Doctor Who & Any Dream Will Do - 31st March 2007

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