Some good news (for once).

Would it be in bad taste to say this is FABULOUS?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/18/senate.dadt/index.html?hpt=T2

The military's prohibition of openly gay people serving within its ranks is one step closer to ending, after the Senate voted Saturday to repeal the armed forces' "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Eight Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined the chamber's Democrats to back the legislation, which passed by a 65-31 margin. The bill needed a simple majority -- meaning support from 51 of the Senate's 100 members -- to pass.

"I want to thank all of the gay men and women who are fighting for us today," said Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine, one of several Republicans who voted for the measure. "We honor your service, and now we can do so openly."

Note the Republican support, small as it was, was very significant - as demographic changes undermine the old certainties, it may well be that some GOPers are realising the importance of wooing the gay vote. All those gay/lesbian soldiers, sailors and airmen, it seems, can finally come out of their Log Cabins.

Things fall apart.

An excellent set of images here by sculptor Lori Nix, depicting what happens when humans either disappear (zombies, rapture, daleks, badgerpocalypse etc.) or simply abandon their civilisation. These are actually scale model dioramas, harking back to a time when draughtsmanship was every bit as important to art as theory and concept.

http://www.lorinix.net/the_city/index.html

A particular favourite of mine is the detail rendered on the Galaga arcade machine in one image. The derelict launderette meanwhile seems simply very sad.

We've been here before, of course. There were once huge cities around the Nile and in Mesopotamia. Where did they go? They simply crumbled to dust, leaving behind only the sturdiest of stone monuments to mark their passing.

Musings after the event

To cut a long story short, I've said my bit and left them to it. It's strange how getting caught up in flame wars can fill up so much time, but there are more important things in life.

Perhaps the big fallacy of the web is that it is a means of communication, when really it's more about informing and being informed.

The 'communication' is just a distraction from that, unless you want to know just how ugly people can be and how little they actually have to say.

Cullion: What a tosser.

Dear Mr. Potato Head,

Good to see you've been reading my blog. A shame you're too much of a turd to not use it out of context, but cogent argument was never your strong point.

Never mind. No wonder your mother abandoned you.

EDIT: You can repeat a lie many times, but it doesn't make it true.

Penny Woolcock's On The Streets: Some Thoughts.

Watching this on BBC Four right now. Stark, brilliant, horrifying but humane and heart breakingly honest. Others have already lauded it in more detail, so let me simply recommend this film.

Now some thoughts, through the medium of bulletpoints:

• Divide and conquer works - English homeless people are conning themselves if they think their 'countrymen' despise them any less than the East Europeans they think they're better than.
• Also, well done on getting off the streets later on. But remember you've got advantages a lot of fellow homeless don't have, and sometimes the dice never roll your way.
• We really need to do something about people after they've left the army. Sod your poppies - actually start looking after these poor sods, who were silly or desperate enough to be dutiful servants of a nasty, selfish, hypocritical state.
• Brian Haw, you're a cunt. How dare you treat that wonderful man like that? Your life is a waste - placards, and platitudes and bullshit and hate. You will change nothing. An unarmed prophet. A worthless, nasty little cunt. Actually helping Iraqis isn't half as fun as the purity of opposition, though, is it? As said, you're a cunt.
• You get the horrible feeling that a sizeable swathe of the population would do away with the homeless if they could get away with it. Another sizeable swathe would look the other way.
• Brian Haw, you're still a cunt.
• Dogs are a higher form of life than most humans.

POSTSCRIPT: On Saturday, I bought the last Big Issue off a seller on Charing Cross Road. He was overjoyed, and so grateful. I felt a bit embarrassed but wished him well. Then I went off and spent a small fortune on a play and dinner, like tens of thousands of other people in London, night after night, and without end.

Rat Salad Days - Why The Browne Report Is A Load Of Brown Stuff.

As the findings of the Browne Report sink in (in summary, 'Pay Up or Piss Off'), let’s dwell on the real issues at stake here.

Like the hypocrisy. Some pampered had-it-all boomers love to whine that in their day only the top 5% got into university and the rest got jobs. (Ergo, all the young 'uns today should pay through the nose for what their predecessors got for free.) I feel a strange urge to shout back that this is just another spin on the 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' argument. And then brick their windows.

Plus it sort of misses the fact that in those days there were other options for post-A Level students. Like lots of jobs that didn't need a degree. You'd be surprised at just how many shit-shovelling, low-level, braindead office, reception and call centre jobs require a BA now. Images of some blessed soul in bellbottoms climbing the ladder to paradise and then kicking it away somehow leap to mind. There was a time when you didn't need a degree to be a nurse, for example. Or, for that matter, a businessman or a bank manager. You just needed a brain, and debt was seen - for some reason - as a Very Bad Thing.

