However, I am more than happy to have had him at the helm of Doctor Who for these last five years.   His vision for the series seemed to start out delighting pretty much all of the established fanbase, but as mainstream acclaim increasingly became the series’ bedfellow, Davies pushed harder to break into the television heartland occupied by The X Factor and Ant and Dec, and in the process seemed to alienate at least half of fandom.

But not me, though.  I was well and truly swept along by the revolution, even when we were subjected to episodes that really tested our commitment (series two’s “New Earth” was in retrospect a real lurch in terms of how far the show was willing to go in an attempt to be all things to all men).  What held the whole thing together was that the beats of each series were so right: the separation of Rose and the Doctor in year two, the realisation that he was not alone in year three, and the return of Rose in year four.  These were great arcs that allowed the show to parade its many wonderful qualities.

And within all this were stories that were absolute gems.  Sometimes these acted as little microcosms of Davies’ grand plan (“Turn Left”, “Human Nature”), and sometimes – even more admirably – these were simply stories so brilliant that they had to make it to the screen, even though they were completely unconcerned with the then current trajectory (“Blink”, “Midnight”).

“The End of Time: Part One” certainly doesn’t deserve the description of a gem, it was flabby, plotless and an exercise in simply putting pieces into their positions.  So what of Davies’ (and of course Tennant’s) final hurrah?  It seems apt that it’s utterly polarised fan opinion.  For my part, I thought it was sensational.

Kicking off part two with a scene that sat entirely outside of the story’s previously established chronology was a brave move.  Here we witnessed the Time Lord’s dying moments at the heart of the much-spoken about Time War.  The proposed solution to escape their fate appositely stretched across the ages in both directions, reaching back into the Master’s personal timeline as well as forward into the episode’s here and now.

It was an elegant example of story telling, and in truth almost the only piece of plotting in the entire episode.  This Doctor’s final battle saw him do little more than disable a spacecraft, re-enable it, fire a gun at a piece of equipment and open a door.  Indeed, the much vaunted grand plan to bring about the return of Gallifrey looked in retrospect to have been constructed on incredibly shaky foundations. Would the newly reforming Time Lord world have been destroyed should Naismith’s house have suffered a power cut?

This was a story that seriously lacked verisimilitude, such that I couldn’t even believe in the door behind which Wilfred was sealed for much of the finale.  And if you don’t believe in a simple glass door, then what chance the supposed technological complex and the Immortality Gate, and the Time Lords and physics and – well – everything?

Well actually there was something I could believe in – or two things, rather – Wilfred and the Doctor.  The acting of Messrs Cribbins and Tennant, not to mention the thoughtful and humanising dialogue they were gifted, actually enabled this episode to transcend its shortcomings.  Who cares that in the end there was no real consequence to the Doctor’s actions in “The Waters of Mars”?  Who cares that no clear reason was given as to why the Ood world had evolved so quickly?  Who even cares that the appearance of a TARDIS in a church window was never properly explained, and that given it was Christmas Eve there was barely anyone in that church in the first place?

Of course, some loose ends were intentional – we were left to stew over whether that dissenting Time Lord was the Doctor’s mother, Susan, Romana or even a regenerated future Doctordonna?  And as for the other dissident whose face was forever hidden behind his hands, he was surely a muse for those fans who will now go away and write a thousand adventures to explain his identity.

That it was to all come down to saving the life of one old bloke was classic Doctor Who, as classic as Sarah’s return to Hillview Road in South Croyden or the oft referred to Yeti on the loo in Tooting Bec.  Yet it was also brilliantly unexpected, and the signal for Tennant’s long farewell.

As the tenth Doctor travelled through time for one last time to see his old friends, it was as if Davies was gathering up all of his creations he had strewn across the Whoniverse so he could put them away and set up a clean start for the next fellow.  A shame then, that during his time Davies was less able to consistently pull together the threads of some of his storylines.  Yet in the mess of his Doctor Whos he and David Tennant and the rest of the team crafted some of the Time Lord’s greatest adventures of all.

And if the next man is a little neater than he, and better able to make a pair of shoes safe for walking in, then he has been awarded the chance to let his plotting excellence shine in future years thanks to the fantastic bedrock of heart and character that his predecessor has put in place.

