About Time 7: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who (Series 1 & 2)

By Tat Wood

About Time vol. 7 continues an examination of the real-world social-political context in which each Doctor Who story was made, this time focusing on Series 1 and 2 of the revamped series (2005 to 2006) starring Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. Essays in this volume include: Why Now? Why Wales?; RT Phone Home?; Is the New Series More Xenophobic?; Why is Trinity Wells on Jackie's Telly?; He Remembers This How?; What's Happened to the Daleks?; Why Doesn't Anyone Read Any More?; Reapers - Err, What?; What's So Great About the 51st Century?; Gay Agenda? What Gay Agenda?; Does Being Made in Wales Matter?; Did He Fall or Was He Pushed?; Bad Wolf - What, How and Why?: What's a 'Story' Now?; How Long is Harriet in No. 10?; Has All the Puff 'Totally' Changed Things?; Stunt Casting: What Are the Dos and the Dont's?; The Great Powell Estate Debate; Is Arthur the Horse a Companion?; Are Credited Authors Just Hired Hands?; How Many Cyber-Races Are There?; and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MadNorwegian
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781935234296

Book preview

About Time 7

The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who (Series 1 and 2)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Copyright © 2013 Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

Published by Mad Norwegian Press (www.madnorwegian.com)

Cover art by Jim Calafiore. Cover colors by Richard Martinez. Jacket and interior design by Christa Dickson.

First Print Edition: August 2013.

First Digital Edition: January 2014.

Table of Contents

How Does This Book Work?

Series 1

X1.1: Rose

X1.2: The End of the World

X1.3: The Unquiet Dead

X1.4: Aliens of London

X1.5: World War Three

X1.6: Dalek

X1.7: The Long Game

X1.8: Father’s Day

X1.9: The Empty Child

X1.10: The Doctor Dances

X1.11: Boom Town

X1.12: Bad Wolf

X1.13: The Parting of the Ways

X1.13a: Pudsey Cutaway

Series 2

X2.0: The Christmas Invasion

X2.1: New Earth

X2.2: Tooth and Claw

X2.3: School Reunion

X2.4: The Girl in the Fireplace

X2.5: Rise of the Cybermen

X2.6: The Age of Steel

X2.7: The Idiot’s Lantern

X2.8: The Impossible Planet

X2.9: The Satan Pit

X2.10: Love & Monsters

X2.11: Fear Her

X2.12: Army of Ghosts

X2.13: Doomsday

Sidebars

Why Now? Why Wales?

RT Phone Home

Is the New Series More Xenophobic?

Why is Trinity Wells on Jackie’s Telly?

He Remembers This How?

What’s Happened to the Daleks?

Why Doesn’t Anyone Read Any More?

Reapers - Errr... What?

What’s So Great About the 51st Century?

Gay Agenda? What Gay Agenda?

Does Being Made in Wales Matter?

Did He Fall or Was He Pushed?

Bad Wolf - What, How and Why?

What’s a Story Now?

How Long is Harriet in Number 10?

Has All the Puff Totally Changed Things?

Stunt-Casting: What Are the Dos and Don’ts?

Why the Great Powell Estate Date Debate?

Is Arthur the Horse a Companion?

Are Credited Authors Just Hired Hands?

How Many Cyber-Races Are There?

Are We Touring Theme-Park History?

Can He Read Smells?

Why’s the Doctor So Freaked Out by a Big Orange Bloke?

Is Doctor Who Fandom Off-Topic?

Was Series Two Supposed to be Like This?

What Are the Most Over-Familiar Locations?

Was 2006 the Annus Mirabilis?

Other Ebooks Available from Mad Norwegian Press

About the Authors

How Does This Book Work?

About Time prides itself on being the most comprehensive, wide-ranging and at times almost unnervingly detailed handbook to Doctor Who that you might ever conceivably need, so great pains have been taken to make sure there’s a place for everything and everything’s in its place. Here are the rules…

Every Doctor Who story (or, since 2005’s relaunch, episode) gets its own entry, and every entry is divided up into four major sections. The first, which includes the headings Which One is This?, Firsts and Lasts and Watch Out For..., is designed to provide an overview of the story for newcomers to the series (and with BBC America’s hefty promotion of Matt Smith’s Doctor, this may mean a lot more people even than joined us in 2005/6) or relatively lightweight fans who aren’t too clued-up on a particular era of the programme’s history. We might like to pretend that all Doctor Who viewers know all parts of the series equally well, but there are an awful lot of people who - for example - know the 70s episodes by heart and don’t have a clue about the 80s or 60s. This section also acts as an overall Spotters’ Guide to the series, pointing out most of the memorable bits.

After that comes the Continuity section, which is where you’ll find all the pedantic detail. Here there are notes on the Doctor (personality, props and cryptic mentions of his past), the supporting cast, the TARDIS and any major characters who might happen to wander into the story. Following these are The Non-Humans, which can best be described as high geekery... we’re old enough to remember the Doctor Who Monster Book, but not too old to want a more grown-up version of our own, so expect full-length monster profiles.

Next is History, for stories set on Earth, and Planet Notes otherwise - or sometimes vice versa if it’s a messed-up Earth or a planet we’ve seen before. Within these, Dating is our best-guess on available data for when a story happens. Also, given its prominence in the new series, we’ve added a section on The Time War.

To help us with the Dating, we may have recourse to Additional Sources: facts and factoids not in broadcast Doctor Who but nonetheless reliable, such as the DVD commentaries, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood or cut scenes.

Slightly more frivolously, we have included a Catchphrase Counter for recurrent turns of phrase and a Deus ex Machina list for suspiciously-convenient ways that the story has been made to fit into 42 minutes of screen-time and not end with everyone dead. These form a significant part of the flavour of the twenty-first century episodes, just as cliffhangers were for the earlier iteration.

Of crucial importance: note that throughout the Continuity section, everything you read is true - i.e. based on what’s said or seen on-screen - except for sentences in square brackets [like this], where we cross-reference the data to other stories and make some suggestions as to how all of this is supposed to fit together. You can trust us absolutely on the non-bracketed material, but the bracketed sentences are often just speculation. (Another thing to notice here: anything written in single inverted commas - ‘like this’ - is a word-for-word quote from the script or something printed on screen, whereas anything in double-quote marks like this isn’t.)