Or how about the doublethink? Many a free market maven (or 'dogmatic arsehole' as I like to call them) scream that students gain the most from their degrees so should pay most of the cost. This sounds like a strong argument until you realise, by definition, that the whole point of education is to benefit the recipient. I may well have greater earning power by having a degree, but I also earn more for being able to add up and read too. By such a standard should we also charge for GCSEs, Primary Schools and Infant Schools? Actually, pretend I didn't say that. It might give them ideas.

Then there's the old chestnut - 'why should the dustman who didn't go to university pay for those that do?' Well, Mr. Dustman will no doubt change his tune pretty damn fast when one of the Dustchildren gets into Leeds Met. Secondly, we already pay for things that do not have a direct benefit for us, but are still for the greater good. Like Mr. Dustman's medical care and pension or his children's benefits if they are unemployed, even if it means not a jot for you if they live or die. You see, that's how society works - we help each other out, even if there isn't a direct payback.

But the argument is flawed in another way too. If degrees really do improve the lives of students* then any (economic) gains are threatened by saddling those same students with crushing debts. Therefore, these people are arguing that students should be benefited by education but only in a way that does not benefit them. That makes sense if you are an idiot.

What doesn't make sense, though, are the social costs. There is the knock-on effect of parents having to divert their finances to helping their kids through the BA/BSc grinder. And then there are those graduates who have to put off buying a house or having children because of the debts they are servicing. This does not bode well for healthy, secure societies. But hey! They get a degree!

Ultimately, it is the lack of honesty that is most galling. What most fees advocates really want is all the (economic) windfalls of a well-educated society, but they sure as hell don't actually want to cough up for it. Hence why sane ideas like a graduate tax were dropped by the Coalition. No one wants to spread the cost even though this would be both more just and sensible. And curiously, very few recipients of free university education seem willing to pay for the benefits their degrees have given them over the years and decades. Nor do they seem to feel any shame for betraying the young in that artful way that horrible old bastards tend to do in this country.

Nor does anyone admit that universities are now just another cog in the economy. Joyless and miserablist as this is, it is also very naive. The skills we all thought the country needed in 1970 or 2008 were quite different from the ones that turned out to be useful. And society needs thinkers as well as doers and office fodder. Adam Smith didn't have an MBA, after all. He was a philosopher.

But what does it say about us? We are willing to condemn future generations to £35k debts, if they’re lucky. And yet we still vote for white elephants like the Olympics, Trident and a bloated NHS bureaucracy. It is a hard-faced penny-pinching age we live in, in part through necessity. But the thing to remember about misers is that in the end they are the living embodiments of false economy.

* Considering that Alan Turing's Maths degree and Sylvia Plath's English MA didn't stop them topping themselves, one must presume this is solely an economic argument.

Teabaggers & The Grizzly Paradox.

The Tea Party movement is fundamentally self-defeating. It is founded on grievance, has a naively malign view of politics and has a sort of paranoid nuttiness that would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.

Yes, it's the Militant Tendency reincarnated as a right wing* nutjob fringe, with the only hope being that they will make the Republican Party as unelectable as the UK Labour Party in the 1980s, as it is equally culpable in letting its rogues take over and run amok. The parallels between both Militant and Tea Party are surprising, and yet clear - both emerged from a deep trauma in the parts of the body politic they represent, and in the end did or will do even more harm to them.

The centre, meanwhile always prevails eventually, and it is foolish to stake so much on a lumpen WASP ragemob (token exceptions notwithstanding**) just at the point when that demographic starts to fade away into also-ran status with all the other adjective-Americans. Regardless of the harm they do on their way down, this is the death spasm of a certain kind of America, with certain values, outlooks, hypocrisies and ethno-religious make-ups that no longer hold sway for better or worse.

But if all else fails, one can sit on the sidelines and laugh as the dolts realise they've been duped and used by billionaire backers who wouldn't piss on them otherwise. The right has its own useful idiots, though that is already a cliché to say. That they will be their own primary victims in the end is another.

So let's dwell instead on Daft Bint Meets Serena Joy Sarah Palin, only two years away from doing a Michael Foot and partying like it's 1983. She describes herself and her female supporters as 'Mama Grizzlies', and this easy metaphor is taken up by the teabaggers with glee.

But in a way, this description says more than just 'wild and free and innit for da cubz'. A bear after all is a solitary creature at odds with its omnivorous, inquisitive nature. It is drawn towards human settlements yet is volatile and unpredictable. It sometimes eats its own, hibernates whilst other animals are forced to live on their wits, needs space yet roams widely, and whilst resourceful and clever, is not quite able to find a place for itself in the modern world it keeps interacting with. It also shits in the wood, much as the teabaggers shit on their own doorsteps.