The Doctor being helpless to intervene as history obliterates a nascent colony makes for a great character study, but left you wondering whether this was to be a real story or just a sequence of events observed, and in this respect “The Waters of Mars” could be said to partially revisit the Schrödinger Cat analogy used in the Steven Moffat episode “Blink”.

Tenuous thematic connections aside, Davies and Ford’s script for “The Waters of Mars” seemed to owe other debts to Moffat, most obviously taking an everyday phenomenon and turning it into a source of terror.  We’ve had light (or lack thereof) and now water – can we expect air and time to be the next microscopic predators to come after the Doctor?

But this is not a criticism, the extrapolation of H20 as a foe was expertly done, in particular the Doctor’s line about water being able to fell a mountain was chilling.  Indeed much of the dialogue in this episode crackled, in particular those exchanges between Tennant and the always brilliant Lindsay Duncan.  The moment in which she refuses to allow the Doctor to escape until he has fully appraised her of her imminent death was perhaps the most mature and complex scene Doctor Who has given us.  While the moments after when the Doctor is able to hear the colonists’ desperate screams was Who at its all time grimmest.

It was also the point, when the Doctor’s personal future, appears to have pivoted and set off towards this incarnation’s demise.  We can’t be sure, but it does appear that the Doctor’s reckless actions on Mars, have triggered everything that will now follow, as the Time Lord comes to learn that no one is bigger than time itself.

In the cold light of day, one might question why it would be this small band of space explorers that has finally pushed the Doctor over the edge, rather than – say – Pompeii, or the countless other events he has witnessed, and although the production worked hard to sell us the atrocity of these events, the Doctor’s motivation to act in this way and at this time still felt a little unclear.

But that aside, “The Waters of Mars” was brilliant television, a fantastic fillip to much of current weekend TV, willing to be bold and dark, as well as stupid and fun.  Adelaide’s brush with a Dalek was poetic and affecting, the Doctor’s descent into a kind of madness, thrilling and scary, and the battle with the waters of Mars a visceral, cinematic tour de force.

We’ve seen such work from Davies’ Doctor Who before, but here it was all the better for not feeling in the least bit grandiose or operatic, this was hardcore, something we haven’t experienced before.  And by the end of the story the Doctor had become a figure that we would no longer run to, but run from – now that’s definitely something new.

Adventures from each of the seven original doctors are promised; The Web Planet (all six episodes) is already up on the MSN UK website.

Further stories are to be uploaded one per week (I think), and are scheduled to be The Tomb of the Cybermen, Planet of the Spiders, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Caves of Androzani, The Mark of the Rani and Survival.

I’m not sure any of the more recent adventures have been licenced, or how long the archive ones will stay up online.

Barry Letts (right) with Jon Pertwee and Dalek

Like all major figures involved with Doctor Who, producer Barry Letts seemed to have his own personal anecdote about working on the show, one which  got endlessly trotted out to the benign bemusement of fans.

In his case, it was a bizarre story about recieving a letter containing a poem advising him of the proper pronounciation of ‘chitinous’. Yet that, and several other similarly prominent anecdotes about eyepatches and ‘Katy’s fella’, belied the fact he also had a great many fascinating stories to tell about the years he spent working on a fascinating programme, many of them relating to a pivotal moment in television history.

Originally an actor, Letts took a directing course in 1967, and one of his first professional engagements in this capacity was the Doctor Who story ‘The Enemy Of The World’. Two years later, he was offered the job of producer on the show, then in the throes of one of its many brushes with cancellation. Though it was in fact outgoing producer Derrick Sherwin who both devised a new format ( The Doctor attached to a military unit and battling Earthbound threats in the hope of countering the ratings slump) and had cast Jon Pertwee in the title role, it was Letts and his script editor Terrance Dicks who made it into such a huge success, even despite the additional headaches caused by the move to colour production.

And, if the various tales of strobing trousers and misjudging model sizes are anything to go by, they were headaches indeed.

