CBEEBIES: Hey Duggee!

“Isn’t it time for….  Duggee!!!”

Most other parents I’ve spoken to about Cbeebies programmes will agree on at least one thing - Hey Duggee is great.

It follows the adventures of a Scouts-like club called the Squirrels, made up of various animals - Octopus, Crocodile, Rhino and so on - who earn their badges for doing different activities.  Their scoutmaster is an enormous dog called Duggee.  Or he is a normal sized dog and they’re all tiny…  It doesn’t matter - as we saw with Bing in the last Cbeebies post animal realism has no place in children's’ television.

Which sounds very plain and quite dull, and it isn’t either of those things.  For a start, the badges the Squirrels earn don’t dictate the adventures they have - it’s not a case of ‘they need to earn their climbing badge, they climb somewhere, get the badge, the end.’  Rather they have an imaginative adventure and a badge relating to what they have been doing is just presented at the end by Duggee with an enthusiastic ‘Woof!’ (By the way, Duggee doesn’t speak English, unlike the other animals, but communicates surprisingly well with a large range of expressive woofs.)

This gives it room to be a playful relaxed show rather than having each episode be a quest for something or have an objective to achieve (the opposite Cbeebies example would be the Go Jetters, who have to find a way to defeat Grandmaster Glitch each episode - but that’s a different post).  The Squirrels don’t even always have ‘adventures’ as such; sometimes things just happen in a dream logic sort of way.  As it should always be in children’s telly everything is bracketed in a friendly, non-threatening bubble without being bland or uninnovative.

This nice atmosphere and bright friendly colours makes it a very relaxing show to watch.  The shapes and animation style are minimalist and uncluttered, making it easy on the eye and easier to go haywire on doing different plots.  It has a fearsomely catchy banjo theme tune.  It also has a whimsical sense of humour which is emphasised by the narration - Alexander Armstrong is the celebrity voice for Hey Duggee and he is very good at doing the friendly upper-class patrician voice (think Stephen Fry’s voice for General Melchett in Blackadder IV with less psychosis).  The humour of the plots can be seen in the clip below, where we find out how far the Squirrels have had to travel on their treasure hunt...

The badges the Squirrels earn are always very specific to the plot that has happened, almost suspiciously so.  It wouldn’t surprise me that when Duggee rushes off to get the badges to hand out at the end of each episode, he’s actually running off to make them all as well.  For instance did a Dancing Bug badge really exist prior to the episode where Duggee had a bug dancing on him?

Also, did Duggee create the Squirrels Club, or is he just one of many club leaders?  And do the parents know about him giving the Squirrels a ‘Duggee hug’ at the end of each session?  If Duggee wasn’t a dog but a human that bit of the show would be a little bit dodgy…  

Forgetting the facetious niggles, Hey Duggee is probably the only Cbeebies programme I can binge watch if necessary.  And could probably binge watch on my own time as well as my son’s.  One of my favourite episodes is the Sandcastle Badge one - where the episode morphs from the Squirrels building a sandcastle into an episode of Location, Location, Location, with a deluxe castle being designed for a not terribly macho crab and his long-suffering friend Nigel. At the end of the episode, after the Squirrels have gone, the crab sees the tide coming in and says “Let’s enjoy it Nigel… While it lasts.”  Which is pretty much how I feel about each episode in the morning, before the maelstrom of life kicks off again.

TV: BoJack Horseman Season 4 (with lots of spoilers...)

"No, you don’t deserve to die young, only the greats die young. Oh, now you think you’re young all of a sudden!" - BoJack Horseman's conscience

BoJack Horseman is not your usual adult-oriented animation series.  Usually with this genre - The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Rick and Morty - the emphasis is on comedy.  And seeing BoJack Horseman for the first time (especially if you start with the first series), it seems on the surface to be very similar (although it has the best opening credits out of any of them...).

The premise certainly seems to superficially setting the viewer up for lols galore - in a world populated with regular people and animal people, a washed star of an awful but successful sitcom from the 90s gets drunk a lot and behaves badly.  About halfway through Season 1 though, it became clear that this was a cover story for being all that and an examination of depression in the deeply shallow world of Hollywoo.  The animal/people bit seems to to be a gimmick but after a few episodes it seems natural for a biped mansize dog with sunglasses to be marrying a normal human woman.

BoJack Horseman is a complex character, a nice way of saying he is a complete mess.  In Season 4 - on Netflix since last Friday - he claims he is poison, that everyone he gets close to he destroys, and there’s plenty of evidence to support his case.  Season 3 ended with his young co-star from the 90s dying after going on a massive drugs binge with him, and BoJack nearly committing suicide.  But right from the first season the show has introduced elements that give context to his self-destructive nature: his love-deprived background, his feelings that he has wasted his talents on something superficial and worthless, his borderline alcohol and drug addictions - and plenty more.