So in that sense, the Tea Party is profoundly Grizzly. And like many a bear, its rank and file have seen what is happening to the natural order it used to benefit from - and realise, in the end, that the game is up. No wonder they're getting rowdy.

* I hesitate to use the term Libertarian as this is a broad term and Libs don't herd.

** Whatever the merits or lack thereof of Lloyd Marcus' argument, he does it no good simply by whom he is associating with.

You Don't Need An E-Reader To Read.

Ever seen that Kindle advert, where the two Bohos sit on a beach and read their e-book readers, no doubt feeling smug that they've spent a small fortune on a fashionable toy?

Well, that's part of the problem with e-readers; that they sell you a problem as well as a solution - namely, that you somehow need an electronic device to store your books whereas before you could just pick a few paperbacks and shove them in your suitcase.

But the point is that you don't need an e-reader. Books still work perfectly well, and you are in fact being taken for a ride. It's simply that - through the power of advertising - Kindles and their ilk are 'cool' (because the TV told you so!) and books are 'old-fashioned' (because in today's culture, reading is something you're forced to do at school or university). You're being sold something you've effectively already got. Ever been to a library or spent time in a second hand bookshop? Usually the answer is no, because they can't afford to advertise like Amazon or Apple or Samsung... You’ve been had.

We certainly don't need Kindles in the way that we need washing machines, medical advances, computers, flushing toilets and so on. Far from being a technophobic rant, this article is more than willing to declare that technology is great and has made things considerably better. The challenge is now not to create superfluous electronic toys but to make our consumer products ever more energy efficient, more long lasting and more affordable. That's not so sexy as, say, an e-reader, though, so we buy the products with the most allure, the most street cred - the most media exposure.

Nor are e-readers an advance that improves an existing technology like mobile phones or digital cameras/recorders. Instead, it's just conspicuous consumption, just like its equally superfluous (and smug) cousin, the iPhone. They're not really about making your life better and more about waving them about (preferably far away from any passing muggers) to impress the rest of the cool kids and make the naff kids feel guilty about having skint parents (or being skint parents). It's so petty and far, far away from the joy of reading those naff things on shelves that are made from paper.

And so what if e-readers gets people reading? If they need gimmicks and a multi-million ad campaign to do this then maybe they're not the people who should be reading books. Their time might be better spent on finding some substance to their lives. And if the book trade really wants to save its hide, then maybe it needs to focus on why people are reading less and less, or why they are not buying books as much as they used to.

And something else is being lost here - the very physicality of the book, the fact that you can hold it, feel it and know what page to turn to and when. The value of owning something (rather than a stream of data) is being lost, and this threatens our connection with the world around us as we lose the joy of that contact. It’s already happened to music – too many people live for the quick thrill of a download and ignore the joy of owning a CD or discovering an old vinyl album, the joy of actually being able to hold something. In the end, what e-readers represent is another step in our relentless march away from our surroundings and into a shallow, empty inner world of instant gratification. No wonder they’re popular.

The Road to Coronation Street: Now 100% Florizel Free!

PLANET NORTH

"The Road to Coronation Street”
16/09/2010
BBC Four

Often it’s not the end product that’s interesting so much as the process that gives rise to it. Anyone who’s watched ‘making of’ documentaries or heard a decent DVD commentary may have noticed this. Once you’ve seen all the effort and hard work those goes into the end product, it seems much less exciting and interesting in comparison.

Such is the case with ‘The Road to Coronation Street’, a drama from ITV broadcast – confusingly – on BBC4 last night. (But more on that later.) This tells of how Street creator and writer Tony Warren fought, often tooth and nail, to get the UK’s longest running soap onto our screens. As drama goes, it is concise, focussed, well structured and flowing, with some great dialogue and characterisation. Which is to say, this story about how UK soaps came into being is much more fun than the soaps themselves these days.

The cast certainly helps. David Dawson plays Tony Warren as a sort of souped-up, gayed-out, speed riddled Ken Barlow on a mission. (The ‘real’ Ken Barlow, or William Roache, is meanwhile played with a sort of delusional ‘I’m too good for this’ pathos by his son, James.)

Elsewhere, Jessie Wallace (yes, ‘er from Eastenders) camps it up with brassy glee as Pat Phoenix, the audition scene between her and Dawson crackling with electricity. Meanwhile, surfacing as a sort of everyman amongst the carnival of elephantine egos is director Derek Bennet, played with both humanity and normality by Shaun Dooley.

And then, in the final act of the drama, comes along Lynda Baron, rumbling into view with a Godzilla-like presence as Violet Carson, invoking the spirit of Ena Sharples with harridan vigour and resigned fatalism in equal measure.

The story itself is a good balance of drama and fact, taking obvious liberties with the events and participants whilst not obscuring them with too much schmaltz. (Though some of the Pat Phoenix scenes do slap it on with a trowel.) The simmering professional, class and personal tensions are well depicted too, being reined in enough to not obscure the drama, but shocking enough when they do surface.

