Now, this is more like it. After a circling of non-plots for Matt Smith’s opening stories, we hit the ground running with a genuinely scary, gorgeous looking, very grown up, and fiendishly clever Doctor Who adventure.
Your number’s up. It seems that these days, full of CCTV, pin numbers, and DNA being kept on file, it’s time for a new Prisoner.
Some Doctor Who fans can be an odd lot. After having been cast in the wilderness for the best part of two decades, you’d think that they’d be happy that their favourite show had returned.
Almost 90 years ago, the BBC started on its mission to educate, inform, and entertain. Apparently, there was another clause to that manifesto, and that was to produce a new cop show at least once every two months.
The first era of the rebooted Who has passed. The sound of drums has ceased to be.
When the follow-up series to Life On Mars first aired, it didn’t really make sense.
Kids lie all the time, don’t they? And one of the best lies put around in recent years is that Skins is a teen drama. It isn’t, of course: it’s far better than that.
And so begins David Tennant’s final run as The Doctor before he’s thrown in at the deep end, and it’s appropriate that for such a bombastic, energetic and fast-moving Doctor, the story demands that he’s immobile, frustrated and unable to help. It’s actually a very old-fashioned story – Space 1999 meets ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’, … >
With great hype, comes great responsibility. You can’t have escaped E4’s relentless pushing of its new superhero drama – a kind of Fantastic Four with ASBOs.
TV has been doing a fair a bit of riffing on the classics this week, particularly with Psychoville, in which a seemingly one-shot love letter to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope had an episode that contained more than a few shot-for-shot flourishes borrowed from the James Stewart original.