The third main section is Analysis, which comprises anything you might need to know to watch the episode the same way that anyone on the first night, sat in front of BBC1 on a Saturday teatime (or whenever), would have; the assumed background knowledge. Some of this is current issues or concerns - part of the plucked from today’s headlines appeal of Doctor Who right from the power-politics over new technology in the very first story (1.1, An Unearthly Child) - some of it is more nuanced. Overseas or younger viewers might not be aware of the significance of details that don’t get flagged up overtly as worth knowing, such as the track-record of a particular performer and what that brings to the episode, or what a mention of a specific district of London would mean to UK viewers. These are your crib-notes. The Big Picture handles the politics, social issues and suchlike occupying the minds of the authors. Many Doctor Who fans know that 15.4, The Sun Makers was supposed to be satirical, but even an apparently throwaway piece of fluff such as 17.1, Destiny of the Daleks has a weight of real-world concerns behind it. New for this volume, English Lessons (and sometimes Welsh Lessons) tackles the allusions and vocabulary that BBC1 viewers all have at their fingertips and all the nuances underlying apparently innocent remarks. More than ever before, the Oh, Isn’t That...? listing will tell you why what might seem an innocuous piece of casting means more to us first-nighters than to anyone else.

Up next is Things That Don’t Make Sense, which in this volume continues to cover plot-logic, anachronisms, science-idiocy, characters’ apparent amnesia about earlier stories or incidents and other stupid lapses, but rarely the production flaws or the naff effects and sets for which the series was hitherto notorious. Finally, for this section, Critique is as fair-minded a review as we can muster; sometimes, this has required a bipartisan approach with Prosecution and Defence, but not in Volume 7.

The final section, The Facts, covers cast, transmission dates and ratings, overseas translations, edits and what we’ve now taken to calling Production: the behind-the-scenes details that are often so well-known by hardened fans as to have the status of family history. We try to include at least one detail never before made public, although these days finding anything nobody’s said to any of the dozens of interviewers hanging around Cardiff is increasingly hard, unless you get into outright gossip or somehow manage to crack BBC Wales’ occasionally impenetrable news-management arrangements.

A lot of issues relating to the series are so big that they need forums all to themselves, which is why most story entries are followed by mini-essays. Here we’ve tried to answer all the questions that seem to demand answers, although the logic of these essays changes from case to case. Some of them are actually trying to find definitive answers, unravelling what’s said in the TV stories and making sense of what the programme-makers had in mind. Some have more to do with the real world than the Doctor Who universe, and aim to explain why certain things about the series were so important at the time. Some are purely speculative, some delve into scientific theory and some are just whims, but they’re good whims and they all seem to have a place here. Occasionally we’ve included endnotes on the names and events we’ve cited, for those who aren’t old enough or British enough to follow all the references.

We should also mention the idea of canon here. Anybody who knows Doctor Who well, who’s been exposed to the TV series, the novels, the comic-strips, the audio adventures and the trading-cards you used to get with Sky Ray ice-lollies will know that there’s always been some doubt about how much of Doctor Who counts as real, as if the TV stories are in some way less made-up than the books or the short stories. We devoted a thumping great chunk of Volume 6 to this topic, but for now it’s enough to say that About Time has its own specific rules about what’s canonical and what isn’t. In this book, we accept everything that’s shown in the TV series to be the truth about the Doctor Who universe (although obviously we have to gloss over the parts where the actors fluff their lines). Those non-TV stories which have made a serious attempt to become part of the canon, from Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures to the audio adventures from Big Finish, aren’t considered to be 100 percent true, but do count as supporting evidence. Here they’re treated as what historians call secondary sources, not definitive enough to make us change our whole view of the way the Doctor Who universe works, but helpful pointers if we’re trying to solve any particularly fiddly continuity problems.

It’s worth remembering that unlike (say) the stories written for the old Dalek annuals, the early Virgin novels were an honest attempt to carry on the Doctor Who tradition in the absence of the TV series, so it seems fair to use them to fill the gaps in the programme’s folklore even if they’re not exactly - so to speak - fact.

You’ll also notice that we’ve divided up About Time according to era, not according to Doctor. Since we’re trying to tell the story of the series, both on- and off-screen, this makes sense. The actor playing the Main Man might be the only thing we care about when we’re too young to know better, but anyone who’s watched the episodes with hindsight will know that there’s a vastly bigger stylistic leap between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive than there is between Logopolis and Castrovalva. Volume 4 covers the producerships of Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams, two very distinct stories in themselves, and everything changes again - when Williams leaves the series, not when Tom Baker does - at the start of the 1980s. With Volume 7, the amount of material has necessitated that the remainder of the Russell T Davies era will be covered in Volume 8, with Steven Moffat’s tenure discussed in Volume 9 and beyond.

There’s a kind of logic here, just as there’s a kind of logic to everything in this book. There’s so much to Doctor Who, so much material to cover and so many ways to approach it, that there’s a risk of our methods irritating our audience even if all the information’s in the right places. So we need to be consistent, and we have been. As a result, we’re confident that this is as solid a reference guide / critical study / monster book as you’ll ever find. In the end, we hope you’ll agree that the only realistic criticism is: "Haven’t you told us too much here?"

Series 1

X1.1: Rose

(26th March, 2005)

Which One is This?

For a whole new audience, this is the one where Rose Tyler meets a mysterious stranger called the Doctor and an amazing adventure begins. For a lot of other people, it’s Spearhead from Space (7.1) on 78rpm and with that kid who was married to Chris Evans [1] .

Firsts and Lasts

Deep breath, and... the first Doctor Who of the twenty-first century is the first episode of the series made in the BBC Wales facilities. (For future reference, BBC Wales is a subdivision of the British Broadcasting Corporation but, being primarily for the population of Wales, makes a lot of local-interest programming that nobody in the rest of the UK ever sees. Some of this is bilingual in Welsh and English, but most Welsh-language broadcasting has, since 1982, been made by S4C: a network partly funded by the BBC but which shows commercials - some of these also in Welsh. See Does Being Made in Wales Matter? under X1.11, Boom Town.) This makes the new Doctor Who the first BBC Wales production to have been explicitly made for export, not just to the rest of Britain (they’d done a few dramas like that before), but potentially globally.

