Grand Guignol

A minor tele-historical footnote, which probably fits this page better than it fits the Randomness Times.

Since nobody else I know seems to have asked this question, I'll ask it myself: are any of you watching the late-night repeat run of The Grand on ITV3? Because this isn't simply an early TV work by Russell T. Davies, but (according to his own testimony) the series which allowed him to find his "voice" as a writer. It's therefore of great historical interest to gits like us.

In itself, it's a good-but-not-great period drama, no I, Claudius but certainly well above average for a prime-time ITV series made in 1997. More interesting are the things which, with hindsight, will become standards of modern-day Doctor Who. Indeed, many of the same telly-techniques are used here, and a lot of similar character-relationships present themselves. Most noticeably, we can see Little Big Russell's interest in using class as a way of drawing the lines between different narrative strands, so keen-eyed viewers will not only notice the origins of "The End of the World" but the whole black-tie-hero-makes-friends-with-the-staff ethos that'll eventually lead to "Voyage of the Damned". For better or worse.

Yet as the author himself has since admitted, the most striking point is how horrid this is. Remember, we're talking about the blood-and-guts Damaged Goods-era Davies, before he learned the benefit of the occasional happy ending. When ITV commissioned a gloss-heavy historical about a luxury hotel, complete with lilting major-key theme music, they must have been imagining something as gentle as Heartbeat with perhaps a few class-struggle elements in the style of Upstairs, Downstairs. They presumably weren't anticipating a first episode in which a shellshock casualty blows his own head off with a service revolver, or a six-episode story arc in which the "spunky" POV character - a girl who shows premature signs of feminism, mentored by a distinctly open-minded female guest who turns out to be a high-class prostitute - ends up being gang-raped and brutalised to such a degree that she beats her persecutor to death with a poker. The sixth episode chronicles the day of her execution. There's no last-minute reprieve. She swings.

Of course, given that we know Big Russell (and that we remember the way he intercut "Pyramids of Mars" with the most explicit sex scene in Queer of Folk), it shouldn't surprise us that the aforementioned first-episode suicide is a man called "Scarman". Or that the music-hall owner in Season Two is blatantly Henry Gordon Jago with differently-hued sideburns and a sex drive. But even we might be startled to find that the doomed POV girl is named "Jones"; that her rapist and victim is named "Tyler"; and that the courtesan who (unintentionally) leads her to her death is named "Harkness". So, as ever, it turns out that members of the Harkness family will sleep with anything.

Most peculiar is that The Grand doesn't yet have its own Wikipedia entry, which surely makes it unique amongst British TV dramas. Any of you feel like filling this gap in our cultural history...?

Doctor Who: A Gambler's Guide

"A pony says it's a bird."

For the modern generation, the next few months are going to be a wholly new experience: those who don't remember the Old Time have never known the gut-level angst of waiting for the focus of the entire universe to change, or the righteous fury of someone who has to inform his or her parents that Les Dennis would not make a good replacement, or the smack of fear that the New Man might be the most hideous human being on Earth. (When I was eight, a communications breakdown in the schoolroom led me to believe that the next Doctor was going to be Jim Davidson rather than Peter Davison, and the emotional scarring still hasn't healed.) In fact, even those of us who've been here for decades might have trouble recalling the sensation. We knew who Eccleston's successor was going to be within 24 hours of his resignation; McGann ambushed us while we were looking the other way; and nobody really cared who was going to take over from Colin Baker. David Tennant's departure is the uneasiest moment in Doctor Who history since 1984, and the results are likely to be just as catastrophic.

Or perhaps that's unfair. But if I'm permitted to repeat myself - and given that I wrote over 50,000 words on the last series alone, I'm bound to use up all the adjectives sooner or later - then this is the point where we find out whether the series can drag itself out of its showbiz offal-pit and become a programme about Adventures in Space and Time again. After the 2007 series, I foresaw a nightmare future-world in which Matt Lucas had become the new Doctor, yet this seemed the lesser of two evils when Catherine Tate was announced as the TARDIS's official silly-face-puller in residence. And now David Walliams is one of the bookies' favourites to fill the Tennant-shaped hole at the heart of the world. Admittedly, I'm running out of new ways to say "surrounded by media back-slappers on all sides, the production team has forgotten the difference between a drama programme and a BAFTA awards ceremony", yet the fact remains that nobody's likely to tell them if - when - they let celeb-culture cloud their judgement. For a while, it looked as if Tate might steal the Best Performance trophy from her co-star at the ITV awards: from the point of view of Big Russell and friends, sitting in the audience of superstars while guzzling drinks made from champagne and little children's tears, it must have looked like a vindication. It probably never occurred to them that it was largely a result of block-voting by geek-loyalists, or that if you gave them a straight choice, ITV viewers would choose Ant and Dec to be the new Doctor.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Two. I said, towards the end of this year's season, that it was time for Tennant to make his excuses. Not because there's anything wrong with him as an actor (indeed, he's the only Doctor who's managed to develop his performance with every passing year, rather than giving a knowing wink to the camera and expecting small children to be impressed by his very presence), but simply because he's become so successful that his image has distorted the nature of the programme. Writers are among the laziest people on God's Clean Earth, and even those who should know better relied on Tennant-standards during the 2008 series. The latter half of "Forest of the Dead" is very nearly a checklist of "Things David Does Well", and his performance alone is enough to stop "The Doctor's Daughter" being as awful as its script. It's apt that he's the first actor to have his Doctor-number in his surname, because he's also the first to treat the role as if it's something like a sacred trust [footnote 1]. Yet he's given us a Doctor who's clever and dynamic and popular and sexy, so his companion would've ended up standing around with her mouth hanging open even if they hadn't hired an actress who specialises in that sort of thing.

In short, we may have passed the point where Tennant has become irreplaceable, which brings us to the nub of the issue. As you've no doubt heard, the bookmakers at Paddy Power have drawn up a long, long list of actors, and are now inviting us to have a flutter on the identity of the next-in-line. I can't say for sure whether it's the first time this has happened (we can be fairly sure that it didn't happen in 1987), but it's certainly the first time it's happened since I've been of gambling age. I speak as someone who made a profit on the 2002 World Cup, then lost it all on Euro 2004, and I still haven't forgiven the referee for the England-Portugal match. So here's a rundown of the favourites, for any of you who might be tempted. Because even if the bookies research every possible angle before they announce the odds, this is the one area in which we have the advantage. Do they know how Steven Moffat or Phil Collinson think…? No they don't. But we do [footnote 2].


Patterson Joseph (4-1 favourite). Here's an experiment you can all try. If you're in the company of non-fans, and someone brings up the topic of the Next Doctor Who, tell them that the current favourite is Patterson Joseph. When they say "who?", just tell them: "He's black." I guarantee that at least 85% of them will just say "oh", as if that tells them everything they need to know. And in a sense, it does. Modern-day Doctor Who has a reputation for being a "Liberal" programme: "Liberal" is used in its modern sense here, to mean something that's politely pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, but doesn't have the nerve to be properly left-wing. The media has latched onto this, so it's inevitable that a black actor is going to be the bookmaker's choice, regardless of what he actually does. And there is a certain appeal in the thought of hearing your slightly-racist uncle mutter "not as good as it was in the old days" under his breath whenever anyone mentions Doctor Who, but on the other hand… well, let's be frank. There's a reason that Joseph specialises in harsh, aggressive, alienating characters, and it's simply that he has no capacity for making the audience like him. Which is, after all, why he was cast as the self-obsessed Dalek-denier in "Bad Wolf". Turning him into the Doctor, especially after the audience has grown accustomed to the shining and beatific countenance of the Boy David, would result in the series collapsing after a single year of Moffathood and Joseph himself being remembered in years to come as "The One Nobody Likes to Talk About". Don Warrington, now, that's my idea of a black Doctor [footnote 3].

David Morrisey (5-1). There's a potentially interesting legal case here. Thanks to the October spoiler-glut, I've just discovered the title of this year's Christmas special, and David Morrisey's role in it. Ergo, we know for a fact that he's "The Next Doctor", even if he isn't the Next Doctor. So what happens if you put a bet on him at 5-1, then take your slip back to Paddy Power after Christmas Day, claiming that you've technically won? Bookies are used to "solid" results, even if those results involve a photo-finish or a stewards' inquiry. They're not used to taking bets on something that might involve regenerative ambiguity or non-contemporaneous timelines. It seems unlikely, though, that Morrisey's Next Doctor will turn out to be a permanent appointment… unless the whole Christmas Special is a devious test-run (see also the 50-1 shot). Ah! On closer inspection, I see that the Paddy Power People have been careful to specify "David Tennant's Replacement" rather than "The Next Doctor Who". They're smarter than I thought.