For it's telling that back in 1960, the thought of northern plebs played by northern thesps was seen as too radical and not commercial enough. This thinking remains, but has merely moved onto other pariahs who are seen as the kiss of death, unless they’re splayed out for all to see on sleazy reality TV.

And it’s telling too where this excellent drama was shown. Made by ITV Studios for the BBC, it was shown on BBC 4, light years away from the mass market ITV1 and BBC 1& 2 schedules. Almost in spite of itself, ‘The Road to Coronation Street’ leaves us wondering whether a modern Tony Warren would even get a twitch of an eyebrow from the fickle powers that be, convinced as they are that they, and they alone, know what the public wants.

BARLOWNESS: 8/10

Edgar Wright vs. The Law of Diminishing Returns (A Scott Pilgrim Movie Review).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Universal, 2010
Dir. By Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead et al

Much ink has been spilt, and equal amounts of bandwidth wasted, on why comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World flopped at the Box Office. (Indeed, you could even say it Bob-ombed! Arf!)

Hypotheses range from the fact that it was badly marketed or that it came out at the wrong time or that it was aimed at geeks, who are unfortunately all two-faced, treacherous thieving c*nts with a bloated sense of entitlement.

Perhaps these are all correct, but let me propose another reason. Maybe the film wasn't that good in the first place?

True, at first this heavily stylised tale does sort of work. The first third of the film crackles with wit, sharp dialogue and the wonderful visual effects make a great impression. The problem, though, is that all the sight gags, SFX flourishes and one-liners get repetitive very quickly, and soon all the other flaws start to surface too.

Like the two leads. Michael Cera is awful, a flaccid lettuce with a ghastly Winnie-The-Pooh voice who brings neither passion nor life to yet another outing as a sort of everyhipster. Meanwhile, Scott's paramour cum McGuffin, Ramona Flowers, is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead with a studied insouciance, but that's all she bothers to do for the entire film.

The rest of the cast does what it can with roles as 2D as cardboard, which is to say, not very well at all. Only Kieran Culkin, playing Scott's man-eating gay flatmate and moral compass Wallace, really delivers the goods as he tears through every scene he's in with a strong presence and a depth and soul the film otherwise lacks.

The film also suffers because its source material, a six volume comic epic set in Toronto, is basically unfilmable, at least all in one go. The Scott Pilgrim graphic novels are too epic and nuanced to translate well onto the screen in such a truncated manner (and people had the nerve to complain about Watchmen!), with the film trying desperately to include as much of the story as possible and so barely doing any of it any justice. 960+ pages just do not fit into 112 minutes, especially when most of the audience haven't even heard of the comic book in question.

What stands out is what's missed out. One major theme of the graphic novels that Scott is actually a bit of a swine, and how he overcomes his own turd behaviour. This doesn't even make it into the film, in part because the script hasn't got the room, and also because Cera's so insipid, he could rape a dog and shoot nuns, and you'd still barely even register it. Fans of the comics may well spend their viewing spotting all the bits either cut out or just ignored. Even the in-film art care of creator Bryan Lee O'Malley just serves to remind you what you're missing in the original comics. This is a film that simply isn't compatible with its source material,

It just proves that Indy comics and mass media simply don't mix. Daniel Clowes' script for the Ghost World movie was by necessity a departure from his original comic strip. Peter Bagge's forlorn quest to whore out and get a TV series will never come true. Robert Crumb won't even try, and Evan Dorkin will never be the cultural colossus he deserves to be. Why? Because by definition, any art form which rejects the mainstream will always have problems when it tries to rejoin it. And that goes for cult comics from Canada too.

Curiously, the film has strong parallels with Spiderman 2 (apart from the box office takings), in that it starts strong but overdoes it and runs out of steam, and so ends up trying desperately to recapture its original spark. The main difference was that Spiderman 2 had a bigger audience to play with and could afford to lose the plot a bit. SPVW couldn't but does so anyway.

Much too has been made of British director Edgar Wright being in charge. Tellingly, though, his most successful films - Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz - were disciplined, low budget, made for the screen in mind, had good characterisation and never alienated their audiences despite their geek heritage. SPVW is none of these things, and so is a far inferior product. At heart, the film is less a Scott Pilgrim spin-off, and more an overlong Spaced episode at its most tiresome and self-indulgent.

Put simply, it didn't work and didn't deserve to succeed. And it hasn't.

EPICNESS 4/10

Ultimate Big Brother: Josie's Twilight of the Sods

ULTIMATE BIG BROTHER

Channel 4

August-September 2010

When they look back and chronicle the many ups and downs of British civilisation, one moment that will stand out is when Josie 'Farmyward Boogie' Gibson looked away from the 2010 Big Brother diary room camera with wet, puffy eyes and wept 'I'm not a celebrity. I'M NORMAL!!!'