It is the first Doctor Who story to be made on Field-Removed video, the film-look digital technique preferred by most TV drama companies. (See What Difference Did Field-Removed Video Make? under X4.15, Planet of the Dead.) The episodes were shot as if on film - with a single camera, a cinematographer and multiple takes from various angles - rather than the three-camera gallery-directed format that had worked (sometimes, only just) until 1989. Rose is also the first orthodox episode since 1966 to have an individual episode-title (see What’s a Story Now? under X1.13a Pudsey Cutaway), and, barring the freakish experiment of Season Twenty-Two, the first time a series of thirteen 45-minute episodes has been shown - the BBC doesn’t do commercial breaks, so that’s the length most imported US dramas come out at when shown by them (and anyone who thinks that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a bad model for a British-made family-orientated fantasy series will really hate the next few years). As such, this is the first episode to have trailers for the following episode (technically, they are called throw-forwards) woven into the end-credits as anything other than a provocative title over the closing shot (as per the black and white episodes). It’s the first of three episodes this year to be directed by Keith Boak, who, mysteriously, wasn’t ever asked back.

This is the first time a series of Doctor Who has been authored, with a designated head writer (who is also one of the three executive producers) not only providing the bulk of the scripts but the ideas for the remainder, and a close supervision of both form and content. Russell T Davies, the soi-disant show-runner, instigated a lot of other American-style procedural changes, running this new, vast operation on more than the memos-and-chats-at-the-bar arrangement that had been common at Television Centre until the 1980s. It’s the start of the culture of Tone Meetings and the commissioning of effects from various outside contractors (a practice that had more or less ended with 4.8, The Faceless Ones, and even then it had generally been one contractor per story for everything - generally in-house, but see 10.4, Planet of the Daleks) under the aegis of one overall series designer and a number of specialists within his department. (This is perhaps the most fundamental change of all: hitherto, the only people who worked full-time on Doctor Who were the producer, the script editor and the production secretary, with various BBC staff assigned to each story and freelancers hired in ad hoc; see the accompanying essay for more.) We have the first use of an in-house choreographer to direct alien movements across the series (c.f. 2.5, The Web Planet). The full-time composer Murray Gold begins his marathon stint (105 episodes and two Proms concerts, four arrangements of the theme-tune and those for Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures), and we get the first use of a few of his most distinctive motifs, including one - a wordless vocal by Melanie Pappenheim - that has gained a certain notoriety for flagging-up outrageous plot contrivances...

After decades of London standing in for Tombstone, Arizona; the Isop galaxy; the Court of Kublai Khan; and anywhere else the TARDIS lands, we have another city (Cardiff) standing in for London, with shots of the real London recorded as if on a foreign location shoot (in a sense, they were). We get to see a new TARDIS prop, with a metallic plaque instead of the plywood one and the correct proportions for a police box (until now it was slightly smaller, originally made to be conveyed in lifts to and from studios according to fan lore). The interior is new, with a brass/coral look and a permanently fixed chair for the first time ever. We see the first use of a new design of Gallifreyan script, the first of several alien languages devised by senior graphics designer Jenny Bowers (who also designed the logo for Henrik’s, the department store where Rose works, and which will be back in later episodes).

This is the first time that episodes have premiered on Saturdays at 7.00pm, rather later than before, and been repeated on digital channel BBC3 twice over the weekend. BBC3 also showed a 30-minute (expanded to 45 minutes with Series Two) behind-the-scenes puff’ show, Doctor Who Confidential, immediately after each first-run episode. This and others were allowed access to the making of the series as part of its promotional strategy. (See Has All the Puff Totally Changed Things? under X2.1, New Earth.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, this story marks the debuts of Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler, Noel Clarke as Mickey Smith, monster-actor Paul Kasey (the Pat Gorman de nos jours), voice actor Nicholas Briggs and - possibly more important than any of these (certainly for merchandising revenue and plot-convenience) - the new-look sonic screwdriver. That’s probably the biggest change since the 1960s: this story sees the start of Doctor Who as a huge business venture from the outset, rather than this being an accidental, if welcome and occasionally hilarious, side-effect. (See Why Was There So Much Merchandising? under 11.4, The Monster of Peladon; Did They Think We’d Buy Just Any Old Crap? under 22.5, Timelash; and Great 21st Century Merchandising Disasters under - where else? - X5.3, Victory of the Daleks.)

Eccleston is the first Doctor to be younger than Doctor Who - he was born during Marco Polo (1.4).

Oh, and this was the last episode to be shown without a pre-credits sequence until Smith and Jones (X3.1), and the last one broadcast before the star’s impending departure was announced (see Did He Fall or Was He Pushed? under X1.12, Bad Wolf).

Watch Out For...

• As we said, this is Spearhead from Space on steroids. The opening shots of both stories are views of Earth from space with modishmusic. The original had a NASA photo spun on a rostrum camera and Dudley Simpson’s small combo doing 60s spy-movie jazz; this time, we get a computer-generated Earth with oceans glistening in sunlight, and a pseudo-symphonic sweep suitable for a Hollywood movie about aliens invading. There had been speculation about who’d get to score the new series, and the press were keen on rave/electronica outfit Orbital - whose leader, Phil Hartnoll, had struck up a close friendship with original Doctor Who theme-maker Delia Derbyshire. Instead, new head honcho Russell T Davies stuck with his chum Murray Gold, and we got a soundtrack exactly like anything else on television.

• Hooray! The Autons are back. Except... they aren’t called that any more. Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes gets a credit at the end for having created the Nestenes, but they skip the name of the iconic killer shop-dummies. Another change since last time they did this story is that the BBC can afford to have fake glass, so that the remake of the scene from Spearhead from Space of the dummies coming to life and shooting down pedestrians in the street ought to look more impressive. (Whether it does is down to personal taste, as is whether the remount of this version in X2.10, Love & Monsters is more effective despite being shot over three hours rather than three nights.) But in the carnage and confusion, nobody’s sure which city we’re in - a prominent Cardiff landmark is clearly visible over Jackie’s shoulders as she takes a call from Rose, and then a London bus is overturned right in front of her.