The theme of Season 4 is parenthood.  It’s an attempt to do more of a deep dive on why BoJack is who he is, how his current character was formed.  A young horse girl, Hollyhock, turns up on his doorstep to find out if he’s her real father.  At the same time, he finds out that his hated mother has dementia and he grudgingly takes her in - for a while.  With flashbacks we find out his grandparents’ and parents’ backstories, and the ghosts of the past (such as BoJack’s lobotomized grandmother) haunt the ghosts of the present (represented by his depression and his mother’s dementia).  Continuing the parenting theme, there’s the plot where Princess Carolyn is trying for a baby and miscarries, resulting in the break up with her boyfriend.

All of this would make the show remorselessly bleak which is why there are the more traditionally comedic subplots - Mr Peanutbutter running for Governor and Todd’s Clown/Dentist business are the ones that stand out, although if the Governor race is meant to satirize Trump it’s pretty toothless.  The fact that most of the comedy is in the subplots is enough indication of the road the series has chosen to go down by now, and it feels less and less essential to me as the drama intensifies, but maybe I just like the darker stuff…  For me that’s where the humour lies.  My favourite ‘joke’ of the season comes at 1:45 of the below clip, and is a lot funnier and truthful than the ‘idiot becomes politician’ jokes.

The middle-ground between jolly and fucking depressing is probably the sweet plot of Todd realising he is asexual and coming to terms with that. It's not a subject I know anything about and I think it is the first time I've ever seen it being dealt with anywhere, ever. So kudos for that in itself. The comic relief idiot character (Father Dougal in Father Ted is probably the best example) is usually an asexual. But the character actually becoming self-aware and seeking a support group to understand it? That never happens.

It’s quite ambitious to try to tackle all these themes and plots in one series though and although it does a very good job on it, there’s definitely some creaky structuring - after one episode covering BoJack’s guilt over Sara Lynn’s death, it’s pretty much forgotten about and the series moves on from it too quickly considering it’s essentially the cliffhanger resolution to the last Season (although in its defence that episode covers a year of BoJack’s life).  And I really don’t understand why Princess Carolyn and Ralph split up - it seemed very rushed and the plot just peters out, begging to be resolved properly.  And the whole campaign trail for Mr Peanutbutter just faded to nothing as well.  It did sometimes seem like the writers put so much into Bojack’s story they ran out of things to do with the others by the final 2 or 3 episodes.

Generally it’s a success though.  A real highlight is the episode ‘Time’s Arrow’, dealing with the story of BoJack’s parents getting together.  It’s viewed through the filter of his mother’s dementia, technically making it an unreliable narrative, but it’s pretty convincing and manages to make us feel sorry for Bea while at the same time not hating BoJack for his treatment of her.

And the big surprise of the series is that it actually ends in a really nice way - BoJack realises has some family he actually likes and has feelings for.  If the concept of the show is that things have to get worse for him before they get better, could Season 5 actually be where things start going right for BoJack?  Guess we won’t find out until next year...

BoJack Horseman Season 4 is out on Netflix now

CBEEBIES: The Dystopian Limbo Of Bing, And Other Theories

I wasn’t planning on doing another Cbeebies post so soon.  But since the last post, where we mentioned Bing only in passing, my wife and friends have put forward their theories about his parentage.

Then a Den Of Geek article last Thursday was solely devoted to the subject.  Obviously this is a hot topic, and it can’t be long before the scandal orientated tabloids will be knocking on Flop’s door, demanding the truth.

But who is Bing?  Bing is a loud and large rabbit, with a penchant for red checked dungarees and being a pain in the hole.  He has several friends of different species, who are roughly the same age and roughly the same size.  Sula, for instance, is an elephant, but is quite happy to play with Bing instead of trampling him underfoot because they take the same size in trousers.

Bing and his friends are analogous to toddlers.  They have parent figures - Bing’s is called Flop.  Flop is the real star of the show as far as parents are concerned, because he manages to solve Bing’s most recent meltdown so calmly - suavely even.  

A usual Bing plot is that Bing is playing with one of his friends (Sula seems to be a regular victim), or maybe just hanging out with Flop; something goes wrong for Bing, whether it’s that he lost at a game, or found out someone is better at doing something than he is, or they’ve not got food he likes in for tea; Flop patiently explains to Bing, in a very calm voice, why he’s behaving like an arse and what he can do to improve; happiness prevails.  The episode alway ends with Flop saying “[episode subject matter] - it’s a Bing thing!”  This means that a lot of seemingly everyday things are actually Bing things, including shadows, ice creams and growing.  Maybe the show is trying to claim everything that exists is Bing’s, step by step.

