Doctor Who returned after being endlessly trailed for the last few weeks. I had my excitement levels ratcheted up earlier by scuttling over to YouTube to watch the full series trailer, just to get a squealy fan girl look at The Master. The first episode was always going to be a foundation laying enterprise where the audience were introduced to The Doctor’s new sidekick, junior medical doctor Martha Jones. Martha’s hospital was the setting, mainly because a backwards black cloud sucked the building up to the moon.
Martha was remarkably unfazed, although she has lived through the Cyberman invasion and some weird spaceship over the Thames so it was understandable. The moon was overrun with the Judoon, rhino type monsters in fetching contoured body armour, who isolated the hospital to try and screen out a human looking blood thirsty Plasmavore hiding amongst the Earthlings.
Being of alien stock himself, The Doctor was in danger but the Judoon tracked down the Plasmavore, in an old lady guise, before abandoning the humans to a booby trapped MRI and diminishing oxygen levels.
It all ended well, naturally. Martha went back to her younger brother’s birthday party, and a predictable family row. The Doctor however was smitten and couldn’t keep away from young Martha – not after he managed to plant a crisis kiss on her back on the moon. The unflappable Martha gladly stepped aboard The Tardis and flew (according to the sneak peek) into the past with The Doctor.
In all, it was a good episode, tightly plotted with nice knowing nods to past episodes (for the army of Geeks who’d be happily emailing Russell T Davis the flaws otherwise). There were some cute one liners too – the usual David Tennant charm and Martha’s quip regarding the Plasmavore’s Stig like henchmen (‘aliens? Where from, planet Zovirax?’)
Freema Agyeman was more than competent, a charming and marginally less annoying companion for The Doctor than Rose, and with much more chemistry which I will look forward to watching develop. I’ll return to the series I imagine – just to see how much better it can get.
Any Dream Will Do repeated last year’s How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? (Where they found Connie “I-can-do-eight-shows-a-week-oh-no-I-can’t-I-have-a-sore-throat-again” Fisher.) Here they auditioned several nubile young men for the part of Joseph in a revival of Rice and Lloyd-Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Lloyd-Webber ‘scoured the regions’ for raw talent. When I say scoured I do, of course, mean he was chauffer driven. When I say regions, I do, of course, mean he ventured all the way to Camden, London. (And I still labour under the illusion that the UK is made up of so much more than the grubby capital.)
Toothsome twinsomes John Barrowman and Denise Van Outen helped chair the panel with pudding faced vocal coach Zoë Tyler and doddery Everton chairman Bill Kenwright. Every candidate sounded the same and seemed to look one of two ways – scruffily handsome and rugged or fresh skinned pasty faced pretty boys.
It was almost entertaining in a laboriously repetitive way. Thankfully it is something I’m sure I can dip and out of. If I can be arsed.
Can’t understand the fuss over Doctor Who? Love West End Musical more than life itself? Chillywinter@hotmail.co.uk
Saturday 31 March 2007
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Life on Mars/Interview With a Poltergeist - 6th March 2007
Sam Tyler had to endure yet another episode of Life on Mars where he was right (‘it’s not the IRA!’) but his belligerent colleagues refused to believe him until he had irrefutable proof. Surely by now even his misanthropic, racist boss Gene Hunt would have stopped in his tracks – just for a moment – to wonder, ‘why is this guy always right?’
Hunt was determined to thwart on IRA campaign by arresting anyone whose surname began with an “O” – before indulging in a bit of ‘Paddy’ bashing. Now, I don’t remember the 1970s – mainly because I wasn’t born (the parents were only nippers) but I always imagine it to be brown and dingy yellow and the Life on Mars set certainly seems steeped in these grim tones. Maybe on the first day of 1980 people had to be treated for shock because they saw the colour red for the first time.
Already half way through what is the last ever series, it is difficult to know where this will go – will we ever find out why Sam Tyler is in the 1973 coma – if that’s what it is? And if he suddenly wakes up, won’t it be ever-so-slightly contrived? Still, I can only trust in the excellent writing so far, even if Sam’s coma trauma tends to manifest in sinister TV characters and an irritatingly smug mystery caller on a brown bakelite phone. The best line of the night was in the pub when Sam tried to explain why a traumatised Ray was behaving oddly, “He’s got PTSD” he said. Hunt was appalled. “He’s a bloody hero, and you’re saying he’s got the clap!”
Interview with a Poltergeist, followed up on the story of the ‘poltergeist’ found in North London in 1977 where furniture, fireplaces and children alike were thrown across various rooms. Seeing the original police interview of the time only served to make Life on Mars seem like a biting piece of 1970s realism – “W”PCs with flicked hair and clipped accents and scruffy looking men with bushy unkempt collar length mops and beige tank tops.
The scariest thing about the whole show was not the undoubtedly weird ‘paranormal’ activity but the state of one the girls, Janet Hodgson, now – skeletal, pale with long witch-like hair, she spoke through sallow cheeks with all the clarity and articulation of Pete Doherty after a heavy night in China Whites. I’m hoping this is less a result of heroin and more a result of long standing physic trauma from being dragged out of bed of a night by an irate dead pensioner.
The fabulous looking paranormal investigator, complete with crazy moustache and bottle-bottom glasses, had sadly died by the time the programme was aired. Hopefully for him, the riddle of that house has now been solved since the show left the viewer with no answers at all and a frustratingly balanced perspective.
Love the 1970s? Believe in ghosts? Chillywinter@hotmail.co.uk
Hunt was determined to thwart on IRA campaign by arresting anyone whose surname began with an “O” – before indulging in a bit of ‘Paddy’ bashing. Now, I don’t remember the 1970s – mainly because I wasn’t born (the parents were only nippers) but I always imagine it to be brown and dingy yellow and the Life on Mars set certainly seems steeped in these grim tones. Maybe on the first day of 1980 people had to be treated for shock because they saw the colour red for the first time.
Already half way through what is the last ever series, it is difficult to know where this will go – will we ever find out why Sam Tyler is in the 1973 coma – if that’s what it is? And if he suddenly wakes up, won’t it be ever-so-slightly contrived? Still, I can only trust in the excellent writing so far, even if Sam’s coma trauma tends to manifest in sinister TV characters and an irritatingly smug mystery caller on a brown bakelite phone. The best line of the night was in the pub when Sam tried to explain why a traumatised Ray was behaving oddly, “He’s got PTSD” he said. Hunt was appalled. “He’s a bloody hero, and you’re saying he’s got the clap!”
Interview with a Poltergeist, followed up on the story of the ‘poltergeist’ found in North London in 1977 where furniture, fireplaces and children alike were thrown across various rooms. Seeing the original police interview of the time only served to make Life on Mars seem like a biting piece of 1970s realism – “W”PCs with flicked hair and clipped accents and scruffy looking men with bushy unkempt collar length mops and beige tank tops.
The scariest thing about the whole show was not the undoubtedly weird ‘paranormal’ activity but the state of one the girls, Janet Hodgson, now – skeletal, pale with long witch-like hair, she spoke through sallow cheeks with all the clarity and articulation of Pete Doherty after a heavy night in China Whites. I’m hoping this is less a result of heroin and more a result of long standing physic trauma from being dragged out of bed of a night by an irate dead pensioner.
The fabulous looking paranormal investigator, complete with crazy moustache and bottle-bottom glasses, had sadly died by the time the programme was aired. Hopefully for him, the riddle of that house has now been solved since the show left the viewer with no answers at all and a frustratingly balanced perspective.
Love the 1970s? Believe in ghosts? Chillywinter@hotmail.co.uk
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