• Another schizoid scene is the one where the Doctor deflects Rose’s questions about who he is by taking her hand and giving a spiel about how he can feel the Earth’s motion. The scene begins and ends in London, but the middle was shot in Cardiff as part of the coverage when the episode was found to be under-running. It’s one of the best moments on display here, and effectively establishes the Doctor as not-a-local-boy. Still, one has to wonder whether Davies, writing this in a hurry to fill a shorter scene, had been listening to The Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

• One small detail that might have eluded you: in the first episode of Queer as Folk, the Davies-surrogate character Vince Tyler and the impossibly self-assured sex-god Stuart Jones re-enact the King of the World scene from Titanic. Vince asks Why am I always Kate Winslett? During this book, we will see several references to this nautical tragedy, and indeed a couple called Rose and Jack. It’s also worth noting that Series Three ends with the TARDIS colliding with what appears to be the Titanic, and a whole Christmas episode follows. One of Davies’ first television projects was a children’s fantasy drama called Dark Season (see X2.3, School Reunion; X4.14, The Next Doctor), which had a protagonist who was like the Doctor if he’d been a chubby 12-year-old girl at a comprehensive school and her two friends, a conventional-looking couple. The girl in the couple was a photogenic youngster called Kate Winslett. Just sayin’...

• And after decades where the public have used Doctor Who as the character’s name (and not just them, see Is His Name Really Who? under 3.10, The War Machines), we finally get on-screen use of the name, as the title for Clive’s website. The website was set up for real by the BBC, but the search-engine Rose uses isn’t genuine.

• The episode was still under-running, so the Next Time sequence was grafted into the end-credits as a slightly desperate ploy - but it allows a glimpse of a story that’s still very Doctor Who, and yet completely unlike what we’ve just seen. For anyone worrying that it was going to be week after week of council estates and comic-relief boyfriend and mum, this was a huge relief. For anyone unfamiliar with the basic concept of the series, it was a bit of a shock.

The Continuity

The Doctor

As Rose [not one to miss the obvious] spots fairly quickly, he’s an alien who talks as if he comes from the North of England. [Specifically, Salford, near Manchester but not so near as to have the same accent - these minutiae matter, as we saw in What Are the Dodgiest Accents in the Series? under 4.1, The Smugglers.] Accordingly, he dresses rather less whimsically than some earlier incarnations. The body he’s got now is tall and lean, with cropped hair and striking features. He has a beaky nose and protruding ears, and is dressed as many men his apparent outward age (mid-40s) would in early twenty-first century London, with a dark leather jacket [more formal than a bomber-jacket, but somewhat hors de combat], black jeans, Doctor Marten boots [worn by generations of Mods and Soul-Boys, see What Are the Most Mod Stories? under 4.6, The Moonbase] and a V-neck sweater, with a zip. [The overall effect is if someone had sought to combine Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Wallace from A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Also notice how the sweater is dark red in this and most stories set in the present or future, with dark green for adventures in History and blue for others. Similar colour-coding applies to David Tennant’s suits, Matt Smith’s bow-ties and the Time Vortex in stories made before 2010.]

He refers to humanity as ‘stupid apes’ [see also X1.8, Father’s Day] and ‘stupid little people who have only just learnt how to walk’, but he also expresses confidence that they’re ‘capable of so much more’. He’s not above a bad pun (‘armless’), and is impressed by the rapidity with which Rose adapts to a peculiar situation and asks the right questions. His main techniques for protecting Earth from alien incursion are blowing things up and running away. He drinks his coffee with milk and no sugar.

• Ethics. The anti-plastic vial used to destroy the Nestene Consciousness seems to be on hand as insurance - a means of the Doctor negotiating with the Nestene and offering a peaceful way out. To this end, he tells Rose, ‘I’m not here to kill [the Consciousness]. I’ve got to give it a chance.’ Mickey’s possible fate after the Nestenes abduct and copy him seems too insignificant for the Doctor to think about while he’s trying to save the world.

• Background. From the way he treats his own reflection in Rose’s mirror, the Doctor is unfamiliar with his appearance and surprised [if not dismayed] at his ears. [This is generally taken to mean that he has regenerated very recently. His inability to do card-tricks would seem to support this - it seems from earlier stories (for example, 19.3, Kinda) that a fresh body has to re-learn motor-skills that were hitherto well-practiced. The other explanation offered by some commentators is that he’s recently had a haircut (‘Could have been worse’), and is moved to independently comment ‘Look at those ears!’ while checking it out in a mirror. Or, both theories could be true - he could have recently had his first haircut in this incarnation. However, if he selected his clothes to suit his new look, it’s unlikely he had a shaggy mop or afro.]

At some point, the Doctor posed for a photo in Edwardian clobber (frock coat, top hat) shortly before rescuing the Daniels family, who were due to sail on the Titanic. This is one of a number of photos of this incarnation at historical moments. [He seems to have been badly photoshopped into a still of Kennedy’s assassination, but this is a photo from the ‘Washington public archive’, Clive says. The Doctor was also sketched on the island of Krakatoa the day before the 1883 eruption (see 7.4, Inferno; 13.5, The Brain of Morbius). If the Doctor has only just regenerated, the most logical (and conceptually neat) explanation is that Rose - knowing that these photos will have been taken and that the Doctor is a time-traveller - later took the snaps herself to make her own past work out correctly, a sort of trial run for sending herself the Bad Wolf messages. This could be why the Kennedy photo has the Doctor staring right at the camera. (A possible caveat is that the Doctor, within hours of Rose opting to travel with him and on their first trip, mentions in X1.2, The End of the World that he survived the Titanic, suggesting he was there without her. Then again, the Doctor could be at the event more than once - one of the New Adventures books, The Left-Handed Hummingbird, also has the seventh Doctor sailing on the Titanic.)

The Doctor knows, or can tell from photos somehow, about the couple being discussed in Heat [then the biggest-selling celebrity gossip magazine]: ‘He’s gay, she’s an alien.’ [As we mentioned in Volume 6, the timing of this episode’s debut for the very week Brangelina came into being was a bonus, but there are several dozen such confected couplings of which it could be true.] Apparently, he’d not read bestselling novel The Lovely Bones before, nor seen the subsequent film [mind you, hardly anyone bothered with the film].

Genghis Khan and his Horde tried and failed to batter down the door of the TARDIS once.

• Inventory: Sonic Screwdriver. It’s back! After being destroyed [for supposedly making the stories too easy to resolve - see 19.4, The Visitation, for many viewers a rather more traumatic death than Adric’s later that year], and used by the seventh Doctor [27.0, The TV Movie], the Doctor now has a sturdy-looking new model with a powerful blue light on one end, and what could either be bone or coral for a handle [not entirely unlike the new TARDIS, a connection that later stories would reinforce]. The main cylindrical form ends in a black cone, and the metallic end with the light is telescopic, making different sounds for different settings and lengths. In this story, it opens and locks doors, and shorts out lift controls. It also jams the Nestene’s psychic link to the animated mannequin arm that has followed Rose home. [This is just the start of a whole slew of improbable new uses for a device originally capable of undoing screws by sound (5.6, Fury from the Deep and How Does the Sonic Screwdriver Work? under 15.6, The Invasion of Time).]