Flop has extraordinarily good parenting skills, especially with patience like his, and is an excellent role model for young Bing.  The reason why Bing’s parentage is of such curiosity is that Flop is a small orange soft toy about a quarter of the size of his charge.  And what takes this out of the realms of curiosity and into the land of very odd indeed is that every single animal in Bing’s town has a similar parent figure.  

Flop is definitely, in no shape or form, a rabbit (or any other sort of animal).  My longstanding pet theory is that he is, but in the land where Bing is set, children just happen to look like animals until they reach adulthood - when Bing becomes an adult he will overnight turn into something rather like Flop (it’s heartening to see that this exact theory was endorsed by the Den of Geek post).  My wife’s theory is that Bing and all of his friends are in foster care, and that the town is essentially a foster town, with altruistic bean bags taking on animal children from broken homes.

After posting the previous post, which wasn’t even about Bing, several theories from friends came forth on Facebook, including:

“Bing exists in a dystopian limbo in which young animals with learning difficulties are banished to be cared for by pastel-coloured knitted golems.”

“I've always seen Flop and his ilk as social workers or foster carers, but then coco's equivalent appears to be a very busy business 'woman', dumping them on anyone that'll take them, doesn't even say hi or thanks to flop for babysitting. Rude.”

“I've spoke to [my daughter] about it, and she very much thinks that Flop is Bing's dad. “

The Den Of Geek article covers several of the above theories and several others (and the internet at large has even more).  It’s obviously a matter of growing national concern, and it’s only a matter of time before the heavyweight journalists get involved and bring us the truth.  Unless Flop is bribing them to keep his story safe.

However all of this parentage stuff is a bit of a distraction from the main issue I have with the problem which is that Bing is an insanely irritating character.  He has an extremely whiney voice, and almost anything he says is bound to annoy me - but the worst is in the title sequence, where he trips, Flop says “are you alright Bing?” and he replies “yuh-hu-uh!”.  I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does.  It’s probably the lack of basic vocabulary - I expect more from a cartoon toddler rabbit on the BBC.  But as a character he is also very prone to being selfish and just always has to be the centre of attention - he’s very much a drama queen.  If I owned a rabbit like that, I’d probably try to give him up for adoption to a bean bag creature myself.

In closing, it should be noted that my son cares considerably less about Bing than I do.

Spot The Celebrity Voice - Mark Rylance (yes, RSC trained, Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance) as Flop.  The first celebrity voice I noticed on Cbeebies, it blew my mind how many famous actors were on the channel at first.  These days it seems odd if I don’t recognise any names at all.

TV: Rick and Morty

I love ‘Rick and Morty’. I'm not sure what I love best. It's funny of course. It lays sci-fi concept after concept on each episode so much so it doesn't feel like a 22 minute show. It follows its freewheeling internal logic much like Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, which is the exact same analogy I used for Cbeebies programmes last week.

‘Rick and Morty’, for the uninitiated, started as a one off spoof of Doc and Marty from Back To The Future. Rick is a scientific genius in the Doctor Who mould (ie, a main character who demonstrates very little actual science but is the figure we depend on for all the interesting and/or weird ideas) ; unlike The Doctor, he’s a hard drinking, foul-mouthed and (most of the time) callous old man.  

Morty, his grandson, is the straight man/fall guy/butt monkey, a stereotype teenager as per any other sitcom but a perfect foil and moral compass to Rick. They go on adventures together, and as time goes on the rest of the family get more involved especially Morty’s sister Summer.  The nature of these adventures are… diverse.  Trying to summarise any of the plots is hard, but they tend to involve one or two sci-fi ideas exaggerated to comic effect - one episode has a ‘Meeseeks’ box that creates aliens that solve a user’s problem and disappear - they start multiplying rapidly and then rebelling when they can’t help Morty’s Dad Jerry lose two strokes off his golf game. Meanwhile Morty tries to prove to Rick he can lead an adventure, murders a giant and nearly gets sexually assaulted by a jellybean (it is at this point, I admit, where Cbeebies comparisons no longer hold up).  There’s usually a hell of a lot packed into a 22 minute episode and whether you enjoy the programme or not you’re unlikely to be bored.