The story of Letts’ hugely successful five-year stint on Doctor Who has been endlessly told elsewhere; suffice it to say that, with the arguable exception of the early ’60s  Dalekmania and the slightly later flirtation with Gothic Horror, the exploits of The Third Doctor, The Master (a character created by Letts and Dicks), UNIT and gaudy alien races like the Axons – famously forming part of a legendarily solid block of BBC scheduling – are the reason why Doctor Who has long been associated with Saturday evening thrills.

His skills as a producer, however, went way beyond creating ratings-grabbing edge-of-the-seat excitement; many stories had thought-provoking environmental themes, influenced by his own beliefs, and he was always ready to accept responsibility if it was thought the show had gone a little too far for younger viewers. He was also adept at creating headline-grabbing showpieces – such as negotiating the rights to use the Daleks after a five year absence, and coming up with the idea of combining all three Doctors to date for an anniversary special – without them ever seeming forced or contrived.

Most notably, all of these positives combined to impressive effect on ‘The Daemons’, a fondly-remembered tale that a far-sighted Letts specifically asked the BBC VT department not to erase; a plea, needless to say, that fell on unlistening ears.

In the early ’80s, he was again called on to oversee a reinvention of the show in the face of declining ratings, acting as Executive Producer while his younger counterpart John Nathan-Turner instigated an initially highly successful overhaul of the series as “intelligent sci-fi”. Right across his work on Doctor Who, it’s clear that Letts had a flair for combining action and imagination, which is perhaps why, by his own admission, his extra-curricular attempt at a realistic adult-orientated futuristic drama Moonbase 3 didn’t work quite so well.

After leaving Doctor Who, this flair was again exploited to its full potential as he spent over a decade at the helm – again with Terrance Dicks – of the BBC’s ‘Sunday Classics’ serials. Though seldom mentioned anywhere these days, it’s surprising how well-remembered many of these productions are, from countless Dickens and HG Wells adaptations to the award-winning Beau Geste, an infamous attempt at casting Tom Baker as Sherlock Holmes for The Hound of The Baskervilles, and a notorious re-imagining of Pinocchio with macabre overtones and a grotesque shrieking puppet interacting with live humans.

Though these productions were subject to much the same restrictions as Doctor Who, Letts would often use the limitations of studio space and primitive special effects as an advantage, taking the opportunity to create a deliberately unreal atmosphere or or stuffily claustrophobic historical world.

Though semi-retired by the late ’80s, Letts still occasionally undertook directing work (including a stint on EastEnders) and kept up his professional association with Doctor Who. The requests to give interviews and pen reminiscences gradually gave way to invitations to write new material, especially after the television show was cancelled in 1989, and Letts went on to write several radio plays and spin-off novels. While these latterday efforts didn’t always meet with a positive response, they were still a then-rare example of straightforward storytelling at a time dominated by fans turned writers gleefully breaking taboos.

That  he remained a well-regarded figure is testament to the fact he put a great deal of care and attention into his work on what could easily have been just another assignment. This was later repaid by similar attention from fans who appreciated his efforts; it’s rumoured he was recording DVD commentaries for old stories right up until weeks before his death. Quite simply he understood how to make an ambitious yet accessible family show more than most, and while that letter writer presumably had their reasons for wanting to ensure obscure scientific terms weren’t mispronounced in front of Saturday evening viewers, they were one of the few people who ever felt the need to correct him.

Sarah Jane and friends

So what links The Sarah Jane Adventures to The One Show? Answer below.

As Dave Golder’s already reported on the SFX website, last night saw the press launch for series three of the excellent Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The opener, ‘Prisoner of the Judoon’, is most notable for Elisabeth Sladen’s truly brilliant, and slightly bonkers, performance as an evil Sarah Jane. It’s a two-parter packed with thrills and gags, although, as Dave points out in his piece, the Chandra parents do come across as superfluous to the action… but they are nicely played.

The Judoon are never better, portrayed as bureaucratic, blustering plods, with no regard for humanity. Watch out as one commandeers a police car, and pulls up an anti-social motorist.

Introducing the screening, producer Nikki Wilson said: “This series it’s even bigger, bolder, funnier and deliciously scary. We also filmed in HD, so it’s really vibrant and really comes to life.”