Once, everyone wanted to be a celebrity. No one strictly knew what a celebrity was, other than a kind of pliant attention whore with no or little talent, or a glorified freak show performer with added douchebaggery thrown in for good measure.

The long and the short was - they were Faces and Heels, pointless, but successful. And they appealed to a culture where actually having enough individuality or talent to be properly successful was sneered at because it was too much hard work, and we were all too afraid to admit that maybe we didn't have what it took, and we were condemned to be non-entitites. It's a bitter truth to accept in today's narcissistic, shallow hellhole culture. 'Slebdom' was the ultimate expression of that, where you could aspire to succeed without actually having to earn that success or face up to your shortcomings.

The net result of this was a whole culture driven towards the flicker of dozens of cameras or hateful, mind-numbingly bad celebrity magazines that obsessed with women's bodies in that hideous way that only other women could stoop to. You too could be a success as long as you looked malnourished and had no noticeable human flaws that reminded others of your or their own humanity.

And then came along Josie, a somewhat well fed, non-airbrushed and mundane, yet charismatic and likeable individual in a Big Brother house of mainly nice people (for once). Tellingly, most of them weren't celebrity material because they seemed too real, not shallow enough to really be celebrity fodder, and too human to really want to be one of those shrieking cardboard cutouts. The show's last series ended not as a casting couch but more like the contest between everymen that it was originally meant to be.

Sam Pepper came close to the sort of utter prat cum performing monkey that used to prosper under the old system, but he was evicted and didn't even make it into the final. Instead, the dwindling 'sleb' faithful subscribed to that most niche of outlets - his Twitter feed - leaving the rest of the country to vote for someone they actually could empathise with.

And what then did this year's winner, Josie, do when she then found herself in a house full of 'classic' Big Brother contestants, those shrieking and empty yet loud and ostentatious shallow Gods of a preposterous age? She wigged out, and left. She wasn't one of them, and - most importantly - she didn't want to be. She chose anonymity and mundanity over a fake and glittering life under never-ending scrutiny. Reality TV yielded to reality. It was a turning point; the real had triumphed over reality. Celebrity lost to humanity.

Reviewing the Ads: Nesquik Bunny Death Spiral

This then is the new Nesquik advert:

LINK

Yes, it's yet another use of emotional blackmail, junk sentiment and bowlderised reality to make mothers give in whenever their mewling little shits demand sugar-coated, processed crap. O a promo for a yummy milkshake - you may delete according to taste.

But what stands out is the almost rasping, laboured voice of the Nesquik bunny. He sounds like Joe Pasquale with severe constipation. Or like he's terminally ill, the corporate mascot recording his final poignant work even as they read the Last Rites and the hospice nurse inserts a rubber tube up his bottom.

"They only grow up once!" he gasps as his lungs collapse and his pupils dilate. It's the sort of thing an old nanna in Eastenders says to her estranged daughter just before she dies during the harrowing Xmas special, where Little Mo is later ripped apart by Yuletide weasels.

Maybe this is deliberate? You can imagine the conversation. "Mummy, why does the rabbit sound so unwell?" "Just drink your Nesquik, darling, and maybe he'll get better..." Mission accomplished, at least for the milkshake peddlers.

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 13: The Big Whimper.

DOCTOR WHO
"The Big Bang”
26/06/2010
BBC One

So thirteen weeks of mostly disappointment later, and what do we have? Well, the Doc’s stuck in the Pandorica, Amy is ‘mostly dead’, Rory is rather upset (and plastic), almost the entire universe has ceased to exist, and the younger Amy is getting mailshots from a weird bloke in a Fez. Riversong, meanwhile, is caught up in a time loop and the TARDIS is about to blow up. So far so good.

But really, this is less a story and more an array of narrative tricks used to distract the viewer from a truly shabby script. The time paradoxes (where characters leap in and out of narrative order via Riversong’s magic wand – err, I mean, time bracelet) were done to death in “Blink” and for that matter Back to the Future II. (it’s sad to realise how much Nu Who is dependent on ‘homages’ to Hollywood movies.)

Old Who never quite got into this too much and that's for a good reason - it's too convoluted and it also sucks in terms of good narrative and structure. The show learned quickly to focus on characters and events rather than naff gimmicks.

The rest of the episode is that most loathsome of writerly cop-outs: The reset button, which, no matter how show leader Stephen Moffat wants to dress it up, is what this episode’s central conceit is, and which exposes most starkly the decline of the show after only five years of its second wind. Indeed, when it’s not trying to be Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Babylon 5, the show is now also trying to be Dragonball Z with its sheer repetitive, lazy reliance on deaths that mean nothing and worn-out formats.