So the long anticipated third series has launched (although the first episode has actually been on YouTube since April). ‘The Rickshank Redemption’ is a classic example of this sort of dense plotting. The second series ended with Rick incarcerated so

this is about resolving that and pressing a reset button. It features Rick being tortured for information in a virtual reality system (that he outplays complete with a fake origin story); Morty showing Summer the consequences of Rick's ‘Doctor Who’ like hit and run approach to adventures by showing her his home dimension ruined in a callback to an episode from the first series; Rick transferring his mind into various other characters, including evil Ricks from the Council of Ricks; seemingly destroying all the plot continuity from previous episodes (whether the show really has done a Year Zero on its own past is yet to be seen but if it has it's a massively bold move)... And it still finds time to deal with Beth and Jerry's divorce.

A common plot of many ‘Rick and Morty’ episodes is this sort of Russian Doll - a simulation within a simulation within a simulation, a dream within a dream within a dream, a living battery within a living battery within a living battery, and so on. This episode takes that to its logical conclusion, with a Rick within a Rick within a Rick. It pulls it off again, although now I've recognized this formula I hope the show doesn't overuse it. ‘Family Guy’ was ruined for me quite early on when I became too aware of ‘remember that time when… ‘ cutaway gags being how the show worked.  That aside it makes for an extremely promising start.

The second episode, which is for many the first brand new episode, feels slightly underwhelming just because the first is just so batshit crazy - it's a Rick and Morty does Mad Max thing, which is still pretty good but I don't really like it when animated series (and it is largely animated series, especially the Simpsons) spend a whole episode on a parody of a specific thing. That said, this being ‘Rick and Morty’, there’s plenty going, including a revenge-bent arm and Rick bringing down the dystopian society by introducing free cable TV. I guess it's necessary to have a less complex plot for this episode as it's largely concerned with character development.

Terry Jones wrote of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books - an acknowledged inspiration for the show - that people don't really read them for the plots or the characters but for the sheer number of ideas that flow out. This is true of most of Rick and Morty - it spends more on character but I’d be very surprised if there are people who watch it to find out what happens with Beth and Jerry's marriage.  It’s probably obvious that I’m in it mainly for the sci fi surrealism, so this episode didn’t do it as much for me for that reason.

It’s still in my view the most creative show in any format right now though, and I’m incredibly happy to have it back.

CBEEBIES: Baby Jake, Raa Raa & Teletubbies

An occasional look at the weird, occasionally wonderful and often deranged world of programmes for toddlers

My morning routine more often than not involves Cbeebies.  I’m sure I’m not the only parent who is in the Cbeebies zone, although I’m sure some are happier to be there than others.  

One thing I like a lot about most Cbeebies programmes is the freewheeling logic where anything can happen - there’s often the surreal anarchy of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.  One of my favourite such moments is from Sarah And Duck, where Sarah and her best friend, a duck, are having a bonfire and the Moon just joins in and starts chatting to them.  It doesn’t change size or anything, it just develops hands and a mouth and the programme carries on as normal.  

I’m planning to look at much more of the Cbeebies programmes over time, but let’s start with some of the ones I see most regularly first thing in the morning:

BABY JAKE

Baby Jake is creepy.  Basically, Jake is a real baby who becomes a South Park-style cut-out animation character with a permanent smile.  In fact, more specifically, he is like Saddam Hussein in South Park: The Movie.  The narration is done by his in-story brother Isaac, and there are songs as well.  Luckily, I’m usually in the shower while Baby Jake is doing his thing, because he really creeps me out.  I think it’s just the cut-out thing - in the live action scenes that bookend the show he’s a perfectly cute little boy.  I’m obviously the sort of person who can’t help overthinking things - I am writing a blog about TV for toddlers for a start - but making the cut-out do things makes me think of some horror concept where a character is forced to do things like a marionette.  The jolly child narration and singing doesn’t alleviate this - in fact it probably reinforces it.  The episodes themselves demonstrate the freewheeling plots I was talking about perfectly - the one I just looked up at random is a space adventure with hamsters, and has plenty of bits of cut-out Jake flying past stars and planets.  

I do sometimes wonder whether in 15 years time real life Jake’s parents will boast to the girls he brings home about how he used to have his TV show and embarrass the hell out of him - I know I would.  I hope his parents are kinder than me.  Anyway, using our own toddler for experimentation purposes, he is mildly interested in the Yaccki Yaccki Yoggi song but generally the programme doesn’t grab his attention.  Sorry, Jake.

RAA RAA THE NOISY LION

Raa Raa is, indeed, a noisy lion.  He lives in a Jingly Jangly Jungle, claymation style.  His friends are a monkey, a giraffe, a zebra an elephant and a crocodile, who are all the same size as him.  Raa Raa is a good entry-level example of this sort of thing - if you can’t hack it with Raa Raa, Bing is going to be too rich for your blood, but that’s for another time.  