• Inventory: Other. The Doctor is also packing a small vial of a blue liquid he terms ‘anti-plastic’. [It makes the Nestene Consciousness burst into flames and blow up the complex, so it obviously isn’t just nail-varnish remover. Fannishly, we might propose that it’s the same mix Polly devised for Cybermen in The Moonbase.]

There’s a Yale lock on the TARDIS. [As you will recall from Volumes 3b and 4, this hasn’t always been the case (see also The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Death of the Doctor).] The Doctor first meets Rose when planting explosives at Henrik’s, and has a chunky remote-control detonator.

The TARDIS

Said by the Doctor to stand for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’. [Note the singular use of ‘Dimension’, and compare with 1.1, An Unearthly Child, et al.]

The exterior now looks almost exactly like a police box from the 1950s instead of approximating for height, layout and the panel over the phone hatch. It still seems, outwardly, to be made of wood, rather than wooden doors set in a concrete box. The outer door leads straight into the Console Room, with no intervening atrium of black [as had been the case on and off since the Patrick Troughton years, and all the time after 14.1, The Masque of Mandragora]. Inside the door is white enamelling, and a cage for the phone, as per a real police box [and the second Peter Cushing movie, see Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 AD in Volume 6’s appendix].

From the door there is a ramp with a bannister, leading up to the first of two disc-shaped gantries. These levels are made of steel mesh and show the lighting and wiring below [a variation on the design for the 1996 TV Movie]. At the centre, the Console is still a mushroom-shaped construction with six panels, although this is now a torus of green glass, lit from within, with assorted domestic objects pressed into service as controls (a chess-piece, a rubber mallet, a bicycle pump, what seems to be a glass paperweight, various sprockets, a nautical compass [see 10.2, Carnival of Monsters], a 70s Trimphone...).

The glass is segmented by six coral/bone amber-coloured struts, with a similar band around the rim. The same ambiguous material provides the basic support for the cupola-like roof. The vast room seems to be made of brass and makes a hemisphere of about five metres radius. There are six vast timbers of the coral-like substance, separated by four segmented panels that meet at the apex, which is also the top of the central glass column housing the Time Rotor. This rises and falls in flight, as usual, and comprises various glowing glass rods of different heights. The brass segments are studded with hexagonal bosses containing circular lights - a gesture back to the old-style roundels - which get smaller the higher up the walls they go. [There are 320 of these.] There is a perimeter gantry about halfway up, which has lights and a ladder to reach it left of the door. [We never see what’s to the right of the door, because the camera is situated there - except for brief shots in the set-up for X4.0, Voyage of the Damned.] Next to the door ramp is a wooden hatstand, as before. Around the neck of the Time Rotor are two brass bands supporting a contemporary flat-screen monitor, on which cryptic swirling glyphs and other handy graphics can appear. There are also Post-It notes in the same hitherto-unseen Gallifreyan language. This screen can be moved around to any panel.

Taking the front door to be six o’clock, the panel at four o’clock seems to be used for tracking the Nestene signal. There is a chair apparently requisitioned from a fighter-plane at two o’clock, and it’s bolted to the floor [the Doctor has finally noticed that landings aren’t always smooth]. Around this main platform is an intermittent steel bannister, as if from a sports ground, hastily wrapped in foam rubber. Thick electrical cables snake down to the Console from the roof, one of which has what seems to be a section of a disc-brake from a lorry at a strategic point [for radio reception?]. A second ramp seems to lead off from one o’clock to whatever else is inside this vessel.

There is a cavernous echoing sound in the Console Room instead of the old hums or chimes [imagine Talos from the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts snoring].

The Supporting Cast

• Rose. When the Doctor meets her, she’s a 19-year-old Londoner with no idea of where she’s going. She’s had something of a chequered past - something mentioned briefly in the little pre-rescue speech she gives when announcing that she has the bronze for Gymnastics (Under-Sevens). Since the useless first boyfriend, Jimmy Stone, who caused her to quit school with no real qualifications, she’s gone back to living with her mum and working in a major department store - albeit at a menial level - although the loss of her job makes her think about going back to school. There appears to be just one novel in Rose’s living room [and we have reason to believe that the copy of Lovely Bones is Rose’s rather than Jackie’s; see X2.12, Army of Ghosts for why].

Rose’s most noticeable trait is, in the best companion tradition, sheer curiosity. [In something of a hangover from the old show, her persistence in finding out more about this mysterious stranger is seemingly rather against the Doctor’s inclinations.] Her gymnastic skills save the day at the last minute against the Nestene, and she’s the one to point out the obvious location for the Nestene transmitter [for the rest of the season, she’ll show a definite talent for mentioning the key fact we need]. She here takes the TARDIS almost in her stride. She does, on the other hand, fail rather miserably at noticing Mickey’s implausible replacement, or for that matter the Doctor showing up again for the third time running.

Rose hesitates when the Doctor first asks her on a trip into space, but immediately believes him when he says that the TARDIS travels in time. She then gives Mickey a quick peck and rushes aboard.

• Jackie. Rose’s mother [for the next season and a half, she’s defined pretty much entirely in terms of this relationship]. Jackie’s genuine concern about Rose’s welfare after her job is blown to bits quickly bleeds over into (from Rose’s perspective) helpful-if-irritatingly-enthusiastic suggestions for how to get some extra cash by exploiting the current compensation-litigation culture. She thinks that the shop has given Rose airs and graces. As Jackie’s would-be flirtatious scene with the Doctor indicates, she’s on the lookout for romance now that she is no longer fending for her daughter. [This will be something of a running gag (and a plot-point next season; see Love & Monsters). What exactly became of Rose’s dad is a matter dealt with later in the season.]