James Nesbitt (6-1). Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Three. Some years ago, Steven Moffat told me about an extra-special project he'd written for BBC1, which had been temporarily delayed because the "perfect actor" was busy with other work. This sounded terribly exciting (any series which needs a specific actor has got to be a masterpiece, surely…?), so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be Jekyll, and the "perfect actor" turned out to be that git from the Yellow Pages adverts. And this brings us once again to the back-slappy world of showbiz. If you work in the media, where programmes of the Cold Feet oeuvre are regarded as the height of sophistication, then James Nesbitt is an A-Grade celebrity. However, for those who don't habitually watch ITV pseudo-dramas that involve successful middle-class people whining about their lack of serious problems - and that's the majority of the British population, myself included - he's just an annoyance in the ad-breaks. His furniture-chewing performance in Jekyll, complete with token attempts at "scary and maniacal" which seemed roughly as intimidating as a twelve-year-old telling you that his dad is a ninja, were so ludicrous that even the Radio Times was forced to treat it as a form of kitsch. And this is a magazine that thinks Heroes is a serious drama. But despite Nesbitt's prior association with Moffat, we can safely assume that he's out of the running, if only because his casting would result in parents across the nation having to answer awkward questions like "mummy, why is that ugly bald man pretending to be the Doctor?".

John Simm (8-1). In the right context, there's nothing wrong with Simm. His cheeky-faced integrity was one of the key reasons that viewers of Life on Mars didn't notice the piss-poor quality of the scripts, although perhaps his greatest role was as the ersatz Barney Sumner in Twenty-Four Hour Party People. (If you haven't seen it, then it's worth a look next time it's on Film Four, if only for the obvious drinking game: take a shot every time you see an actor who's been in modern-day Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has a cameo part as a homeless wino who quotes Roman philosophy at Tony Wilson, and that's entertaining even as a sentence.) Yet the hideous miscasting of Simm as the Master was another example of the production team jamming a well-known, well-liked media "face" into the series, whether he belongs there or not. There's no clearer sign of this than the way he's introduced at the end of "Utopia". You'd think, wouldn't you, that we'd get at least one close-up of the newly-regenerated arch-villain in order to establish his identity…? But, no. All we get are waist-up shots as he dashes around the TARDIS console, because the assumption is that this man is a Big TV Star, and therefore needs no introduction. When even Graeme Harper is so celebrity-dazzled that he can't direct properly, something's gone badly wrong.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (8-1). Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead.

Russell Tovey (10-1). Tovey's inclusion on this list is a direct result of Big Russell "coming out" and describing him as one of the nation's greatest rising talents (he was in The History Boys, of course, so he's probably used to being a fat-camp-man magnet). And there are numerous precedents for bit-part players becoming regulars in the Doctor Who universe, although hard-core fans might find it harder to swallow the Doctor's transformation into Alanzo the Helmsman than to accept that the Sixth Doctor was based on Commander Maxil's body-print, or that Martha was related to the girl with the Cyber-lubricant in her ear at Canary Wharf, or that the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl from Torchwood was somehow based on the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl who gave her poor little working-class life to save Victorian Cardiff [footnote 4]. As a leading man, however, Tovey has a problem: he's twelve. Or at least, he appears to have been strategically punched in the face until he looks twelve. The Doctors may be getting younger, and Davies may have insisted that the character needs youthful jumping-around abilities these days (isn't that what the companions are supposed to be for…?), but an incarnation who looks as if he might cry when you take his jelly away is pushing things a little.

David Walliams (10-1). Currently being mistaken for a serious actor by retarded television executives across the UK, plus Stephen Poliakoff. In fact, the lower reaches of the Paddy Power list are riddled with comedians who believe they can Do Drama (including both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter appearing semi-feasible after House, although I still can't watch it without expecting him to shout "dammit, John!" at any moment). One of these represents the ultimate nightmare scenario: Ricky Gervais at 80-1. This may sound like a long shot, but scarily, Greece were given odds of exactly 80-1 to win Euro 2004. And what happened there? I lost everything, that's what. Now we're all in that position.

Anthony Head (10-1). The major objection to Head being the Doctor is that it's just too obvious, but then, there are an awful lot of people at BBC Wales who've got even less imagination than the bookmakers: those who see Doctor Who as a "cult sci-fi" show seem convinced that the best way to keep the fans happy is to cast lots of people from other "cult sci-fi" shows, hence the hilarious attempt to parachute James Marsters into Torchwood. Nonetheless, it's true that the casting of Head would be welcomed by the kind of degenerate nerd-scum who described the embarrassing swimming-pool scene in "School Reunion" as "iconic". As with John Simm, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Head in himself, but casting him as the Doctor would be final, crippling proof that the series has given up any chance of having its own identity. Did I mention that I saw him in The Rocky Horror Show, in the days when he was only known for the Gold Blend adverts…? He had great legs.

Richard Coyle (14-1). If I had to look down the list of candidates and choose one based on nothing more than his name, then this would be the winner. The polar opposite of Chiwetel Ejiofor, it just looks right on the page: Eccleston… Tennant… Coyle. Sadly, he's the drippy one out of Coupling (read: "the geeky side of Moffat that he tries to keep hidden, or at least tries to be ironic about"), who then became some sort of Celtic warrior in a film about King Arthur that even fantasy buffs have managed to forget. Again, the association with Moffat guarantees him a place in this list, and puts Coyle in the "chillingly possible" category. But no matter how much they try to re-style him, he still comes across as a bad perm looking for somewhere to happen.

Sean Pertwee (14-1). Let's be honest, he wouldn't be here at all if he weren't called Pertwee. And if we're talking about the ability to engage a family audience, then he isn't even the most qualified of the Doctor-spawn. (I don't mean David Troughton, either. Think eyelashes and a functional womb.) Pertwee Jr's vulturine, granite-cast features suggest that his father mated with Darkseid from The New Gods, and even if you could somehow chisel a smile across it with a diamond-tipped drill, he'd still give you the impression that he'd rather be stamping on baby rabbits than fighting cosmic evil. This makes him ideal for television's "criminal psychopath" and "ruthless drug-lord" parts, which is why it seems so bizarre that he's the country's most sought-after voice-over artist. His numerous TV ads sound like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in a near-future fascist dystopia, promising unlimited power for the masses with a creeping undercurrent of "…once all the defectives have been eradicated". Not perfect for this role.

Robert Carlyse (14-1). Oh, God, yes. Please, yes. Apart from anything else, Carlyse's casting would force the programme to climb out from under the mountain of rotting celeb-flesh and become something like a drama series again (albeit a drama with nods toward light entertainment, which is how it seems to work best). Donna Noble would be as unthinkable under Carlyse as she would've been under Eccleston, and his presence might even compel could-be-good-if-they-tried writers like Gareth Roberts to come up with proper scripts instead of collections of in-jokes. Carlyse's name has been mooted in connection with Doctor Who since the Eccleston mini-epoch, partly because both actors came from the same batch of Rising British Talent in the early '90s, and partly because they've been locked together in our mass-consciousness ever since Carlyse stabbed Eccleston to death in Cracker: this is why some of us half-expected the Doctor to regenerate into Ricky Tomlinson at the end of "The Parting of the Ways", and why Carlyse seemed the obvious choice to be the new Master. But nooooo, they had to go for This Year's Mr Popular, didn't they? Hearteningly, a recent Radio Times interview suggested that he'd be willing to consider a major part in Doctor Who, but that he simply hadn't been asked [footnote 5]. The question is, though… would the general public be able to accept anyone this intense, after four years of Tennant's "Mickeeeey!!!" approach? We can only hope.

Richard E. Grant (14-1). What, again?

Jack Davenport (16-1). Another actor well-versed in playing a manifestation of Moffat's psyche, having spent several years as "Steve", the hero of Coupling who walks a neurotic line between geekdom and self-confidence while treating his barely-concealed misogyny as a form of post-modernism. Davenport's case is strengthened by his Hollywood credentials, if you can ignore the fact that the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean cast him because of his lack of charm and charisma (I forget the name of his character, but Lead Snotty Englishman just about covers it). We should also remember that he's already had a shot at being the star of a "cult sci-fi" series, and that he utterly botched it. Ultraviolet was meant to do for fantasy what Cracker did for the detective series, but whereas the anti-hero of Cracker was a pathologically unpredictable spit-ball of rage and obsession, the lead character of Ultraviolet was a mumbling bore who instantly alienated the audience. Mind you, Simon Pegg killed the otherwise-promising Hippies in exactly the same way, and he somehow got a second chance.