In the Q&A season following the screening – slightly delayed while Lis popped to the loo (“It’s just too exciting!”), children took centre stage with the questioning. One asked if Russell T Davies still has an involvement in the show. “I had a text from Russell today,” revealed Lis, “saying,  ‘I’m sitting in LA, watching Sarah Jane defeat the Mona Lisa. It doesn’t get better’.”

We also learned Daniel Anthony (Clyde) was genuinely scared filming in a ‘haunted’ house; shooting in the attic is incredibly hot (Lis: “The worst place is in the back, where all the books are… if you survive the scene you get a Mivvi”); writer Phil Ford’s highlight this series is the aforementioned haunted house story (“It’s one that I’ve been talking about doing for ages”); and they got their money’s worth from David Tennant in his upcoming two-parter  (Lis, again: “Once we knew we had him, we worked him so hard. I think he was a bit sorry he came!”).

And the link between Bannerman Road and Ade ‘n’ Chris? Incredibly, it’s the same press officer working (very hard, it has to be said) across both shows.

And here it is.

Titled Dreamland, the six-part story will be available via Red Button and on the BBC’s Doctor Who website (who’ve just put online an introductory video about the project) . The whole thing – clocking up at 45 minutes – will then be screened in its entirety on BBC2 in the autumn, and the BBC HD channel.

Here’s what the Beeb is saying about it…

Written by Phil Ford (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sarah Jane Adventures) Dreamland will see the Doctor – played by David Tennant – arrive at the infamous alien hot spot, Roswell.

During a visit to a local diner he stumbles upon a mysterious alien artefact that leads him on a mission to rescue Rivesh Mantilax from the threat of the Viperox and the clutches of the American military.

Joining David Tennant will be Georgia Moffett (Doctor Who, Spooks) in the role of Cassie Rice – the Doctor’s new animated companion.

David Warner (Wallander, Hogfather) also stars as the leader of the ruthless Viperox.

In the run up to the animation, fans will be able to visit the Doctor Who website (bbc.co.uk/doctorwho) to follow a behind-the-scenes production blog on the making of Dreamland, giving the opportunity to follow the progress of the animation as it develops.

Dreamland was commissioned by BBC Drama Multiplatform and will be produced for the BBC by Brighton-based animation company Littleloud.

It is being executive produced by Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Piers Wenger, with Gary Russell as director.

Russell T Davies said: “Dreamland is a remarkable project and I’m thrilled with it. Phil Ford is a wonderful writer and promises to send the Doctor into a whole new visual dimension.”

Rosie Allimonos, BBC Drama Multiplatform Commissioner, said: “I‘m extremely excited about Dreamland. It presents an amazing opportunity to expand the multiplatform storytelling potential of Doctor Who.

“To offer the ability to watch this brand new Doctor Who animation on so many different BBC platforms is a real treat for our audience.”

Richard Deverell, Controller, BBC Children’s, said: “This is a wonderful addition to the already fantastic portfolio of CBBC programming. Having talent like Russell T Davies and Phil Ford at the helm of this project will no doubt ensure it captures the imagination of CBBC viewers.”

Award-winning channel CBBC also further reinforced its commitment to British animation as it announced that online portal Cartoon Works is expanding to become a new destination to premiere short-form content from the UK animation industry.

CBBC has also commissioned brand new animation Muddle Earth, based on the much-loved children’s books by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, and Shaun The Sheep returns to screens this Autumn in a series of new exploits.

Basil vs Dalek by DWM's Ben Willsher

So, in this month’s Doctor Who Magazine (out about now, so pester your newsagent), I have a 10-page feature wherein I try to discover if Doctor Who is actually good television.

Now, to be honest, this is more a conceit to talk to a range of TV experts who haven’t ever really gone on the record with their views about the series, so I hope there is some fresh opinion within.

When I submitted the piece, I also filed some additional box-out bits, but Editor Tom Spilsbury opted not to use them all.  So, with his permission, I’m slinging some of them here, on OTT. (I do also have graphs charting AIs, ratings and just general ‘success-ratings’  for Doctor Who – and elements therein – over the years, but some dull techie problems prevent me from getting them all online right now… maybe another time).