• Mickey. Like Jackie, he’s almost entirely defined in terms of how Rose thinks of him. [He’ll gain a semblance of autonomy in later instalments, and more chances to do something useful (although it’s more than understandable that Noel Clarke’s most enthusiastic acting in this episode comes when he’s playing a restaurant-destroying Auton). Still, before being kidnapped by an importunate dustbin, Mickey does come off rather well; he and Rose seem to be having a genuinely good time during their lunch in Trafalgar Square, and he’s chivalrous if rather over the top about defending his girlfriend from evil Internet predators if necessary. Naturally, he’s not at his best by the time Rose and the Doctor rescue him from the exploding warehouse (this is Mickey’s first ride in the TARDIS, although a lot of people seem to overlook this), and by the end of the episode is more or less left blubbering on the ground while his girlfriend runs off with another bloke. During the final confrontation with the Nestene, Mickey clings to Rose shouting ‘Leave [the Doctor], there’s nothing you can do’ - which, for anyone steeped in the programme’s lore, is as good as ordering Rose to stage an improbable rescue. Things look up for Mickey later, and eventually he becomes something of an action-hero.]

Mickey is fond of footie [as per the stereotypical English male], and drives a yellow VW Beetle. Like the Doctor, he finds the temptation to mess about with a detached window dummy arm simply irresistible. He has a stud in his left ear.

[There is a school of thought that the odd behaviour of the Nestene facsimile of Mickey results from the real one resisting alien mind-control - which makes him better at this than Martha when the Sontarans clone her in X4.4, The Sontaran Stratagem.]

The Non-Humans

• The Nestenes [last seen on TV in 8.1, Terror of the Autons] are a collective mind housed in a lumpen, undulating mass of semi-molten plastic about the size of a tennis-court. They can use the psychic energy with which they came to Earth to animate plastic, including replicas of specific people, shop-dummies and wheelie-bins. The moving plastic people [never identified in this story, but virtually identical to the Autons from the two Nestene invasion attempts in the 1970s, so we’ll call them that for now] can kill either by physically beating a human to death or by the use of the energy-weapons built into their right hands - the hand hinges just before the wrist, directly opposite the thumb-joint, as before. Each Auton is independently animated, and the components can also move when separated from the rest. The arm that Rose pulled off one manages to walk [like Thing in The Addams Family, we presume] and get in through Jackie’s cat-flap to hunt down Rose. As with the daffodil-like Auto-Jets [Terror of the Autons], the arm attacks the face to smother the victim. A dismembered Auton sends and receives signals, making it easy to immobilise with a jamming pulse from the sonic screwdriver, but on detecting any attempt to home in on the source the body-part melts, possibly automatically. Apparently, despite the entire thing being operated by remote, an Auton’s head is more complex than its arm.

The Nestenes have lost all of their ‘protein planets’ and have selected Earth for conquest because of the various noxious substances humans have introduced to the atmosphere, including dioxins and hydrocarbons. The loss of their worlds was a consequence of a war in which the Doctor was a participant [see The Time War entry under History], and the Consciousness blames him. They identify the TARDIS as superior technology and a potential threat. [Although most of what the Consciousness says is unintelligible, sharp-eared viewers might discern its dying words as ‘Time Lord’; the closed captioning on the Series One DVDs confirms this. Some claim to have heard Bad Wolf there as well, but this is disputed.] The Consciousness is versed in its ‘Constitutional rights’ and the details of ‘Convention 15’ of the Shadow Proclamation [something we’ll be hearing more of - see X4.12, The Stolen Earth]. The Doctor says that the Consciousness makes use of ‘warp-shunt technology’.

History

• Dating. The missing-persons poster for Rose in Aliens of London says that she disappeared on 6th March, 2005. The tax-disc in Mickey’s car-window confirms the month and year [although he ought to have sent it off for renewals, as it expires in under a month - he’s a motor-mechanic, so he should have known that].

• The Time War. Whatever happened in the interim since Survival (26.4), it involved a great conflict across time, including many of the most advanced species in the cosmos. The Nestenes lost their homeworld and all their protein-planets, and the Doctor, who says he ‘fought’ in the war, was powerless to help. There has been some restitution of law and a universally-recognised code of conduct - the Shadow Proclamation maintains relations between the higher beings. Convention 15 of the Proclamation governs safe conduct during negotiations.

Additional Sources

Panini’s Doctor Who Annual 2006 has a background piece by Russell T Davies that fills in the gaps about Rose, Mickey and Jackie. Rose and Mickey have been on-and-off since she was 14, and Jimmy Stone was the wannabe rock-star who came between them and stole her money. Jackie pays the bills by running a hairdressing service from the flat, which is 48, Bucknall House, SE15 7GO. Rose has been on a school trip to Parc Asterix, Paris (see X1.7, The Long Game), but other than that, a week at a Welsh seaside resort every summer is as far afield as she’s been.

Catchphrase Counter

We get the first of several occasions where the Doctor declares something to be ‘fantastic’, in this case Rose pointing out the London Eye’s suitability as a Nestene transmitter.

Deus Ex Machina

[Although the Flavia theme - that female vocal we will be hearing whenever the plot needs a helping hand from Fate - is used for Rose’s first sight of the TARDIS, the really flagrant scripted cheat is the anti-plastic, which is never explained but does an awful lot of damage for something looking like the complementary shampoo from a cheap hotel.]

The Analysis

The Big Picture

Whilst the BBC is predominantly concerned with making radio and television for the public - who pay a Licence fee to get the content without commercial interference - there had been a move since the 1980s to maximise the spread of the Corporation’s activities into other, directly remunerative areas such as publishing, CD, video and DVD releases of old programmes and online services.

This was nothing new: it was the BBC Enterprises division that had made sure there were filmed copies of the black and white episodes of Doctor Who to be sold to Nigeria, Cyprus, New Zealand and elsewhere. Enterprises, which became BBC Worldwide in the late 1990s, published the tie-in books about Paul McGann’s Doctor and supervised the successful exploitation of Doctor Who when there were no new episodes being made. It’s worth reiterating that Doctor Who, even in the last few years when the outlay per episode was higher than whole year’s-worth of 1960s episodes, made more money from overseas sales and merchandising than it cost to make. This money, however, went into the BBC’s general kitty for television drama, funding EastEnders, Silent Witness and various things with Michelle Collins in (X3.7, 42). In the essay with this story, we will look in detail at the logic of bringing back Doctor Who in 2005, but the precise nature of the series they made isn’t as obvious a choice as it might look now.