Raa Raa and his friends are quite fun - the episode I saw a few days ago had Raa Raa singing about his favourite things, taking them out on a walk, losing them all and his friends help him find them.  The tickling feather Zebra and Monkey were enjoying is nobly given back to Raa Raa when they find out it is his feather - or maybe they’re just worried if they don’t give it back they’ll be eaten.  The jungle setting is strangely white, which I have just realised as I write this, puts me a little bit in mind of episode 1 of the classic 60s Doctor Who story ‘The Mind Robber’.  Raa Raa’s relentless optimism and energy (and indeed noisiness) grates on me after the first five minutes or so, but that’s my problem for not drinking coffee before it’s on.  Lorraine Kelly does the narration by the way - for the uninitiated there’s more than a few ‘spot the celebrity voice’ moments on Cbeebies.  

For our son the theme tune will get him stood to attention watching - however, during the main programme he will run around losing his own favourite things.

TELETUBBIES

Teletubbies is the most famous of the Cbeebies programmes.  If you have never tuned in to Cbeebies you more than likely still know of the Teletubbies and can probably name them.  There is a laughing baby’s face for the sun, then Teletubbies come leaping out of holes in the ground like colourful moles.  The first bit of the programme normally has them picking up signals for us to watch something on their tubs.  This is normally a minute of a day out to a farm or a car show or some such, which is then repeated immediately.  After this, the Teletubbies, go and look at their children (Tiddlytubbies), eat some Tubbycustard or Tubbytoast, then it’s time for Tubbybyebye.

Which actually all seems quite conservative and low key in the current land of Cbeebies.  Even Postman Pat, in his super-turbo-charged Special Delivery Service incarnation somehow seems more modern.  That’s not a criticism of Teletubbies, a lot obviously goes into making it.  Its formula is quite strict, and is never really deviated from - the reasoning presumably being that children find comfort in repetition.  

Spot The Celebrity Voices: Jim Broadbent, Fearne Cotton and occasionally Jane Horrocks - not that you can recognise any of them

It’s not really something that keeps me interested but, crucially this is a programme that really does get our son watching, usually to the point where the only movement he makes is jumping up and down or pointing at the screen.  And that should be the main aim of any children’s programme.

TV & RADIO: Full Disclosure - The BBC Salaries

BBC stars being forced to reveal their salaries is a bit of a non-story isn’t it? Is it really a surprise to anyone that Gary Lineker isn't on minimum wage, or that Jeremy Vine earns more than a junior doctor?

Of course it's not. This has been at most an open secret; more realistically it is common knowledge. People on the telly get paid shitloads, and the majority of the high earners are white men. That is what we have learnt today.  Who knew, eh?

The real story here is the government of the day getting a dig in at Auntie Beeb, and our attitude towards public funding.

All governments seem to end up resenting the BBC, at the very least since the early 60s where ‘That Was The Week That Was’ showed the first signs of the dog biting the hand that fed it. Tory governments make more natural enemies for it because the BBC tends to be quite liberal, but Labour governments usually end up resenting it too; possibly because when they are in opposition it seems like the BBC is on their side, only to find out when they are in power they actually aren't.  Alastair Campbell famously met his match by going on a crusade against the BBC over the Iraq war, and losing because (according to Andrew Rawnsley’s book ‘End Of The Party’) people don’t just see the BBC as a news outlet but also as the people who make Eastenders and Cbeebies.

Theresa May is a Prime Minister who badly needs some heat taken off her and has found a convenient way of doing it, at least temporarily.  The reason why these salaries are being publicised is that May, and Cameron before her, demanded them to be.  That’s fair enough to an extent, it is public money after all, but the way it has been done is very obviously an attempt to shame the BBC.  It won’t work.  In the short term, some pay cuts may be made to some of the more bloated wages.  In the long term, to be honest probably in a day or two, people will go back to hating the politicians again.  The BBC makes things that people enjoy and politicians don’t - the BBC will always win a fight for the public’s heart against politicians.  This is a desperate act of spite that will do nothing except embarrassing a few people who are media-savvy enough to take it.

And pots, kettles, etc - who on earth are politicians, of all people, taking the moral high ground on this issue?  They’re hardly all scrimping and saving with the rest of us, the JAMs that Mother Theresa has done so much for.  We might be putting public money into the BBC but at least we get something we enjoy watching out of it, which is more than can be said for PMQs (they need a new showrunner there…)  They probably win on points regarding gender equality, but I’m pretty confident in saying that Westminster is not a hotbed of forward thinking feminism.