Thus, please do click-through; read these bits and – should you also buy DWM (and you should) – feel free to tell me what you thought of the piece. Here we go, then… Read the story »

Karen Gillan and Matt Smith in costume

A new era of Doctor Who gets underway today as filming began on the show’s 2010 series. And to beat the spoilers, Matt Smith’s new, pleasingly boffinish costume was revealed on this morning’s edition of Breakfast at 8.55am.

More than that, the press release attached to this event is the first issued by Premier PR – who also work on Ashes to Ashes, Hustle and Spooks – since they won the contract from Doctor Who‘s long-standing publicists Taylor Herring earlier in the year (although Taylor Herring will still be dealing with all press for the remaining David Tennant episodes). And here’s what it says…

Cardiff, 20 July 2009: Production started today on the new series of Doctor Who in which viewers will meet the Eleventh Doctor and his companion for the very first time.

The latest incarnation of the iconic character is played by Matt Smith (Party Animals). Upon arriving on set in Cardiff, for his first day of filming, Smith commented;
“I feel very privileged and proud to be part of this iconic show. The scripts are brilliant and working alongside Karen, Steven and the rest of the crew is an inspiration because their work ethic and passion for the show is so admirable. I’m excited about the future and all the brilliant adventures I get to go on as the Doctor.”

Accompanying The Doctor on his further adventures in time is a new companion, Amy Pond, played by Scottish actress Karen Gillan (The Kevin Bishop Show) who will first meet The Doctor in episode one of the new series.

New showrunner and long-running Doctor Who fan Steven Moffat has developed this series and, as Lead Writer and Executive Producer, will be responsible for the overall creative direction of the show, as well as plot and character arcs. Moffat’s previous episodes of Doctor Who, including the BAFTA-winning episode Blink, have garnered widespread acclaim from critics and fans alike.

About the series Moffat commented;
“And here it is, the big moment – the new Doctor, and his new best friend. And here’s me, with the job I wanted since I was seven. 40 years to here! If I could go back in time and tell that little boy that one day all this would happen, he’d scream, call for his Mum and I’d be talking to you now from a prison cell in 1969. So probably best not then. Matt and Karen are going to be incredible, and Doctor Who is going to come alive on Saturday nights in a whole new way – and best of all, somewhere out there, a seven-year-old is going to see them, fall in love, and start making a forty year plan…”

Piers Wenger, Executive Producer and Head of Drama, BBC Wales added;
“The scripts for the new series are every bit as funny, thrilling, scary and imaginative as you’d expect from the man who brought us The Empty Child and Blink. There’s a strange and perfect alchemy between Steven and Matt Smith and the next few months are going to be riveting as that relationship starts to emerge on screen. Steven always says he’s been waiting to do this job since he was seven. But it’s actually the Doctor who has been waiting for him.”

The new series follows on from three Doctor Who specials starring David Tennant which will transmit later this year.

Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning says;
“I am thrilled that a whole new generation of children will forever say that their Doctor was the wonderful Matt Smith.”

The series was co-commissioned by Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning for BBC One and Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One and will be produced by Tracie Simpson (Doctor Who) and Peter Bennett (Torchwood). Steven Moffat is Lead Writer and Executive Producer (Jekyll) with Piers Wenger, Head of Drama, BBC Wales and Beth Willis (Ashes to Ashes), also Executive Producing.

Filming is taking place in Cardiff until March 2010.

Darcy Bussell and Alesha Dixon to 'refresh' Strictly

Strictly ‘refreshed’, 16 celebs going around the world in 80 days, Take That headlining a Children in Need concert at The Albert Hall and Totally Saturday “not as good as it should be”: Today’s press launch for the autumn season on BBC1.

BBC1 Controller Jay Hunt was on confident, bullish form as she unveiled BBC1′s new season line-up (joshing the event was quite nerve-wracking for her “given what happened to my predecessor… I’ve looked at all the pictures you’re going to see today, and I didn’t see someone walking backwards when they should have been walking forwards… but I might have missed something”).

The headline story was Arlene Phillips’ departure from Strictly Come Dancing. She’s to be replaced by former Strictly champ Alesha Dixon, who will also be joined by Darcey Bussell for the last three weeks of the run. The show will also debut with a two-night special, running over Friday and Saturday. Details of the full line-up can be found on the BBC’s press site, so let’s cut to highlights from Hunt’s brief Q&A session with the press following the presentation.