To make a twenty-first century version of Doctor Who, they had to remove any taint of cheapness. Less-gifted comedians were still making the same three jokes about the wobbly sets, the low budget and Daleks being defeated by stairs. There were economies of scale that follow from making a big-budget series: the quality (or, at least, fame) of actors, the overall look of the series and the use of dedicated staff and facilities - as opposed to just cobbling things together from whatever other productions have just been made at the same complex. Making individual episodes in blocks out of transmission order means utilising resources (including specific actors) efficiently.

The gamble would only have been assessed to have paid off if the ratings were favourable. Although the BBC is still not primarily concerned with crude viewing figures, audience-share for BBC1 output is used as a measure of success amongst the Corporation’s critics. These were very active at the time, both other media consortia (especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) and politicians who were increasingly resentful of the BBC’s independence from their control. Spending a vast sum of public money on a series watched by a few thousand obsessives would give these critics ammunition at a time when the government was looking for ways to clip the Corporation’s wings.

They therefore needed to make a product that would re-ignite interest in a well-established and lucrative brand, and have it be watched by as broad a spread of different categories of viewer as possible. It had to be child-friendly, action-packed, soap-like and clever. The soap aspect is one that US broadcasters never quite got, given that they work on the assumption that these are two different audiences. This is partly a function of the nature of American soaps (which are occasionally shown in the UK for ironic viewing tinged with outright gobsmacked disbelief). It’s also to do with the progressive ghettoisation of any fantasy-themed series onto specialist channels and the image-problem this gave them amongst mainstream viewers in many countries. The BBC had learned the hard way that this didn’t work in Britain: the mistaken belief that nobody would be equally interested in Doctor Who and Coronation Street had caused no end of trouble in the period when Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor.

Many of the writers Davies recruited were veterans of Britain’s soaps. As it happened, the whole trend in fantasy television was towards character-led, novelistic stories with small details becoming significant much later, and long-term storylines feeding into individual episodes - a radical change since the days when each individual episode of a series was made to be broadcastable in any order, and one that eventually proved the undoing of the anthology series The X-Files when it brought in too many conspiracies and recurrent mysteries for any resolution to seem possible. Paradoxically, the best way to make something that spoke to the whole of Britain was to make something that seemed American in form, and the best way to be able to justify that scale of outlay was to sell the result overseas and hope that this secondary audience were smart enough, or patient enough, to follow a series making relatively few concessions to them.

An argument can be made that the BBC deliberately sabotaged the overseas sales of Doctor Who in 1985, when they allotted fourteen 25-minute episodes per year. With a slightly larger budget for sets, cast and costumes, the production team could have made two-part stories (or occasionally traditional-style four-parters) and sold these in batches every two years making, in effect, 28 hour-long episodes - a standard US-style season (sort of). For financial and logistical reasons, however, the minimum length of stories was now three episodes. For a relatively small capital outlay, it could have been possible to make a late-80s Doctor Who that looked like it deserved to be on the world’s screens. Using post-production techniques similar to the ones used on US shows could have made them look as though they had been originated on film, and thus keeping the savings of video-tape whilst not having the compatibility problems that made British VT-made series look odd on French, US or Indian transmission systems. (And, it must be said, vice-versa: the initial BBC2 run of Star Trek: The Next Generation looked like fourth-generation bootlegs of home-movies.)

We’re going to talk a lot more about this in Volume 8, but the production of the series from Rose onwards is altered to look as much like an American series as possible. Although fewer than half the domestic television sets were configured for it, the episodes were made in the 16:9 aspect ratio preferred by foreign networks (and set manufacturers). There is now a regular Director of Photography (other names for this complex job are cinematographer or lighting cameraman) who arranges the lighting and lenses and works with the post-production colour-grading team to make each individual frame of the episode look a particular way. In the days of film, this was a matter of the right film-stock, lenses and lighting-rigs, but the switch to digital has made it, if anything, more complicated. The Betacam system also meant one camera used for multiple takes from different angles, rather than the conventional TV drama set-up of three to five cameras recording a scene from the different angles in a continuous take.

There is a drawback to this approach. Whereas the kind of American series they are aping in form have a regular base and a large stock company, Doctor Who rarely stays in one place or time for two stories in a row. If individual episodes are now self-contained stories (itself a drastic change from the format that had worked for 26 years - see What’s a Story Now? under Pudsey Cutaway), this could mean costly set-building and costuming problems for 13 different planets or historical locales. Compared to something like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where they can do entire episodes with just the usual sets, Federation uniforms and actors - or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where they can go ten episodes without any location shooting - it might have seemed daunting to even consider doing Doctor Who. Look at Series One and you can see how they did it: Mickey’s flat, Jackie’s flat, the TARDIS and Satellite Five and lots and lots of locations, mainly in Cardiff. Other than these, there were a few tiny sets dotted about, most of them in the two-part World War II story.

So the content was British, but the form was American. It was a definite choice and rather cynically made: this time around, Doctor Who had a definite season finale, and something premeditatedly designed as a potential relaunch or sweeps episode (X1.6, Dalek) if the first launch faltered. It is unfortunate that many observers assume that the BBC’s overseas sales mean just the US networks. As we will see in Volume 8, the redubbed and re-edited versions of the Welsh-made series are a global phenomenon, albeit one that some territories find baffling.

Something non-British viewers will probably not quite realise is the extent to which this episode’s version of London is explicitly tourist-friendly. All the bits where actual Londoners go are removed in favour of a run-through of clichés straight out of Austin Powers and Richard Curtis romcoms. (Ironically, the same grotesque parody of London that Noel Clarke has devoted his main career to trashing.) In this and the other two-part story made in the first production-block, director Keith Boak is consciously evoking the trite Cool Britannia sales-pitch of the late 90s, one which Tony Blair endorsed (to widespread ridicule). In particular, there are many scenes and shots that seem almost fingerprint-identical to Spiceworld: The Movie. (If you think that’s a coincidence, look at who got the first line of spoken dialogue on day one of shooting... Naoko Mori, who was the fictitious sixth Spice Girl in that benighted flick.) Just as every American film set in Paris takes place in hotels which magically all have views of the Eiffel Tower, so this kind of production is a sort of visual shorthand for the fairy-tale version of England with bad food and Pearly-Kings. (To quote Elton from Love & Monsters, real London is madder, and darker and a whole lot better.) It’s only just a step up from Murder, She Wrote’s use of 50s stock-footage of fogbound Piccadilly Circus and Remington Steele’s idea that we had steam-trains in the 80s.