Alan Davies (16-1). I'm not even going to dignify this with a response.

Adrian Lester (18-1). What's amusing is that just in this rundown of Twenty People Who Might Be the Next Doctor Who, there are more black actors than there were in the entire Hartnell era. But whereas Patterson Joseph is far, far too vicious for the role, Adrian Lester is merely bland. Much more interesting is what his appearance on this list says about the way Doctor Who is perceived by the Not-We. Lester is best known for the BBC's Hustle, literally the most predictable television series ever made, usually described by the Radio Times with the obvious euphemism "glossy". But these days, this is how both the bookies and the media-in-general see the Doctor's world: the series is no longer an ever-growing experiment in High Strangeness and relative moral values, it's quite distinctly a "format", related to the Tony Jordan school of License-Fee-draining, guest-star-heavy pseudo-drama. When you remember that the same people responsible for the vacuity of Hustle also devised Life on Mars (which is just as vacuous, but better-camouflaged), the last two years of Doctor Who make a lot more sense.

Adien Gillen (18-1). Aiden Gillen…? Oh, of course: the press still believes in the "Gay Mafia" theory of television, so Gillen is a potential candidate simply because he was seen committing various acts of fleshy man-lust in Queer as Folk. But in itself, this proves that he's not in the running. If Big Russell [footnote 6] were still Best Gay Friends with him, then Gillen would've had a major guest-star part in Doctor Who three years ago. For Davies to insist on casting an old acquaintance now, just as he's about to leave the series, would be bizarre behaviour even for the man who thought "Journey's End" made sense.

Alexander Armstrong (18-1). Back in 2003-2004, when we were still obsessing over the question of who the first twenty-first-century Doctor might be, one reader of the RT suggested that they should cast a new Doctor every week and call it Have I Got Whos for You. At around the same time, Russell T. Davies was expressing his disgust at the tabloid speculation that Jamie Oliver could get the part instead of a "serious" actor. And, hooray! He cast Christopher Eccleston. Yet after five years of separation from the world of mortal men, Davies has brought the programme to a point where the papers are once again more likely to suggest "celebs" than "thesps", which is why the list of candidates to be the Doctor looks frighteningly like a list of candidates to be the nation's leading game-show host: Alexander Armstrong is not only a regular chairman on Have I Got News, but has also been mooted as Des O'Connor's replacement on Countdown. To be fair to Armstrong, he's by far the least offensive of the comedians on this list, and nobody could take issue with his performance as the Modern K-9 in The Sarah-Jane Adventures. But this tells you almost as much about the state of the programme as the Adrian Lester option.

Jason Statham (18-1). Do me a ***ing favour.

Harry Lloyd (18-1). Honestly, it's hard not to like the man. If, indeed, "man" is the word: he looks as if he's still being used as a human toast-rack by the older boys at Eton. After his appearance as Son of Mine in "Human Nature", his interviews for Confidential proved him to be in the well-adjusted middle-ground between relaxed professionalism and boyish enthusiasm, although that's perhaps not surprising for someone who looks as if he should be in the Doctor Who version of Muppet Babies alongside Russell Tovey. I just about managed to accept a Doctor who's roughly my age, but a public-school Doctor born in the 1980s? It's hard to imagine him commanding the authority to save the universe, unless he's going to challenge Davros to a round of the Biscuit Game. (Which Davros would lose, obviously. Because... well, y'know... he doesn't have a spare hand to hold the biscuit.)

And, way down the list of contenders…

Alex Kingston (50-1). Every time it looks as if a new Doctor's going to be required, some idiot suggests that it might be a woman. This year, that idiot was me, although there was a logic behind it. If Tennant has become so popular that he's virtually irreplaceable - far more so than Tom Baker ever was, since people in those days only expected an actor, not a major celebrity and national sex-symbol as well [footnote 7] - then the only option is to introduce a Doctor so shockingly different that the question of "better" or "worse" ceases to be an issue. If there's ever going to be a full-time female Doctor, then it's going to be now, especially when we consider the new producer's preference for hanging around with sexy actresses [footnote 8]. So there's a terrible credibility in Alex Kingston, the only woman on the Paddy Power list, being a candidate. If the programme-makers earmarked her as a potential She-Doctor some time ago, then the banality of the contrived-love-interest scenes in "Silence in the Library" makes a lot more sense: it's the set-up rather than the punchline, the twist being that she's not the Doctor's future wife at all, but someone who's destined to carry his "essence" around after the death of his current body. There are any number of precedents for this in SF television, and besides, the casting of an actress from ER would be seen as a coup by those bottom-feeding telly-whores who believe American TV to be the paragon of all human culture. In other words, exactly the kind of people whom the members of the Doctor Who production team are likely to meet every day.

However, if we're talking about the possibility of a bluestocking Doctor, then… I'd like to propose a rank outsider of my own.

Billie Piper. At the moment, she's happily squirming in her own afterbirth (she's named her newborn "Winston", which shows that she's lost none of her taste or good judgement since she declared "The Satan Pit" to be her favourite episode of 2006). But she wouldn't have to start shooting the 2010 series for another few months, and by then, the glow of celebrity motherhood would almost certainly have been replaced by a professional nanny. A few months after that, the papers would be full of speculation about her husband knocking off the nanny while Ms Piper's in Cardiff, but that's none of our concern. The thing to remember here is that the bigger Doctor Who gets, the more terrified its creators become, and the more they rely on past successes to win audience approval. Reuniting all the recent companions in "The Stolen Earth" might be regarded as a "celebration" of the programme so far, but it could equally be seen as a work of cowardice, especially since the story ends with a thoroughly pointless reprise of "Doomsday". Billie Piper is a proven ratings-winner, and associated with a Golden Age of Doctor Who that's scheduled to end with the departure of Tennant, at least unless they can keep it going by replacing him with someone just as recognisable. For the Doctor to take on Rose's form is no more ridiculous than any other regeneration (old-school geeks may quibble with this, but you can shut them up just by mentioning "Destiny of the Daleks", without even having to resort to "Journey's End"). Two years ago, it would've seemed silly, but then… two years ago, so would this entire list. With one exception, anyway.

Of course, since newfangled Doctor Who was designed to revolve around the companion until Catherine Tate made it impossible, we know that the nature of the new sidekick will be almost as crucial as the casting of the lead. For obvious reasons, Paddy Power isn't running a book on that, but we can make guesses based on Steven Moffat's known tendencies. Assuming that the Doctor's still male, the New Executive won't break with tradition, so it'll be another girl. She's unlikely to come from 2008 again - that'd be too obvious - but at the same time, Moffat won't want to risk alienating the audience by making her too far removed from home. He also wants to push the public's "nostalgia" button, as well as keeping the fans on his side, so the clever money says she'll come from 1963. In which case, she'll probably be an orphan, to avoid the necessity of return-trips to her own period. And since Moffat will want to curry favour with everyone else in Cardiff (q.v. "The Doctor Dances", in which he attempts to flatter to his Big Gay Boss by inventing a version of 1940s England in which none of the men are heterosexual), she'll obviously be inclined towards Welshness.

And, as pop-fate would have it, there's a model for this character. The last twelve months have already given the UK a vulnerable-yet-spunky Welsh girl who's got all the retro-glamour and heart-rending angst of Dusty Springfield, which is why I'm predicting that the 2010 series will be - in a nutshell - Duffy the Vampire Slayer.


Footnote 1. Eccleston came close, by treating the cultural well-being of younger viewers as a sacred trust. It's hard to imagine Tom Baker putting his ego aside in quite the same way, just as it's hard to imagine Eccleston making an arse of himself on a BBC1 panel-game show in twenty years' time.

Footnote 2. One of them wants to impress girls, and the other wants to smash giant spaceships into volcanoes.

Footnote 3. But even Warrington, like anyone over the age of forty-five, would be unacceptable after Tennant. Actually, I suggested him as a possible Doctor in a "Round Table" interview for I, Who 2, circa 2001. Gary Russell was also part of that Round Table, and shortly thereafter, Big Finish cast Warrington as Rassilon. Coincidence…? Yeah, probably. (The same interview saw Gary Russell describing Alien Bodies as one of the best Doctor Who books ever written, shortly before he blacklisted me from Big Finish for being mildly impolite about one of his own efforts. How do these people sleep?)

Footnote 4. There's also the issue of Morton Dill being one of Steven Taylor's ancestors. But let's not be too anal, there might be civilians reading this.

Footnote 5. Unlike, say, such luminaries as Roger Lloyd Pack or Michelle Collins. That's a bit like asking Chris Chibnall to write an episode, but not asking me.

