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.
Are you ready for your treatment? The creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly returns to the network that, if you believe fan furore, hasn’t always treated him well in the past.
On the evidence of this, Colin Baker’s 4-part opening story from 1984, it’s clear the poor boy never stood a chance.
Years ago, we had Village Of The Dammed, a creepy tale about some kids who got possessed by a bunch of aliens who used the youngsters’ skills for their own purposes, hence getting nick-named the Midwich Cuckoos.
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.
This, arguably, is what started it all – from the creative mind of Gerry Anderson, Fireball XL5 was the first marionette sci-fi television show.
Being a Doctor Who fan in the eighties must have been awkward: the lonely Timelord wasn’t cool, wasn’t sexy and – crucially – wasn’t David Tennant.
Pretender to the crown of Doctor Who and infinitely better than its ITV1 stable-mate Demons, Primeval is an entertaining Saturday night bit of fluff that fortunately doesn’t take itself entirely seriously.
Few, if any, television shows in recent years have achieved cult status on the same level as Battlestar Galactica. Although slowly rising from almost complete obscurity, it still never gained the mainstream popularity it so clearly deserved.