We do have a love/hate relationship towards public funding - no one enjoys being taxed, but most people enjoy the free healthcare and free entertainment that goes with it.  The BBC obviously isn’t our only source for entertainment - out of the old school main channels, there’s also ITV and Channel 4.  ITV commands similar ratings for programmes that to my eyes are much lower in quality.  Channel 4 - which is partly publicly funded as well - also produces interesting programmes.  However, it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that for many the BBC produces the majority of the media they consume, and that is because of the quality of the programmes it produces both for TV and radio.  

It is extravagant to pay millions of pounds to a small group of individuals.  It’s perfectly valid to wonder why the hell society seems to have always thought it perfectly sensible to pay actors and presenters more than doctors - that has always baffled me. But that’s not the BBC, that’s how it is everywhere, and the BBC has to compete within its market or settle for having less talent than its competitors.  It obviously pays less than other organisations because there’s always BBC stars ‘selling out’ to other channels for more money - and usually immediately losing their audience because they’re no longer producing something people want to watch, like those two off the One Show who went over to ITV and dropped off the face of the earth.  

Would I pay Chris Evans over £2m for presenting Radio 2?  Fuck no.  I wouldn’t pay Chris Evans to do anything, apart from to get the hell away from me.  Even if I liked him, I’d probably say £2m is too much.  However, most of the salaries on the list don’t seem batshit crazy when taken in context of the industry - it would be interesting to see them compared with their ITV or Sky counterparts but that’s not going to happen.  I suspect it’s a whole lot less, maybe comparable to wages of a private and an NHS doctor.  As far as I’m concerned the BBC has consistently good results in many areas and I’m happy with what they do.

Which is more than I can say for this government.  If you don’t like the idea of people being massively overpaid, don’t take your eye off the ball like May wants you to and instead think about how much public money she earns, and more importantly how much she spends - and in whose interests it is spent in.  

TV: Doctor Who Series 10 Finale

This blog contains spoilers...

The ending of the latest series of Doctor Who ends with the 12th Doctor stubbornly refusing to regenerate, something completely in tune with Capaldi's portrayal; and then meeting the first Doctor, possibly the only previous Doctor who can match the 12th Doctor for stubbornness.

Well I did say there were spoilers.

Anyway, that will all be dealt with at Christmas no doubt, Steven Moffat’s last flirtation with timey-wimeyness before he goes. Well his love of timey-wimeyness is less ‘flirtatious’ and more ‘rampant’ but you know what I mean.

This last series has seen the introduction of Bill, who has been one of the best companions in a long time.  Clara was originally created more as a development than a personality - the ‘impossible girl’ - and her departure last year, where she basically became a Doctor-like figure in her own right was a continuation of this, despite an attempt to giver her more character development in Season 8. That’s not to say she was a bad companion, but it’s refreshing to have a character that was more emotionally realistic and bult from the ground up.  In fact Bill’s character is probably my favourite companion from Steven Moffat’s tenure. Moffat sometimes can’t seem to help himself from going all timey-wimey on his characters, which isn’t always a bad thing in this kind of show - might not work as well in Corrie - but it’s nice that Bill became a powerful and realistic dramatic force in the programme to contrast with the weirdness around her.  Until she became a Cyberman and the Doctor couldn’t save her of course (you know by now there’s spoilers - if you’re annoyed about this spoiler you only have yourself to blame).

The build up of the evolution of the Cybermen finally gives them a origin genesis story in New Who - their introduction way back in Season 2 was basically the same as Genesis of the Daleks, but with Trigger from Only Fools and Horses instead of Davros.  Seeing the slow evolution of the Cybermen as something that a civilization willingly does in order to survive is believab

le (as far as Doctor Who goes) and creepy than the idea they started out as kidnapped homeless people by bad men and turned into robots.  The city (which has a strong 1920s ‘Metropolis’ feel), dominated by a hospital with its Inpatient, Conversion Theatre and Outpatient wards feels suitably decrepit and desperate. The patients, covered head to toe in bandages before being fully converted, are eerily sympathetic, and give a greater understanding of the point of the Cybermen - they started out as willing converts, and then went around the universe spreading the good news.  They’re technological evangelists.  According to the Doctor, all the vague and conflicting stories about where the Cybermen come from can be explained by the fact that this is where evolution takes everyone eventually, when mother nature can’t keep up with the demand for survival, humans give her a hand with their own augmentations.  These early Cybermen, based on the original Cybermen from the 60s, are suitably slap-dash and the best that could be done with limited resources (which in real life is exactly why the Cybermen costumes looked like they did in ‘The Tenth Planet’ making this episode partly a retcon 60s costume design).  It doesn’t take them long before they develop ‘war units’, who are the traditional armour plated Cybermen we are used to.