Footnote 6. By now, you're probably sick of my insistence on calling him "Big Russell". But anyone who saw him on-stage at the ITV awards, dwarfing his minions in all three dimensions, will realise how apt it is.

Footnote 7. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: even if they were all still around and all still in their prime, none of the actors who've played the Doctor so far would possibly stand a chance of being Tennant's replacement. Not even Eccleston, whose leering, ogre-like demeanour would make far too many teenagers shout "eww, minger!" after the Boy David.

Footnote 8. Yeah, like I'm any different. Oh, that reminds me: why haven't I been commissioned to write another Bernice audio this year? I want another chance to flirt with Lisa Bowerman.

...Of Death

As I write this, Film4 is showing Doctor in Clover. This is a '60s medical comedy starring Leslie Phillips, and not - as modern fandom might like to imagine - a movie about David Tennant being rolled in low-fat butter.

However, I don't want to talk about David Tennant being rolled in low-fat butter. I want to talk about something which isn't much more insightful, but which is morbidly obsessive in a very different sort of way. I want to talk about famous people dying.

Traditionally, there's always been a skulking, unspoken connection between Doctor Who and Celebrity Death. The reason for this is simple and obvious: one of the most important Big Facts we were told about the series, when we were learning its ancient history from the fanzines and guidebooks, was that the first episode was broadcast while the world was still recovering from the hangover of the Kennedy assassination. For those of us who started reading Doctor Who Monthly before we started thinking about girls, it may even have been the first time we heard of the Kennedy assassination. At first sight, it's hard to see any direct correlation between the "Camelot" Presidency (motorcades, mafia connections, power and glamour, Jackie Kennedy's early-'60s ultra-chic) and Hartnell-era Doctor Who (junkyards, police boxes, very small sets, Barbara Wright's cardigans), however desperately "Silver Nemesis" might try to link the two. More importantly, though, the hype and pizzazz of Lee Harvey Oswald's Grand Day Out has overwhelmed all the other legends and oddities surrounding Doctor Who's arrival in the world. Which is unfortunate, when you consider that the very same day - 22nd of November, 1963 - also saw the deaths of both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis.

Even on its own, the death of Lewis is striking, far more so than what was going on in Dallas. Not that I want to heap any praise on the pompous, reactionary old bore (obviously I'm bound to be on Philip Pullman's side in this argument, although the Narnia books are actually far less offensive that Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, which is the SF equivalent of being shouted at by the angry man who stands outside the supermarket and tries to give you pamphlets about the Love of Jesus), but it is true to say that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe gave us the most important single prototype of the TARDIS. Yes, even more important than the H. G. Wells model, since the Ship's "magic wardrobe" qualities have always been closer to the heart of the programme than its "time-travel" ability: q.v. the final scene of "Rose". We can go further, and suggest that Doctor Who was the post-War descendant of the same children-find-a-secret-world-down-the-back-of-a-sofa tradition, even if "An Unearthly Child" presents us with a version in which the grown-ups are the ones who discover Fairyland. Had Lewis lived just another twenty-four hours, then he would have been able to watch the first episode and say to himself: 'Haaaaang on a minute…'

But when you consider the three fatalities in combination, a more interesting picture emerges. (We're not the first ones to try this, incidentally. Peter Kreeft wrote a novel entitled Between Heaven and Hell, in which Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis meet each other in limbo on their way to the afterlife, and drone on about the nature of Christ for 120 pages. The justification for this is that all three men were Christians of varying philosophical breeds, but if it's acceptable for an author to use their deaths as an exercise in Catholic propaganda, then I'm fairly sure it's all right to use them to talk about Daleks.) Consider the following…

Early Doctor Who was never explicitly conceived as "sci-fi", and the parts that seem most "spacey" came from experiments in TV production rather than the Arthur C. Clarke school of rocket-ship fiction. But the '60s version of the programme did exploit all sorts of popular anxieties and aspirations about the future, specifically those parts of the future that most concerned the British, at a time when the country was still in the process of rebuilding itself after the Austerity years. The fact is that the people of 1963 considered Thinking About the Future to be an important pastime. Our twenty-first-century society, being wholly consumer-driven and largely run by Rupert Murdoch, fetishises the idea of having things now and discourages us from thinking about what-happens-next. To the '60s mind-set, what-happens-next was at the root of all modern culture. For the British, anything American was considered futuristic, and the Yanks seemed determined to build fully-functional space-colonies by the 1980s. Across the western world, questions of social order and population control were making us wonder whether the White Heat of Technology really could save humankind. And amidst all of this, the BBC was attempting to make reasonably cosy, reasonably highbrow family entertainment with its roots in popular literature rather than Hollywood razzle-dazzle.

This is the crucible in which Doctor Who was given shape, and in that light, can you think of any better combination of blood-sacrifices than the space-happy President of the US, the man who wrote Brave New World, and the country's best-known children's fantasist? The only name which might perhaps be better-suited to the list of casualties is John Wyndham, given that Susan Foreman can safely be considered a "nice" version of one of the Midwich Cuckoos (and certainly a product of the same post-War generation-gap angst), but Wyndham didn't pop his clogs until 1969. He may even have seen Doctor Who, although God knows what he thought of it if he did. Maybe he watched "An Unearthly Child", and found himself thinking 'oh good, it's not just me'; maybe he watched "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", and wondered if he was in some way responsible for either the vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain or the giant shambling plant-creature; maybe he watched "The Dominators" in his final months, and just thought it was a load of cobblers.

This raises another point about death and Doctor Who: a lot of people we now think of as "historical", or at least "recent-historical", lived long enough to watch it. The 1980s taught us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll eventually overlap with its own predictions about the future ("Attack of the Cybermen" might be seen as a symptom of this problem more than an actual story, or at least, it's half-tolerable if you think of it that way). Now the 2000s are teaching us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll start treating the early years of its run as if they were an era of antiquity, fit for the Doctor to revisit. "Remembrance of the Daleks" was the first sign of this, but it's a lot more noticeable if you live in an age which is so obsessed with the present that it even considers time-travel to the 1980s to be in some way exotic (Ashes to Ashes, for Christ's sake…). Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis all missed the Doctor Who epoch by twenty-four hours, and Wyndham could theoretically have watched Quarks at play, but they all died in the monochrome 1960s. To someone of my age, the difference between the black-and-white era and the colour era is like a geological boundary layer, separating the Ancient TV Past from the Recent TV Past. What about casualties of the 1970s, then?

When BBC7 interviewed Agatha Christie's biographer in 2007, they remembered that geeks might be listening - because BBC7 always remembers that geeks might be listening - and asked her what Dame Agatha would make of the fact that she's going to be the subject of a Doctor Who story this year. The biographer fielded the question politely enough, but interestingly, both interviewer and interviewee spoke as if Christie would be vaguely puzzled by the existence of this strange, futuristic programme about a man in a time-travelling police box. Except, of course, that… she died in 1976. Specifically, she died between episodes two and three of "The Brain of Morbius". Whereas it used to be taken for granted that the Doctor only ever met historical figures of the Marco Polo oeuvre, it's now perfectly reasonable for him to bump into people who might actually have seen Philip Madoc trying to cut Tom Baker's head off.

This raises odd questions about the future, assuming our civilisation has one. Modern-day Doctor Who is, as we've already established, so addicted to celeb culture and showbiz parties that the monsters in "Voyage of the Damned" even look like walking BAFTA awards. Many of the celebrities who come into contact with the series in our own decade will be historical figures, of a kind, thirty or forty or fifty years from now. A producer of Sky-TV-owned Doctor Who in 2050 may well decide that it'd be "cute" for the Doctor to go back in time and meet legendary late-twentieth-century starlet Kylie Minogue, oblivious the fact that she was actually in the programme. Or how about soon-to-be-mythical Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who's surely guaranteed a cameo appearance in the show at some point in the next few years?

I mentioned a blood-sacrifice, and… I may not have been entirely serious. But human beings can still instinctively feel, even after centuries of evidence to the contrary, that no great work can succeed unless somebody's buried in the foundations for good luck (hence the creepy later verses of "London Bridge is Falling Down", and the more modern architectural tradition that a new bridge hasn't been "christened" until at least one suicide has jumped off it). It obviously worked for Doctor Who in 1963, given that the bridge is still standing, even if it was closed for repairs between 1989 and 2005. It's not always so successful, though. Jon Pertwee snuffed it just before the supposed "return" of the programme in 1996, which might have been interpreted as a symbolic laying-to-rest of the old before the ushering-in of the new, but all it seemed to get us was a "Planet of the Spiders"-style motorbike chase in the middle of the TV Movie. And the only notable person who died in the twenty-four hours before "Rose" was Jim Callaghan, which might be considered a bit of a damp squib on the Kennedy scale. Although it may be apt that Callaghan was Prime Minister during the late 1970s, the last time the series was a ratings-winning national institution.