On Arlene Phillips being forced out due to ageism: “Hand on heart it’s genuinely not. I mean, you’ve seen in the time that I’ve been here I’ve looked at an array of programmes in the BBC1 schedule and some of them needed a refresh. Whether it be Watchdog, where the decision was to take off a 30-year-old woman and replace her with a 60-year-old woman, or Country File. So, what’s happened with Strictly is really about refreshing that brand and making sure it remains as compelling for viewers as it always has been. As you can see, Arlene is leaving the show but I’m delighting she is joining The One Show – an incredibly important part of the BBC1 schedule, in fact the most prominent show on BBC1 after the News.”

On Graham Norton, who was barely represented in the season trails screened: “To be honest, lots of things weren’t mentioned. Graham was in the Comedy and Light Entertainment show reel and I’m incredibly glad to have him on the channel. As you know, his [chat] show moves over to BBC1 in the autumn as well, and that will be a big moment. Hand on heart, I think when we talk about creative risk on BBC1, and I was very clear when I took this job that if we were going to be serious about reaching out to different audiences, we would take risks… When I arrived [at the channel] we had Strictly Come Dancing and the Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, and they were the only returning entertainment formats that we had. At the end of this year, we’ve got a break-out hit with Let’s Dance For Comic Relief which saw off Saturday Night Takeaway. We’ve got Total Wipeout and Hole In The Wall, completely colonising that physical entertainment space and we’ve managed to make stand-up comedy cut through on a Saturday night. Who would have thought that? So we’ve had a lot of success, along the way we’ve had a lot of disappointments. Totally Saturday isn’t as good as it should be, but the interesting thing about that show is the feedback from viewers about Graham has been consistently strong.”

On if there’s going to be an Doctor Who element in Children in Need this year: “Yep.”

We pan across a Cardiff street where Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) is standing in front of a cash machine.  A mundane tableau, except that Gwen looks just like a character out of a TV drama.  Is it her immaculately styled hair? Or perhaps the way she seems to be wearing a costume rather than clothes?  The best science fiction succeeds in making the incredible feel credible, but that’s something that from the evidence of this opening episode is still beyond Torchwood‘s grasp.

It’s not obvious whether this level of stylisation is deliberate, or whether the production team are earnestly trying to make the world of Torchwood appear authentic.  If it’s the latter, it’s just not working.  In this episode we’re presented with Peter Capaldi (playing Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, John Frobisher), who is clearly a character that is meant to be steeped in sophisticated politicking.  However, this is all rather undermined by the fact he is dressed to look like a cross between the Demon Headmaster and an all too archetypal civil servant.

Then there’s the government computer system.  If a common-or-garden university network can track which accounts are active on which computers, you’d think the government’s PCs could at least do something similar.  Here, armed only with someone else’s log in details, junior PA Lois Habiba (Cush Jumbo) is able to access all sorts of confidential information – it just doesn’t feel believable.

We’re not asking here for authenticity – merely credibility.  It is said that when writing State of Play Paul Abbott didn’t research how investigative journalism actually works, he just made it up.  Whilst he might have got things wrong, there was always an air of plausibility to his newsroom.  Conversely the government machinations in Torchwood never feel authentic.

Mind you, in other aspects Torchwood: Children of Earth was really quite good.  Doctor Rupesh Patanjali (Rik Makarem) looked for all the world as if he was destined to become a Torchwood operative but – in a neat twist on our expectations – he was revealed in the episode’s last act as something more sinister.

Paul Copley’s performance as Clem MacDonald was also well worth watching, but then Copley is the type of actor that Torchwood needs – able to live up to the over-inflated realism of the lead characters, while still grounding his performance in authenticity.

And it all moved along at quite a pace too – this speediness in part thanks to the fact that the central storyline of (what seems to be) an oncoming alien invasion is one that most viewers will be very familiar with, meaning we could quickly fill in the gaps in the plotline as they came and went.

From here it’s going to whip along, such that by the end of the week it’ll all be done – and that perhaps is the most commendable thing about this third series – it’s probably going to be great fun. You’ve seen the (flawed) series, now enjoy the (equally flawed) rollercoaster ride – just don’t look too closely at the joins.