating personality disorder.


Rory is for me the best thing about The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. As I said, he's the Moffat analog and in being such is a far more humane character, even when he's an Auton, than the horribly idealised Amy Pond. This is the plastic man that hangs around for 2000 years protecting the Pandorica, marries the woman inside it and settles down to a life of hen-pecking in the TARDIS. He's a man who engages in excessive self sacrifice in order to get a response from the woman who allegedly loves him and then happily takes the humiliation from Amy when he is reluctant to find any pleasure in all the dangers that travelling in the TARDIS throws at him. He's a deeply flawed man whom most of us can relate to - 'the boy who waited' guarding the gift of hope in the Pandorica (definitely symbolically similar to Pandora's box itself) and who emerges into manhood.

The finale is flawed, lacking a really decent conflict between the Doctor and whoever it is that caused the TARDIS to explode and told us 'silence will fall', but they are good, solid and entertaining episodes. The scripts are witty and full of life even if Moffat plunges into self-indulgence in The Big Bang. The death of Amy at Rory's hand, literally, is the pinnacle of The Pandorica Opens whilst the allegedly show stopping gathering of the alliance of monsters is just a sop to keep the kids happy (and bearing in mind my thoughts about the budgetary necessities of the anti-epic, how must they have been disappointed to find it all reduced to one pathetic Dalek screeching for mercy in The Big Bang?).  

The Big Bang is more satisfying emotionally with it being the conclusion of the series long Amy arc. The stand out scene between the Doctor and Amy, the conversation with her as he prepares to hurtle into the heart of the burning TARDIS, is one of the best of the series. It adds the full stop to the whole series subtext about remembering and forgetting that has been drip fed into stories from the beginning and the notion that the Pandorica ultimately symbolises hope after both forgetting and remembering, much as in the ancient story of Pandora, even if it does stray rather too close to a big reset button.


Moffat's story arc, in which all of history is erased and then rebooted, in which the very act of remembering is a macrocosmic event (the key to saving the universe) -  and a microcosmic event (bringing back your long vanished parents) is surprise, surprise a main tenet in fairy tales. Amy's Red Riding Hood journey through time, symbolised very powerfully in the forest scenes in Flesh And Stone, is one about avoiding the threat of being devoured wherein the hungry wolf of the old fairy tale is now the crack in the bedroom wall. But like many readings of fairy tales, is this also a story about a girl's desperate avoidance of womanhood, her impending marriage to Rory, and to remain a child by jumping aboard the TARDIS to avoid the predations of the wolf (Rory and the crack in time)? Might this explain her defensiveness to Rory in some of the earlier stories?

The interesting thing about Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales is that they are concerned with the control of women, the control of desire. Amy as a Red Riding Hood princess whose final trajectory is marriage is a fascinating reading of a transgressive woman, acting on her own desires but who in the end must be rescued by two friendly male figures - Rory and the Doctor - the husband and the father. River, cycling through a number of identities and appearances - from earth mother to seductress - is positioned here as a trickster heroine and as literally, the figure of the old wive's tale, the woman as storyteller and an analog to Scheherazade, as one who spins her narrative ('spoilers') throughout the Doctor's timeline. Plus, of course, she's his wife and by extension she's symbolically Amy's wicked stepmother.


As ever, Matt Smith completely steals the show and is particularly impressive in The Big Bang, giving us a mesmerising range of performances within one episode, capturing ancient wisdom and youthful recklessness in one big eccentric package. He truly is the biggest success of what I think has been a fairly middling series this year and remains the sole reason for continuing to watch the show. I have no problem with Karen Gillan's abilities but I'm hoping that now we've got Amy married off the character will acquire some warmth and sensitivity.

The themes in this year's series about the journey from childhood to womanhood didn't quite make it across in the performances until the very end of the series. Less flippancy and that awful shouty emphasis she puts on the ends of certain line readings would also help.  I'm very pleased that Rory appears to have permanently joined the crew. He is the 'everyman' figure that the series must hold on to and Arthur Darvill is completely charming in the role. Now all we need are better monsters (the new Daleks and Silurians were design disasters in my opinion), decent scares and better realised worlds as a context for the journeys the Doctor, Amy and Rory go on. 

Until Christmas then...

A completely revised and much fuller version of this review is now available in my book Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens - Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor published by Classic TV Press and also available on Amazon.