Now Doctor in Clover has come to an end, and the TV ads are telling me that you can get free Doctor Who DVDs in this week's Sun. That settles it: the world is officially broken. Balance can clearly only be restored to the universe if, in the spirit of '63, Rupert Murdoch gets shot in the head twenty-four hours before the broadcast of "Partners in Crime". That might make even Catherine Tate seem bearable.

A Postscript. While we're feasting on the dead… these days, a lot of critics (rather unfairly) attack the film 2010 for being "dated", on the grounds that it depicts a world just two years in our future where the Cold War is still in progress. However, I'd point out that the movie also features a cameo by Arthur C. Clarke, who's seen reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House. I'd tentatively suggest that Arthur C. Clarke reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House is a lot less likely to happen in 2010 than a face-off between America and Russia, at least unless someone does something really weird with preserving fluid and animatronics.

SF Iconoclasty 101

(The following article was originally written for Death Ray magazine, but ended up being too long to fit anywhere. It's about the legacy of Nigel Kneale, although readers should note that it doesn't necessarily agree with the orthodox version of British SF history. You know. The version you get in BBC4 documentaries.)


Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, a sizeable chunk of American society - brought up to believe that anything which hadn't been trimmed to regulation length was either a sign of moral degeneracy or the work of Commie infiltrators - looked around at the dissent, disorder and racial turbulence at large in the nation, and concluded that the whole of human civilisation was on the verge of collapse. With hindsight, this seems absurd: less than a generation after the trauma of World War Two, anyone half-rational should have realised that you've got to expect a few unsightly cultural trends and a modicum of rioting if your society's in the process of reinventing itself. But America likes to think in terms of catastrophes, so forty years on, the modern American right is founded on the belief that the '60s saw the world itself being brought to the edge of annihilation by left-wing agitators and people with loose morals. It's the neo-conservative version of the Story of the Flood.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Nigel Kneale also noticed the rumblings of the coming generation. His own response was to write Quatermass and the Pit, in which it turns out that humans are doomed from birth to hate, hunt and kill each other, because their genetic development was influenced by evil tribalist Martians. These three-legged space-grasshoppers have essentially given us Original Sin, and that's the real reason for the race-riots in Mississippi and Notting Hill. We're just born bad, so self-destruction is all we're good for.

We can probably assume that nobody on the planet has ever taken the "Martians" story at face value, but what's notable is that both these versions of human history come from the same core anxiety. In essence, both are panic-reactions to an aggressively unpredictable world, in which a few local flashpoints are treated as proof that the whole of humanity is about to wipe itself out. There are many, many precedents for this lack of perspective in literature, and SF writers are quite wonderfully prone to it (we might especially remember H. G. Wells' Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which the author took his own depression as evidence that the entire universe was being unravelled by a malevolent invisible force… amazingly, this was supposed to be a work of non-fiction). Of course, modern-day, liberal-minded SF fans would immediately question the notion of '60s America as a literal Gomorrah. On the other hand, it's de rigueur to regard Nigel Kneale as a visionary.

Was he ever really a visionary? These days, he's routinely portrayed as the Grand Old Man of SF television, and it's often said that the scripts he wrote in the first half of his TV career were scarily prescient of things to come. But with Kneale himself now among the departed, and his admirers making numerous improbable claims about his achievements, it may be time to re-evaluate his impact on British TV. Because far from accurately pre-empting the future, much of his work seems to have difficulty getting to grips with the present.

Perhaps the most telling case-study here is his script for the final Quatermass serial, made by ITV in 1979. Older readers may recall that in Britain, the 1970s was an age of strikes, fuel shortages, powercuts, and punk rockers scaring everyone's mum. Extending this into the near-future, Kneale gives us a dystopian society in which human civilisation is (go on, guess) on the verge of collapse, where thuggish working-class youngsters in leather jackets rule the cities, and - according to the astonishingly po-faced opening narration - a "primal disorder" has been let loose on the world. The thing to note here is that this seemed ridiculous when the story was broadcast, never mind 29 years later. The suggestion that petrol rationing and a ten o'clock TV blackout would lead to a New Dark Age was bizarre even before the election of Margaret Thatcher, but the real subtext of the 1979 Quatermass is that any world which involves Johnny Rotten swearing on television is obviously doomed to oblivion. Except…

…except that in this final Quatermass story, the villains are hippies. Which is to say, the hippies are the brutal, mindless cultists who assemble at stone circles in order to worship evil man-mincing aliens. The presence of malevolent flower-children makes more sense when we consider that the first draft of the script was written seven years before the final version reached the screens, but even in 1972, this would have been a dubious attempt at satire (anyone who's seen the Star Trek episode "The Way to Eden" will know why). The kind of hippy-kids who liked to paint their faces with yin-yangs and hang around ancient monuments had become positively quaint by this stage, yet their sporadic minor skirmishes with policemen are taken by Kneale as proof that Britain is a hair's-breadth away from civil war. Then again, the story doesn't really make a distinction between the hippies and the murderous urban terrorists. In Kneale's world, all latter-day cultural movements become indistinguishable, so the script can confidently inform us that there's no difference between hairy people gathering on Salisbury Plain and the Nuremberg Rallies.

The fact is that in the Quatermass continuum, only sensible middle-class people over the age of forty are allowed to be civilised. Anyone else is a walking demonstration that human beings are genetically stupid. The "funny" working-class couple whose home is demolished by a space-capsule at the beginning of The Quatermass Experiment are, sadly, the rule rather than the exception. In the same vein, we should be thankful that Kneale's script The Big, Big Giggle was never filmed. The tale of a teenage suicide craze, it was vetoed for fear that it might provoke copycat incidents, but its embarrassment factor would have been far worse than its body-count. This was the work of an author so dismissive of modern culture, and so ignorant of the real reasons behind These Young People Today taking drugs and starting riots, that he honestly thought teenagers were prepared to slit their own wrists just for a laugh. You might find yourself reminded of one of those '50s American "information" films, about schoolchildren turning into psychotic killers after smoking marijuana.

So as in Quatermass and the Pit, anyone who isn't a mouthpiece for the writer is an ignorant savage with an urge towards self-destruction. Because, far from being a forward-thinking visionary, Kneale's work suggests the SF equivalent of a Daily Mail columnist: an arch-conservative who considers anything new, alien or peculiar-looking to be untrustworthy and ultimately catastrophic. Why, then, is he considered such a revolutionary?

In recent years, there's been an attempt to interpret some of his scripts as prophetic, most particularly his 1968 teleplay The Year of the Sex Olympics. As this involves a futuristic "reality show" about a family trapped on an island with a goggle-eyed madman, it's said to predict the worst excesses of television in the twenty-first century, but few people who've actually watched it can take this claim seriously. In 1968, the idea of TV as a voyeuristic form of cruelty was already an old one, both in SF and in mainstream culture. And the death-game in Sex Olympics bears so little relation to Celebrity Love Island that it's hard to see the programme as a warning from history, even if you can get over the sight of Leonard Rossiter slouching around in a bacofoil kaftan.

No, the real reason for Kneale's reputation is a sentimental one. For the British geek, he's become a figurehead of "serious" science fiction drama, a sign that we were always so much more grown-up than the Americans. In particular, the original Quatermass Experiment (vintage 1953) is remembered as the BBC's first "serious" attempt at SF. The problem is that this folk-memory isn't supported by the programme's content. Take away the surface layer of middle-class smugness, and there's virtually nothing to differentiate it from a '50s American B-movie. It's certainly far less intelligent - and a great deal more reactionary - than Hollywood's It Came From Outer Space, made in the same year. When Hammer Films remade the serial as a feature film in 1955, they turned Professor Quatermass into an American, and the result doesn't even pretend to be anything other than low-budget sci-fi schlock. It's worth noting that the 1985 edition of the Science Fiction Film Sourcebook, published before Kneale was reinvented as a prophet, describes Brian Donlev's performance in the movie as "giving what was otherwise an undistinguished storyline a touch of authority": there is, quite rightly, no suggestion that this was anything other than a monster-movie runaround.