Once past the cheesy happy-ending (truly sick-bucket territory and far too tidy and convenient), you then realise that what you’ve seen is not a resolution to the previous story arc but simply a preluding to yet another story arc that's just like the others and will be every bit as disappointing. There is something profoundly cynical about this, like what you are watching is pretty irrelevant, but WHAT MATTERS is that oft-promised and never-delivered extravaganza just around the corner. We cannot enjoy the show as it is but what it might possibly, perhaps, probably give us in the future. This is no longer a show in its own right but an advertisement for another show that, as we now all know, will never get made. It says a lot when all the speculation on the Web is much more satisfying than the real thing when it was finally delivered.

So how about this, Moff? Why not just tell a story instead of always setting up the next one? Or guerilla marketing where bullshit is leaked to the web so everyone is disappointed with the final article? Don't promise. Just do. And no, it's never been a fucking fairy story either. Good sci-fi needs to take itself a bit seriously after all. Maybe then we'll get stories that don't keep relying on poxy Deus ex Machina, even ones that get vaguely hinted at over 13 episodes in a sort of titanic arse-covering exercise. Or relying on novelty, leaving aside there being a new Doctor. But then that would mean facing up to the show’s many shortcomings: Its obsession with celebrity, its shallowness, its weak scripts and its cardboard characters and settings.

As for the cast, well – let’s just say I haven’t changed my mind on Karen Gillan. Yes, I have spent 13 weeks raining shit on a hapless 22-year-old actress but it's just the character is so fucking horrible, and Gillan's performance just revs it up to the max. It doesn’t say much that Amelia Pond (the eight-year-old one, as played by Gillan’s cousin, Caitlin Blackwood) is much more likeable than the grown up one, but then it’s a strange fact that little girls are often far more dynamic and interesting than young women, if not as interesting as old men.

Speaking of old men, Who XI finally starts making sense in this one, Matt Smith somehow fitting into the role at last, even if he’s still Tennanting from time to time. He may well be remembered as the Doctor with the most teething troubles, but he finally brings a unique character and bearing to the role. And as an aside, what with Old Who costume designer Barbara Kidd rejoining the fold, it may be time to do the unthinkable – AND GIVE MATT A HAT. Namely a fez, which suits him.

Also strong, as to be expected, is the interplay between the Doctor and Amy’s poor-sod fiancée (and later husband) Rory, care of the series’ big find, Arthur Darville. There are some excellent scenes between the two, with a chemistry that’s impressive to see. It’s also a father-son relationship; an old, conflicted and haunted Doctor trying to guide and protect an angry, resentful and hurt Rory, still finding his own identity and sense of manhood. And it is here, rather than all the over-amped Amy sub-plotting, that the real heart of the show can be found.

Also, suffice to say, Alex Kingston continues to deliver the goods as Riversong. (Yes, I know it’s actually ‘River Song’, but it looks better if you write it as one word.) Her lines are silly, her role too much like a lame pastiche of a superhero or space opera Mary Sue, and the ongoing ‘who the bloody hell is she?’ foreplay is getting rather tedious now. But Kingston makes the role come alive and even be worthwhile, if only when she’s not being used as yet another way of foreshadowing another vast future disappointment. She is also Moff’s answer to RTD’s Captain Jack, the character he’d love to write a series about, if it weren’t for that pesky Doctor they have to write for instead.

And so they produce cobblers like ‘The Big Bang’, almost out of spite. Cast notwithstanding, it was lazy and shallow. This is no longer storytelling; it's just setting up a 'spectacular' that everyone's already seen five times before. Strangely enough, it all seems rather repetitive now. Even RTD could write better than this load of old shit.

So, thirteen weeks later, what do we have to show for it? One genuinely good episode, one genuinely entertaining one and one passable one (Smartie/M&M-coloured Daleks notwithstanding). The rest, an awful disappointment. The kool-aid sippin’, easily impressed and poorly discriminating public have already eaten it up, perhaps in desperation as deep down they must know the Emperor is stark bollock naked. But what we’ve really had here is a series as bad if not worse as Who in its mid-to-late 80s nadir, and once the hive mind lets go of its delusion, it’s hard to see how this series has any future at all.

WHOPOINTS 5

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 12: The World Ends (Sort Of).

DOCTOR WHO
"The Pandorica Opens”
19/06/2010
BBC One

The main problem with the new Dr. Who format is that it keeps sticking to the same formula. Namely, a season finale that’s set up throughout the series, loads of big hints, fanboys frothing at the mouth on that hotbed of Autism called the Web, and then a loud, bombastic, gormless power creep marathon at the end that never quite delivers.