Boak isn’t solely responsible, as the script has the London Eye used as the Nestene transmitter. The entire colour-palatte of these three episodes is jarringly vibrant and mainly red, white, blue and pink. Lots of pink. The Tyler household, supposedly our benchmark of real, is one of a kind that only exists in mid-90s TV dramas and sitcoms, to the extent that when they attempt a different sort of TV-drama-natural touch, the contradictions and anachronisms trip each other up. (See Why is Trinity Wells on Jackie’s Telly? under X1.4, Aliens of London, and Must They All be Old-Fashioned Cats? under X3.3, Gridlock.)

With such a high-profile series taking so much Licence-Fee money, the first episode had to be as low-risk as possible and demonstrate as many aspects of the format as possible in three-quarters of an hour. Subsequent episodes had to capitalise on this and avoid alienating the broad audience expected for the series by looking too much like the nerdy, self-obsessed US space-operas with which the BBC had attempted to bracket the re-runs of 70s episodes during the interregnum. This is the reason so few episodes in the first two years take place any further away than Earth orbit, and why every alien world is being explored by humans from Earth - Davies’ faith in the casual viewers was never high (see Is Kylie from Planet Zog? under X4.0, Voyage of the Damned). As a shop-window for the series’ potential, Rose is as risk-averse as is conceivable, and allows for as much painless introduction of characters and situations as possible whilst still having things happen rather than just being talked about.

English Lessons

• Lottery Money (n.) The National Lottery, later renamed the Lotto, launched in 1994 and was originally on Saturdays. A second draw on Wednesdays followed, and various other new permutations have come along (including a Europe-wide draw on Tuesdays and Fridays). Many workplaces have syndicates, each donating a pound (the cost of one standard entry) and making multiple entries on an even split of whatever winnings they make. Rose being given custody of the entry-money indicates that she is A) trusted and B) fairly junior. (And yet Jackie seems to be able to join, if the phone call next episode is any guide.) The Saturday Draw should have followed that episode, but there was a bulletin about the death of Lord Callaghan of Cardiff.

• Coffee (n.) Although American-style chains have come and almost replaced our indigenous cafés, most people in Britain stick to the simple mug of instant coffee from granules or powder as a work-place alternative to tea, according to taste and time of day. So many people are particular about how they have their tea that making it for strangers is almost as bewildering as ordering coffee in one of the US franchises, whereas a cup of coffee is more-or-less uniform with only yes/no milk and sugar choices.

• Swan Off (v. trans.) To leave with an affectation of nonchalance, as with a swan (which appears to glide gracefully but, beneath the surface, is paddling away like billy-oh).

• Beans on Toast (n.) As hinted at in Volume 6, our baked beans aren’t quite like the ones on sale in the US, and the fact that this quick, easy and nutritious meal needed to be explained at all perplexed us.

• Chips (n.) Not the same as French Fries. These days, those aren’t even potatoes but processed maize (the stuff Americans call corn; that being what everyone else uses to denote various grains such as wheat and barley). Chips come in two basic varieties, the ones deep-fried in chip-fat and served with battered fish, doner kebabs etc., or game chips, which are larger chunks of potato roasted in the fat of whichever meat they are served with (as in the steak and chips the Doctor orders in X1.11, Boom Town, although less salubrious establishments fudge the difference or use pre-prepared frozen oven chips, as do busy housewives). Our basic chips are cut into long cuboids with a 1/2 inch cross-section (thus absorbing less fat than US-style fries) and marinaded in milk or secret-recipe preparations. They are fried twice (so they’re fluffier on the inside than they are on the outside), the second time on the premises in front of the customers. Traditionally, this would be done once every two days, as some people prefer the more frangified day-old chips (hence the sign frying tonight on chip-shop doors until the 80s). As with all the best British food, it’s adapted and altered from overseas, mainly Belgium, and came to the East End with Jewish emigrés in the late 1850s. What we did with the basic format made it all ours (using different varieties of potato and applying salt and vinegar instead of mayonnaise).

• A Levels (n.) Originally the intermediate step between school and university, these are now the basic qualification for anyone planning to go beyond menial work. They are sat after the GCSE exams (which generally come when a student is 16) and now have two phases: AS and A2. Without three A Levels, any hope of University has to be at best postponed. However, since their introduction in the early 1950s, they have become the benchmark qualification for employers.

Oh, Isn’t That...?

• Christopher Eccleston (credited as ‘Doctor Who’). He seemed to come out of nowhere in 1993 and just be in every British-made film or major TV drama. First he was the 1991 historical drama Let Him Have It (more talked-about than seen until the DVD release), then the by-the-book cop in Cracker, against the almost-stereotypical maverick psychological profiler Fitz, played by Robbie Coltrane. His character, DCI Bilborough, was killed slowly by Robert Carlyle’s character in an episode that was Jimmy McGovern’s first script about the anguish following the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster (he did another, called Hillsborough, starring Eccleston).

And then came Our Friends in the North, which told of friends responding to 30 years of British social history and pitched his idealistic character against a more cynical survivor played by Daniel Craig. At the same time, Eccleston was in the first of Danny Boyle’s films, Shallow Grave, opposite Ewan McGregor. By this time there was a definite type of role he played, and a set of directors whose projects he tended to be in, so later films (Elizabeth, where he was the least bewildering piece of casting, eXistenZ (sic) and Gone in 60 Seconds) saw him moving out of that clique, and his cameo in The League of Gentlemen had him play comedy for almost

Reviews for About Time 7

[soror_peregrina · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Umm... wow. I get the distinct impression that the author *really* hates:1) The new series.2) Anything having to do with Wales.Simply because it's WHO-related, parts of the book were modestly interesting, although it rambles around like nobody's business and often leaves you with the feeling of, "Hunh? What did he just say?" I mean, really: five-plus pages outlining seven theories why Christopher Eccleston left after one season? Come on. Is the author getting paid by the word? As a reasonably competent writer, I would die of embarrassment to have my name appended to this lengthy mishmash.There is, of course, the possibility that I misunderstood the author completely and that he is neither a NuWHO hater nor a Cymruphobe; but, if so, it's damn hard to tell. I'm giving this book a generous two stars because I have more than four decades of WHO-watching experience behind me, and I will read just about anything related to Classic or NuWHO. But frankly, I'm a little sorry I bothered with this.