(A side-note here… the serial's one original feature, as Kneale himself liked to point out, is that the slimy tentacled space-fungus doesn't get blown up in the final episode. Instead, Quatermass appeals to its humanity and convinces it to commit suicide. This is apparently supposed to be a moral victory, yet it's blatantly just the standard "all aliens are evil and must die" schtick, dressed up in such a way that the central character doesn't get blood on his hands. Which is very middle-class indeed, as well as being a massive ethical cop-out.)

Beyond sentimentality, what do we have? The original Quatermass serials were the talk of the nation in the 1950s, it's true, yet their success lay in the context rather than the content. Look at it from the perspective of a viewer in 1953. You haven't had much time to get used to television as a physical presence, let alone the root of all Popular Culture. What's more, it's all been terribly polite so far, presenters talking in their best Reith-ese and doing absolutely nothing that might frighten the horses. Then, all of a sudden… one night, when nothing's protecting you from the darkness outside except for a pair of curtains and a wall of fog, there's a programme on the BBC that starts with the juddering DAAANNN DAAANN-DAAAAANN!!! of Holst's "Mars" and then shows you something nasty creeping around in Middle England. Now, you're used to seeing scary things at the cinema, and nothing about this killer-from-outer-space concept is particularly shocking. But in your own home…? Here, it's a kind of transgression. For the first time, monsters are being pumped straight into your living room in creepy 405-line black-and-white, rather than existing on the big screen and at a safe cultural distance.

This is why Quatermass worked: it turned fear of the unknown into something domestic, by its very nature rather than by its story. We shouldn't pretend, fifty years on, that the script was in any way revolutionary. As BBC3's wholly pointless remake proved in 2005, it… just wasn't. Take away the '50s viewing environment, and you're left with a big ugly lump of unlikely situations and bad dialogue.

What, then, has been the real legacy of Nigel Kneale's work? The answer is, tragically, that it's been almost entirely negative. The Quatermass serials have left us with a vague sense of superiority, without prompting us to question their meaning. And it's a poor sort of television that only inspires mistrust. Kneale's vision is an insular, mean-spirited one, in which everything unfamiliar is a threat; all human endeavour is worthless, if not actively dangerous; and anything which goes against the principles of old-school Britishness must be destroyed. It's significant that when Doctor Who explicitly began copying the Quatermass format in the 1970s, during one of the programme's more formulaic phases, the writers at least acknowledged the flaws in Kneale's design by raising the possibility that aliens aren't necessarily all man-eating predators and that progress isn't necessarily a dead end. After all, Doctor Who came from a more heterodox, outward-looking, big-R Romantic tradition of SF, which is why Kneale hated it. Morally and philosophically, these programmes are polar opposites.

But in the thirty years since, British SF writers have begun to copy Kneale's formula by rote, in the belief that anything in the Quatermass tradition is somehow "worthy". In truth, the scripts are no more insightful than the '50s notion that Alien Invaders = Filthy Communists, or any other kind of tabloid scaremongering. And if one message comes through in his work, again and again, then it isn't "think about the future" but "turn that radio down, you bloody kids".

The Christmas Doctor Who Thing

Twenty-four hours until Christmas Day. Thirty-two hours until I find out how badly my relatives have misjudged my personality while attempting to think of a suitable gift, thirty-six hours until I have to ask myself whether I really am going to bother roasting something for lunch rather than settling for a tube of Pringles with a picture of holly on the wrapper, forty hours until I find myself joining in with every single word of The Two Ronnies. Just under forty-three hours until "Voyage of the Damned", the BBC's new vehicle for Bernard Cribbins.

Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric time-travel-based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?

My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.

Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.

Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (Haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.

And as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.

With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…

…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.

Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninety-eighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.

If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programme-makers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.

And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends of Doctor Who?

That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.

I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.

And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.

Secs Sell

A question I've already asked in my "proper" journal (there's a link on the left): what's the most excessive piece of merchandising in history? Anyone schooled in the important points of British cultural development will be familiar with artefacts like the Doctor Who underpants of the 1970s, designed in such a way that you could make Tom Baker's face look really, really Jewish by having impure thoughts. But this sort of thing seems almost reasonable, compared to the deluge of merchandising that followed the BBC radio show Bandwagon in the 1930s. Bandwagon was largely a vehicle for the young(ish) Arthur Askey, and the idea that shops began selling Arthur Askey "action-figures" seems remarkable in itself, especially if you grew up in the '80s and can only remember the aged, cancer-riddled version of Arthur Askey who had to have both his legs amputated. At the height of its success, however, Bandwagon even had its own brand of oven-cleaner. Star Wars just isn't in the same league.

Of course, to us, the mad glut of Doctor Who merchandising available for Christmas 2007 is definitive proof that We Win. Let's be quite clear on this point: here in the latter '00s, Doctor Who is more popular than at any time in its prior history. Naturally, the viewing figures were higher in the late '70s. This is partly because there was nothing else to do in those days, when the TV set was the only leisure accessory that ran on electricity, and when "getting boozed up on a Saturday night" wasn't seen as a fit pastime for all ages, classes and genders. But it's also because viewers in the 1970s saw themselves as belonging to a wilfully captive audience. Saturday-night viewing was part of a complete entertainment experience, the stay-at-home descendant of the Music Hall, and you sat through the entire BBC schedule - or the entire ITV schedule, if you were a bit common - whether you liked all the programmes or not. You wouldn't have switched channels, even if you'd had one of those newfangled remote controls. In those days, before geek-scum tried to claim that Doctor Who should be just like Babylon-5, the series was part of the World of Showbiz. And yet…

…and yet it wasn't what the BBC now likes to call its "jewel in the crown" show. Doctor Who was halfway down the bill of the entertainment line-up, it was never the star attraction. The ratings may have been higher in the supposedly golden year of 1979, but even then - even at a time when you could rely on one-third of the population to have seen Julian Glover rip his face off and become a one-eyed seaweed-man - the importance that's attached to the series now would have been unthinkable. In 1979, it was taken for granted that it'd always be there. In 2007 (if slightly less so than in 2006), it matters. It's a lodestone of British pop-culture rather than a reassuringly ever-present quantity, the Beatles rather than One Man and His Dog. "Popularity" is measured by impact rather than ratings, and for the people of the 1970s, it'd beggar belief that "Sontarans Return" would qualify as a news headline. In a world where Showbiz was a rare and precious commodity, it was always going to be overshadowed by The Generation Game. In a world where celebrity culture seems somehow more banal than fly-on-the-wall footage, something as strange and as (potentially) unpredictable as Doctor Who is bound to thrive. For a while, anyway.

So when Asda presents us with a national TV advertisement specifically to tell us how cheap its Dalek Sec masks are, we have to see it as our crowning moment. Consider what this means. At a point in time when consumerism is just about the only surviving philosophy, one of the largest retailers in the country has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to focus on a toy based on a character from one single episode of Doctor Who (plus one cliffhanger). It wasn't even a very popular episode, at least not amongst "serious" fans [see footnote], but that's hardly relevant. At the very least, you can't help feeling that the ubiquity of the Sec mask would raise severe feelings of bitterness in Scaroth of the Jagaroth. This, not 1979, is the age of the one-eyed tentacle-faced monstrosity.

So just as Doctor Who has gone from "a thing that everyone watches because it's there" to "a thing that lots of people watch because they feel compelled to", Doctor Who merchandising has gone from "stuff you buy for children at Christmas because it might shut them up for a bit" to "stuff that has a cultural identity of its own". With the possible exception of the '60s Dalek playsuit - an item which achieved a certain cache just because it seemed so expensively exotic, and which became notorious in the 1990s when Toyah Wilcox appeared on Thirty Years in the TARDIS to describe it as if it were an item of rubber fetishwear - no piece of Doctor Who fodder has ever been this iconic, or this high-profile. And if anything, then the odd cultural side-effects of the new series are even more disquieting than the obvious cash-ins. When Kylie Minogue leads up to her Doctor Who appearance with a single called "Two Hearts", it's hard to tell whether it's a joke or a coincidence. It apparently comes from her new album X, which also includes the hits "Lungs of a Birastrop" and "Aspirin Might Kill Me".

But in the high street, not since Bandwagon have manufacturers believed they could get away with so much. Personally, I have a theory that someone at Character Options is seeing how far they can push the concept of "action-figure". Children are actually supposed to play with these things, remember, they're not just Dapolesque collectors' items. The "action-figure" of Lady Cassandra was hardly G. I. Joe (even Arthur Askey had two working limbs), but at least you could roll her around a bit, and at a pinch she could get into a Hot Wheels race with the Moxx of Balhoon. Recently, however, Character has become obsessed with releasing "action-figures" of geriatrics. I can accept the Carrionite witch, but now we've got poseable toys of Victor Meldrew, a dead grandmother, and an old woman with no face. "Gee, dad, an old woman with no face! Can I have one for Christmas? Can I?"