Oh yes, and that seemingly friendly man who looks after Bill for years in order to trick her into undergoing conversion?  Yes, that’s John Simm in disguise for the majority of the first half of the story, doing an excellent job of the Master being in disguise for an actual reason.  In the first multi-Master story the series has done, he is there in order to remind us how much Missy has become better at not being a completely villainous bitch and is starting to go over to the Doctor's side.  Simm’s Master is the traditional Master, the trickster who just likes being evil for evil’s sake.  He’s largely there as a counterpoint to Missy but steals a great many of his scenes.  When both versions of the Master murder each other (timey-wimey breakdown alert) there’s a brilliant scene of them giggling and laughing their heads off like naughty schoolchildren.

This series got the balance of dark and light just right.  The Doctor is still aloof but not as unkind or unsympathetic as he was in Season 8.  Most importantly, the plots have been entirely relatable and could be a great place to introduce someone to the series (perhaps - as long as someone could explain the Master to them).  If you’re ever trying to watch the show with a non-fan, Moffat is at his most frustrating when he over-eggs the clever plotting and it’s much more reined in here.  I’m looking forward to seeing how Capaldi’s Doctor finally ends, and of course finding out who his replacement is going to be...

TV: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall - Bewitching, brilliant - and that’s just what the continuity announcers said.

There’s been a lot of praise for the BBC series of Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, and it’s been extremely popular - according to a recent Guardian article it is the most popular drama since the modern ratings system began.  So why didn’t I get it?

"But did I leave the gas on or not?"

I tried reading the book of Wolf Hall a couple of years ago to see what the fuss was about, and found it really hard to get into - so hard that I didn’t in fact get into it and got distracted by something else.  I found it quite dry and boring, (which surprised me because I’m interested in the Tudor era in history and liked learning about the story at school).  Although technically it was still on my ‘things to finish’ list, it was way down. 

But I had the same thing with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - a bestseller that I’d found hard to get into but saw the film, and saw the light.  Seeing the film made me go back and reread the books and recognise that there was something I’d missed.  So I settled down to the dramatisation of Wolf Hall bearing that in mind, and you know what?

Well - it was a bit dry and boring… wasn’t it?

I was disappointed all over again.  I was being told this was ‘the new I, Clavdivs’ in the papers and most friends and colleagues seemed to really be enjoying it. too  The ratings seem to prove I’m wrong.  Everyone says that Mark Rylance was brilliant whereas I thought it looked like he sleepwalked through it with one expression (a man having a long and quizzical senior moment) before finally coming alive in the sixth episode.  Damian Lewis was admittedly brilliant as a charming and menacing Henry VIII.  Jonathan Pryce and Anton Lesser were well cast as Wolsey and Thomas More respectively.  And it all looked very authentic (whatever that actually means) in that Beeb Costume Drama way.  But the story seemed surprisingly divorced from emotion somehow - it showed other people’s emotions being enacted on screen but failed to inspire any in me.  I guess I was hoping to see something along the same lines as a Tudor House of Cards or The Thick Of It, a behind the scenes view of an arch-manipulator at work.  But we didn’t see that much of Thomas Cromwell’s Machiavellian skills until the end.  Instead of seeing ‘under-the-hood’ of Tudor politics, each episode seemed like walking in on a  series half-way through despite having been watching them all - you know, in order and everything.

So then I tried to enjoy it as a drama about Thomas Cromwell - The Man.  But with Rylance looking either mournful or like he’d forgotten to feed the cat I didn’t care enough about him.  And he doesn’t have that exciting a private life anyway - apart from a sequence in the first episode where his wife and daughter are killed by a fever, and a few other scenes here and there (he nearly gets off with Anne Boleyn’s sister, for instance) there’s not much to it.  Or rather, his private life and his political life were completely entwined.  

I, Clavdivs worked by taking a fairly marginal character (until his unexpected crowning as Emperor) and allow us to see events and characters through his eyes (although when it was dramatised Derek Jacobi managed to imbue the TV Claudius with liveliness and charm).  But the balance was all wrong in Wolf Hall - it felt to me we were seeing Cromwell’s life at the expense of seeing events build.  It felt like there were scenes missing that had been replaced with trivialities.  And the I, Clavdivs historical drama model doesn’t fit Wolf Hall in the end because Cromwell wasn’t by any means marginal - he was pivotal to the politics of Henry VIII’s court during this period.  