True, ‘The End of Time’ sort of dodged that one, but only because it featured DAVID FUCKING TENNANT regenerating – which isn’t a common event as a rule. Otherwise, it’s been exactly the same narrative each and every time, and five years later, it’s looking rather worn out.

But like a porn freak, Nu Who keeps chasing that original thrill (which was rather lame and depressing the first time), always missing the target because there never was one to hit in the first place.

Series 5’s damp squib, “The Pandorica Opens” (followed, as with all the other damp squibs with an even damper, squibier episode which bodges everything the week after) is a case in point. We find out what’s really behind those cracks, all those questions are (mostly) answered and the subsititution of Special FX in place of story proceeds ever onwards.

Here, all the Doctor’s old enemies unite to shove him in the Pandorica, which turns out to be a giant prison cell, because they think he’s going to bugger up the universe. What this means in practice is that the cash-strapped show has plundered its storerooms for all its old (but not too old) costumes and mixed in a few expensive new Daleks and Chris Ryan (a welcome return, as it happens) pretending to be a Sontaran again. Even the Autons resurface, one of which performs the dual public service of returning Rory to the show (sort of) and killing the Pond-beast (yay!) all in one fell swoop.

It’s unconvincing, just a big set up for an ‘event’ (and some pointless horse riding) that lacks any real human depth or character. The story is shoddy. It’s incredibly lazy, and full of a sort of sterile conservatism that rivals the show’s nadir in the 80s. But never mind! Here’s some big bangs! Whooshing space ships! Loud orchestral music! This is what happens when British TV tries to ape Hollywood – an unconvincing pastiche that veers dangerously close to the nightmare scenario:Turkish Cinema.

There are good bits. Arthur Darvill, it’s good to see you back – and well done on bringing some real humanity to this mess. (And Chris Ryan, oh how we missed you and your roaring fascist ET Napoleon schtick! Keep getting cloned – you are a Sontaran after all!) Matt Smith is sounding desperately like he’s almost cracked it, give or take some lapses into uncharacteristic set-piece posturing, and the Troughton is strong in him too, with a Tomb of the Cybermen-esque pep talk to Amy. Yes, River Song returns, but the other edge to that sword is that at least we get Alex Kingston back, and she’s too good for this load of old arse, frankly.

Amy Pond? You finally rejoice when the Rory-Auton zaps her dead, as she is so annoying, obnoxious and slappable at this point, you rather hope it’s her who’s going into the magic box. The ongoing campaign to repurpose the show as ‘Doctor Douchebag’ continues too, the episode continuing to make the Doc look less like a protagonist but more of a twat, and even a villain, or at least a fool, when Matt Smith isn’t allowed to portray him as – y’know – the main character.

Perhaps a good summary of what’s wrong with this episode is encapsulated in the clash between Amy and a Cyberman. Firstly, it makes no sense – if the machine parts of a Cyberman can operate autonomously, then why do they need a human component? Also, how is Amy able to ward it off with a flaming torch and how is the Rory-Auton able to kill it with a Gladius, seeing that Cybermen are bulletproof (as a rule)? Secondly, there is the power creep again – apparently Cyberman heads can sprout tentacles and fire poison darts and their arms can fire independently. It’s not as bad as the invincincible flying munchkin Daleks of death, but it’s getting close. And finally, it is unbelievable – why would they not spot a dismembered Cyberman lying all over Stonehenge (and underneath it) in the first place?

This, plus a ‘reveal’ that suggests that the main conceit of the series is going to be rather infantile and quite literally a ‘fairy tale’, suggests a show that doesn’t respect itself or its audience that much. This is a rather depressing thought – that not only is such a show treated like children’s TV but that ‘children’s TV’ is shorthand for crap.

WHOPOINTS 3

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 11: The Eleventh Doctor's Eleventh Episode.

DOCTOR WHO
"The Lodger”
12/06/2010
BBC One

James Corden may have peaked too early. The first time I saw him was on a Tango ad, where his house was invaded by swarms of red-head men and he was driven to madness as they broke his spirit. It was great comedy. The next time I saw him was in 2002's Cruise of the Gods, where he played - fittingly - a fanboy of a naff 80s sci-fi series, all too painfully aware of his own ironies, whilst also deeply in love with a show with heart as well as tack. Sound familiar? It was plainly Davison and (Colin) Baker-era Who, with a dash of Blake's 7 and a hint of the obscure kids' TV sci-fi show Captain Zep. He showed a lot of promise, bringing together a studied wit with a real vulnerability.

Then he peaked too soon with the overrated Gavin & Stacey as Gavin's bff, Smithy. Neither as inspired as some claim, nor likely to be remembered, it typecast him as the archetypical fat oaf, a role he still plays now on TV with his own James Corden's World Cup. And then there are disasters like Horne & Corden or the bleeding awful Lesbian Vampire Killers. Nothing fucks you over like early success, and yet as his rather sparkling performance in the TV adaption of 'The Gruffalo' (!!!) shows, he can still bring vim and vigour to his performances, when he's allowed to.