Now… I'm aware that children (boys especially) like toys which represent the grotesque and the misshapen, yet this usually means rotting zombie-creatures and monsters made of bogeys, not 5" representations of people who dribble when they eat and suffer periods of incontinence. This is why there's no such product as My Little Rest Home. A septuagenarian whose only "action" ability is to lose her visible features seems less than dynamic, the sort of fan-fodder collectible you expect to see in the "unsold stock" section of Forbidden Planet, not in a display at Tesco's. And as for the Weeping Angel… kids, you too can have a moulded plastic representation of the top of a war memorial. Yet nobody finds any of these things puzzling, as if Doctor Who has not only broken the rules of modern TV (by being a light entertainment show that isn't disposable, by being a drama that gets noticed by the rest of the media without recourse to nipples, by being an SF series that doesn't involve Americans whining on about their f***ing "issues"…) but the rules of consumerism as well.

Which would be fine, if we could be sure that the iconic status of the merchandising won't start to warp the series itself. The curious decision to bring the Sontarans out of retirement in 2008 - even though they're visually less impressive than (say) the Judoon, and conceptually no more interesting than any other bunch of stomping alien warmongers - might, at first, be taken as a sign that we can expect Sontaran egg-cups for Easter 2009. Then the publicity photo turns up in the papers, and we discover that the "controversial" new Sontaran outfit makes it look like a five-foot-tall action-figure. Can we believe that it's been deliberately designed with an eye to the merchandising? No, not really. But can we believe that because of the merchandising, a brightly-clad, fully-jointed, clearly-moulded monster is what the designers think a "typical" Doctor Who baddie should look like these days…?

Actually, that seems a lot more feasible. Those Character Options figures are now an important part of what Doctor Who "does", and it's inevitably going to have an effect on the way everyone perceives the programme, including its creators. If nothing else, then it's hard to hear a title like "Planet of the Ood" without imagining how an army of collectible Ood are going to look in the Argos catalogue. It may well be the first thing you think of, even before you get the image of Charlton Heston shouting "get your damn hands off me, you lousy, stinking Ood". (Mind you, take another glance at that publicity photo: the Kinder-surprise Sontaran still looks less plastic than Catherine Tate.)

There was a time, as many of you will remember, when the only items of Doctor Who merchandising that really mattered were the books. Many, many people have expressed the opinion that without Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters or Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, they never would have bothered to read, to the point where even describing them as "merchandising" seems rather unfair: before video, the internet and BBC3, these were the only way that juvenile viewers of Doctor Who could keep in touch with the series when it wasn't on the air. They were a form of history, not filler material. The Plastic Age has made Doctor Who books rather redundant, and turned things upside-down. Thirty years ago, the books meant something, and the toys - which very few children actually wanted, and not just because the 12" Cyberman had a nose - seemed rather pointless. Today, the action-figures and the voice-changer masks are like badges of honour, while the books… well, they sell, but they seem somehow irrelevant. And this is hardly surprising, because I didn't write any of them, even though I was obviously qualified for God's sake.

I mentioned that the Dalek Sec mask is the ultimate sign of Doctor Who's victory, proof that the series has become even more noticeable than it was in the Showbiz Era. Of course, it can't last. Doctor Who Volume One survived for 26 years specifically because it was Just There. Like the Shipping Forecast, getting rid of it seemed counter-instinctual. Doctor Who Volume Two has thrived because it was born into an environment that had forgotten it was even possible, but the environment is already changing around it. When the Showbiz Era ended circa 1980, the series had to give up its position in the Saturday night line-up, and find its own specific audience rather than being part of the BBC's big night out. It managed this quite well, at first, by being the kind of show that appealed to kids who liked the Human League rather than by trying to draw in the whole family (wise, given that the Family Audience was simply drifting apart). But if Doctor Who Volume Two starts to wane, then it's far too big, important and expensive to "specialise" in this way. When it goes, it'll go completely.

Which means that the Christmas toy-flood isn't just a sign of glory, it's also like the thing on the side of the life-support machine that goes "beep" to tell us we're still alive. In 2007, we get the Dalek Invasion of Asda. But this time next year, if the supermarkets have difficulty shifting the action-figures of the old man in the wheelchair from the final scene of "The Family of Blood", then we'll know we have a problem.


Footnote. Well, of course fans didn't like "Daleks in Manhattan" much. Their idea of "ideal" modern-day Doctor Who is something that's as much like an American sci-fi show as possible, preferably with more story arcs than stories, so it's hardly surprising that they'd take against an adventure which owes more to old-fashioned Doctor Who than anything else in the BBC Wales era. Very old-fashioned, in this case: the Doctor's semi-educational stroll around Hooverville is as close as twenty-first-century television can get to the "Marco Polo" model of the series, while the Daleks themselves speak, act, and argue about the nature of humanity in exactly the same way they did when David Whitaker was writing them. This is a '60s Doctor Who story with added colour and explosions, which means that you could almost believe you were watching the third big-screen Dalek movie, with David Tennant replacing Peter Cushing (or possibly Bernard Cribbins). Though we've all been conditioned by nerds to believe that "traditional" Doctor Who means the aberrant aliens-take-over-contemporary-England stories of the 1970s, "Manhattan" is as traditional as the latter-day series gets. And Sec's cult status proves, if nothing else, that nobody cares what nerds think.

Doctor Who, 2007: Eyeing Up the Talent in Space and Time

We realise, now, that no heterosexual male can watch any ensemble-cast television series without trying to figure out Which One He'd Have. This is a simple fact of modern life, and programme-makers have even come to welcome it: after all, it played a big part in the success of BBC1's Bleak House (or at least, its success among a part of the audience that wouldn't normally watch Charles Dickens), while most new comedy series aimed at eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds seem determined to actively encourage it. Though women may prefer the more socially-complex game of Shag / Marry / Kill, men still use a first-past-the-post-system, as part of the same impulse that compels them to make lists of their favourite things ever.

Though it may be very, very gay in so very many ways, the modern-day version of Doctor Who provides rich material for games of Which One Would You Have. A series which introduces a completely new supporting cast in every story, and which obeys all the currently-accepted rules of mixed-gender, mixed-demographic casting - you know, the kind of thing Patrick Moore hates so much - is guaranteed to present the audience with at least one actress of mating-age every week. Since there are thirteen episodes in every season, this suggests the possibility of a thirteen-month pin-up calendar, although it's unlikely that such a thing would be publishable even if BBC Worldwide could pass it off as "ironic". It raises all sorts of awkward questions about polymorphous sexuality, like whether Cassandra would be a better proposition in "human" or "lasagne" form, or whether it's all right to fancy a fourteen-year-old's body if she's possessed by a thousand-year-old alien intelligence.

But story-by-story, here are the front-runners for this year's Which One Would You Have list. My front-runners. Because as we've already established, only my opinions make sense. Readers should bear in mind, however, that here we're talking about characters as much as the actresses who play them.


1. "Smith and Jones". The presence of slinky-yet-muscular CPR addict Martha Jones provides us with a handy Plan B for this season: in the event of an episode which doesn't involve any impressive "local" talent, we can always fall back on the companion. (Those who played the Which One Would You Have game in 2006 may remember how crucial this was in the case of "The Idiot's Lantern", when Billie Piper's appearance as a regular saved us from having to make a really horrible decision.) So although it's tempting to pick Martha as our poster-girl for the all-important debut episode, it's best to leave her in reserve until the mid-season girl-drought. Besides, she spends most of "Smith and Jones" in a white doctor's coat. And whatever fantasies we may have about sexually-unbalanced nurses, the truth is that real-life medical gear isn't appealing at all, often due to the presence of hospital food, vomit, and / or disinfectant (depending on how long she's been on-shift). In fact, dress sense is the key here. Because this episode also gives us the debut of Martha's sexually-confused kid sister, Tish "Show Me An Old Cathedral And I'm Yours" Jones, whose short-skirt-and-boots ensemble suits her chunky-thighed physique rather better than the eveningwear she tries on later.

'By the way, did I mention that I'm helping to
change what it means to be human tomorrow?'