Wolf Hall also an intensely humourless production, bursting with a sense of the emotionally arid and dull.  A story that by rights should be very varied had exactly the same story arc for an entire three individual episodes (The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey; The Fall of Thomas More; The Fall of Anne Boleyn).  The sixth episode came alive (by comparison to the previous five at any rate); we saw Rylance absolutely take command and finally show the audience why his character has a fearsome reputation. 

Mark Gatiss wasn't very good either

Apart from a few forgettable one-off scenes in previous episodes, menacing relatively minor characters, we’d not seen evidence of him actually doing Henry’s dirty work.  Well ‘show don’t tell’ is a cliche, but like all cliches there’s some truth in it, and having people tell us that Cromwell has a fearsome reputation but not showing us why (until so late in the game) made for drama lacking in drama.  

I hated not liking Wolf Hall, because I was really looking forward to it.  Maybe I am missing out on what the biggest BBC2 audience of all time found in it, but I’m going to blame Wolf Hall and not myself for missing something this time round.

TV: Doctor Who - Last Christmas

Doctor Who often works by having The Doctor turn up in other peoples’ stories and own them.  So it was quite amusing seeing a Doctor Who story briefly invaded by Father Christmas in ‘Last Christmas’.

The last Christmas in Doctor Who terms was ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ and was a horrible mess.  (I first watched it recovering from a seizure, but further watches didn’t improve matters)  What was going on in it was anyone’s guess – it included the worst of Steven Moffat’s writing (the self-referential continuity, kitchen-sink plot) and I for one only kept watching to get a glimpse of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor – by then, all that Trenzalore stuff I just didn’t care about at all, and that’s speaking as a fan.  It being a Christmas episode we were sat around watching telly as a family I was expected to translate this into comprehensible drama terms for my parents and then fiancé.  Perhaps that has coloured my opinion of it as an episode, but I remember it as being something of a nadir.

Well it’s been a year – since that brief glimpse of Capaldi we’ve seen him in his successful first series and now in this, his first Christmas Special.  As with the episodes in this year’s series the plot in ‘Last Christmas’ is much more focused.  The story is set in a scientific research centre at the North Pole, but takes place in dreams, that turn out to be dreams within other dreams. There are aliens where you have to avoid even thinking about them (which gives ‘Blink’ and ‘Listen’ a run for their money in terms of Moffat's list of abstract threats) and there is Father Christmas.

I was deeply sceptical of Father Christmas being in Doctor Who like the Mr Grinch McScrooge I am, and if he had been in last year’s end-of-year pantomime any scepticism probably wqould have been justified as being a cheap gag.  However, in this episode Father Christmas meant something and I liked it.  Father Christmas represented dreams, and in this story dreams weren’t stable or safe – dreams were mercurial and potentially lethal.  To put it bluntly, if you were dreaming in ‘Last Christmas’, the chances were you had a face-hugging monster eating your brain.  Father Christmas strolled into a normal(ish) Doctor Who story to completely disrupt things the way the Doctor normally would.

 

"And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home!"

Doctor Who often works best when it’s in unchartered waters like this and has successfully messed around with dreaming and the unconscious from ‘The Mind Robber’ to the Dream Lord in ‘Amy’s Choice’.  ‘Last Christmas’ succeeded by setting up the audience for that most predictable and generic of Doctor Who stories, the base-under-seige, and then successfully throwing something as bizarre into the mix as Father Christmas and still getting away with it.

Nick Frost’s Santa was judged perfectly right – it was actually about as understated a performance you could ask for when the performance in question is Santa.  Peter Capaldi didn’t make any concessions to sentimentality just because it’s Christmastime, oh no – but he did show signs of his Doctor slowly thawing out as time goes on (oh, and grinned and whooped whilst driving Santa’s sleigh).  Clara was excellent as ever, although the weakest scenes seemed to be based around her, for instance the first dream sequence reuniting her with Danny seemed to just be going on for the sake of it; and the scene where the Doctor went back to save her but she had aged…  But then it turned out it was all a dream and she hadn’t!  Yep, it was a story about dreams but that was one little dream too far.

Those are very uncharitable quibbles though from a fan who was left happy.  This was a good episode of Doctor Who which didn’t patronise its audience (regardless of age or level of fan-knowledge), was scary, clever and funny – oh yes, this year Steven Moffat showed that guy who wrote last year’s show how it’s really done.  (Ho, ho, ho…  Oh please yourselves.)

It also showed that this supposed 'dark' direction that the show has taken is just as capable of lightness as earlier eras, but that lightness comes in chinks and comes with sadness - perhaps ironic that the Doctor Who Christmas Special with the least fairytale-like plot in some time should also be the one that gets to have Father Christmas.