2. "The Shakespeare Code". Now, according to Russell T. Davies, this episode has a "sexy villainess". Unfortunately, Lilith is so devoid of charm, personality or dirtiness of any kind that she seems to come from the same range of historical blow-up dolls as Madame de Pompadour. Or, to put it another way… only a gay man would call this "sexy". (For some reason, gay writers have a habit of creating all-devouring female villains with no actual personality traits. Although for our purposes, even I'd have to admit that Christina Cole is a step up from Maureen Lipman.) Presented with this wall of slippery-smooth non-sex, we're forced to turn to the Elizabethan barmaid instead, and luckily she's used to people doing that. Though she fails in at least one of her barmaid duties by not qualifying as "buxom", she does at least acknowledge the existence of hormones: when offering a bedroom to the Doctor and his blackamoor paramour, she not only makes the obvious assumption but looks as if she'd be quite happy for Martha to invite her in for a Game of Flats. Which is technically an eighteenth-century name for it rather than an Elizabethan one, but I've wanted to use it for ages.

Yet amazingly, there's no Cornish accent.

3. "Gridlock". Sex with a cat-nun is, in many ways, an appealing prospect. After all, it's two transgressions in one. But Novice Haim is past her prime now (presumably she's still a Novice because the rest of her order was disbanded, and there's nobody left to promote her), and besides, there's the question of whether a human male could ever satisfy a hominid feline. Let's not forget, the genitals of a male cat are covered in tiny little spikes. These cause severe pain when the penis is removed from the female, triggering a hormonal reaction which puts her cat-eggs in "ready for sperm" mode. Now, at first, it might seem that a cat-woman would appreciate the lack of nob-hooks on a sexual partner. Yet if cats have evolved to seek this sadomasochistic kick, then sex with a smooth-cocked human would probably be something of a disappointment. So with this in mind, I'm going to go for the obvious and pick the female carjacker with the big sexy mouth instead.

'My boyfriend's given me this great new
mood-patch called "Swallow"…'

4 / 5. "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks". My first impulse is to say "can I have the writer?". But if we're doing this properly, then… well, pick a showgirl, any showgirl. If we assume that we're only allowed to choose characters with speaking parts (because otherwise, we'd have to go through every crowd scene of "The Christmas Invasion" looking for attractive roof-leapers, and even I don't possess that degree of lechery), then we're stuck with either the principal blonde or one of the backup brunettes. None of these really stretch the limits of male sexuality, especially not when we're still wondering whether Novice Haim likes her men barbed or non-barbed, or asking ourselves whether gay men who go for "bears" might also go for Ardal O'Hanlan in tabby-face. Now, if the Daleks had turned some women into pigs… ohhhhh yeah. Udders a-plenty.

That difficult first date.

6. "The Lazarus Experiment". The paucity of female characters in this episode - actually, the paucity of characters of any kind, apart from the regulars and semi-regulars - means that our options are limited to the Jones clan, the woman from Coronation Street, or the party guest who makes the pointless comment about olives and then gets eaten. (Speaking-part actors get paid more than non-speaking extras, of course. So was it really necessary to stretch the budget by giving "Olive Woman" this single, clunking line of dialogue? Is it supposed to make her subsequent death seem more meaningful? Are we meant to feel sorry for her because we've heard her speak, or feel glad that someone so stupid has been bumped off by a monster, or…what?) In fact, this is the point at which we have to play our joker and pick Martha, because the Little Black Dress really does suit her a lot better than it suits her sister. This is the episode in which we get our best opportunity to eye up her pulsing, womanly biceps, and best of all, she looks very, very sweaty by the end of the story. Much of the appeal of the "traditional" horror movie comes from the boy-thrill of seeing a woman in a state of impossible exertion, and since "The Lazarus Experiment" is such a simplistic attempt at a forty-five-minute horror movie that even Heat magazine liked it, it's apt that both of the Jones girls should end up breathless in a loft.

'You name it, and I'll do mouth-to-mouth on it.'

7. "42". Well, clearly, I'm not going to pick Michelle Collins. I may be curious about the genitals of cat-people, but I'm not insane, for God's sake. This leaves us with two other doomed, sacrificial female crewmembers (and the author explicitly said that he was inspired by "The Impossible Planet" when writing the thing-that-passes-for-a-script, so obviously the female crewmembers are bound to be doomed and sacrificial). The woman in the medical section lacks appeal, but then, that's probably just because she's got the bad luck to be in an episode directed by Graeme Harper: no other director on Doctor Who takes the phrase "warts and all" so seriously, or spends so much time making sure that characters look as if their faces are turning septic, as fans of "Doomsday" will recall. This leaves us with the tomboy mechanic, who - like the Elizabethan barmaid - at least looks as if she knows that sex exists in this universe. The "appealingly sweaty" thing also comes into play again, though any character who works this close to the sun may cross the line between "appealingly" and "unhygienically". Still, Martha spends much of the episode trapped in a tiny escape pod with a man who doesn't look as if he changes his pants even when he's not in a crisis situation, and she never complains. Alternatively, we could give the forty-second century a miss and stay on Earth, with the svelte agent of Mr Saxon who'll forevermore be known to us as "Sinister Woman". This might seem promising if you go for the stern type, but she's also the kind of woman who'd be thinking about the Foreign Secretary all the way through the conjugal act. Comparing the end credits of "The Lazarus Experiment" and "42" also raises the question of whether Sinister Woman is related to Olive.

The Space Corps: supplying k. d. lang
fans to the galaxy since 2803.

8 / 9. "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood". Y'see, here's my problem. If I even suggest that Mother of Mine is worth considering as a sex-symbol - and dear God, just using the words "Mother of Mine" in this context brings on a tidal-wave of Oedipal horror and memories of Little Jimmy Osmond - then many readers will be likely to react with a degree of nausea. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you go for women with big curves, the important thing to remember here is that Rebekah Staton is deliberately made up to look as dowdy and pallid as possible, first as a slavey with bad skin and then as a walking corpse. She doesn't actually look like that. She usually does "slightly glamorous fat birds" rather than "maternal zombie fat birds", and indeed, if she appeared here as she does in BBC3's Pulling - quite possibly the worst sitcom ever made in Britain, in which she provides the only high points - then she'd probably be my choice for the entire series. If you're going on a date with Mother of Mine (feasible, because Father of Mine looks like a bit of a swinger), then you might realistically expect her to put on some lippy rather than looking as if she's just been exhumed. And even if she goes mental with the dessert trolley, you know she's got several lifetimes' worth of experience in her glowing green boudoir. No? Well, bloody sod you then. You can have Jessica Hynes, like everybody else. Telling, though, that it's easier for me to justify "fancying a cat-nun" than "fancying a woman with a big arse"… you people are just sick.

For all you know, that's a look of unbridled
alien lust.

10. "Blink". It's going to be Sally Sparrow, obviously. In "The Lazarus Experiment" or "42", you could have made a case for someone like Kathy Nightingale (good God, they're even named after birds), but not here. Because this is exactly what Shakespeare had in mind when he coined the phrase "foregone conclusion".

'…and I came top of the Bleak House list,
as well.'

11. "Utopia". Ah, now we've got a decision to make. If we can only pick speaking-part characters, and we've already used our joker, then we have to choose a non-human. The question is, will it be the blue insect woman or the '80s-hair cannibal girl? As with the cat-people, there might at least be some scientific interest in mating with a female who's equipped with visible pheromone glands, assuming that you are supposed to mate with her rather than fertilising her eggs while she's out shopping. But as with Martha in "Smith and Jones", Chantho's white coat and laboratory environment make her seem rather antiseptic, and she probably smells like formic acid in the heat of passion. By contrast, cannibal girl really is the dirtiest woman we've seen in the series so far, and the only surprise is that she's not already Big With Futurechild. You just wouldn't ask her for oral, that's all.

'80s-hair cannibal girl: makes you think
of that magic trick where somebody puts
their finger in a guillotine.

12 / 13. "The Sound of Drums" / "The Last of the Time Lords". Notable for being the one story in which we have a reason to be jealous of the Master, and it's clearly not because we want to be as bland as John Simm. The figure of the wife-accomplice, not so much a Lady Macbeth as a woman who just gets mildly aroused by criminal activity, is common in cinema but rare in Doctor Who. Countess Scarlioni in "City of Death" may get a kick out of planning art-gallery raids with her husband (whom she clearly believes to be gay, rather than an alien monster with no understanding of breasts), but at least she doesn't look as if she might have an orgasm while watching the execution of six-hundred-million people. Lucy Saxon's streak of hormonal evil is leaps and bounds ahead of anything in "The Shakespeare Code", and yet her most adorable quality isn't her sadism. It is, as I've already argued, the way she tries to dance when the Paradox Machine kicks in. She also scores points as "Woman Most Likely to Wear Jodhpurs During Role-Play".

Vote Saxon… because there's nothing like
watching posh white girls trying to get funky.

As ever, thanks to time-and-space.co.uk for the screencaps, although they probably didn't know I was going to letch over them.