So is his role as straight man to Who 11 in 'The Lodger' a disaster or a renaissance? The bad news is that he's still playing a fat oaf, but the good news is that he brings some of that old humanity to the role, and makes us sympathise with his character Craig Owens, a loser-in-the-making, marking time at a dead end job and making eyes at his best friend and unrequited love Sophie (Daisy Haggard) while sinking into a fast-food-and-lager stasis. True, Corden is playing to type, but on the other hand, it's nice to have a lardy performer who neither apologises nor really cares about what you think re: his waistline, and Corden also puts in an entertaining, engaging and funny performance. He's still got it, after all!

Alas, there is also a nasty neighbour upstairs who keeps luring people into its lair and isn't letting them out, and a nasty black mould is spreading on the ceiling. Then a tall, lanky weirdo in a bow tie turns up at the door offering to rent out the spare room, cash in hand... And then hilarity ensues.

In many ways, then, this episode has a lot in common with 'zom-com' classic Shaun of the Dead. Both have a lovable loser whose dead end life is transformed by strange events and who ends up with the woman he loves because, and not despite, of the mayhem that ensues.

The main difference here is that it's Shaun's disgruntled girlfriend who makes the biggest journey in SoD, learning to accept Shaun for what he is rather than what she thinks he ought to be (the line 'At least you tried' can be read on many levels). Here, though, the loser's own failings, mediocrity and lack of courage is the focus, as the Doctor casually exposes Craig's every social, professional and intellectual flaw.

What is refreshing here, though, is that Craig benefits from this by finally accepting that he needs to admit his love for Sophie, and so allow his life to proceed. The Doctor is the catylist he needs rather than a threat to his manhood, despite how it may appear at points.

In previous Nu Who series, after all, the Doctor's challenging of the status quo is often portrayed as a Bad Thing. (Why Jackie Tyler's lumpenprole 'know your place' mentality was never really dealt with is just one of the show's many intellectual and moral failings. Donna Noble's mother also needed a proper bitch-slapping.) Here, though, the Doctor is more of a fairy god-doctor, which is perhaps how he should be portrayed - he is meant, after all, to be a force for good.

In any case, and as said, Corden does a good job of portraying a man who is, as the episode puts it, turning into his sofa, making his sloth and small-mindedness clear, while keeping him sympathetic nonetheless. Haggard's portrayal of Daisy is seamless too, her love for Craig contrasted with her urge to live a life beyond pizza, beer and call centres via a nimble balancing act from the performer.

Matt Smith's progress, meanwhile, continues ever onwards. He's still not sounding 'old' enough but he has the eccentricity nailed down and the episode cleverly takes him away from the TARDIS and too much Sonic Screwdriving, making him do what the Doctor should be doing - making it up on the spot and relying on his resourcefulness rather than a magic wand. Away from the ghastly Amy Pond, he also gets to work as a character in his own right and be, well, the star of the show. He can talk to cats and make sensors out of rotary clotheslines! He mindmelds by head-butting you! He can play football! He can act like an alien and really confuse Craig's friends! And his ability to see time out of synch, last seen way back in 'The Eleventh Hour', returns in this episode too, again to great effect, and in a way that makes you wish they'd used it more.

It's almost like this episode is a reminder of what a Who episode can be like without the bullshit. Even the aforementioned Pond-Beast is kept well away from the action, stuck on an unstable TARDIS, and only popping in now and then to remind us of what a total arse she is. The script is strong and well-written, with a villain that is original and not strictly speaking monstrous - merely ruthless, calculating and amoral. The only problem is when the story tries to do too much in too little time (a recurring problem with Nu Who as previous reviews have noted). But the episode also has a good structure, is fun to watch and is genuinely entertaining - if only it were part of the majority and not the minority in this ill-fated series! And if only the new TARDIS set looked as good as that of the alien ship, but that's another rant altogether...

WHOPOINTS 8

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 10: Van Gogh and the Disabled Space Chicken of Death.

DOCTOR WHO
"Vincent and the Doctor”
05/06/2010
BBC One

(Yes, I know this one is late. Stop whingeing.)

How the hell did this script ever get off the ground? I'm not talking about the quality of the end product here. But you have to admit that the episode pitch must have been a sight to behold: "Yeah, well Vincent van Gogh meets the Doctor and they end up fighting a killer space dinosaur-chicken. Hilarity ensues!" On the other hand, connections always help, and since it was Richard 'I've written loads of comedies, me!' Curtis who wrote this script, he could probably have got away with an episode wherein the Doctor travels back in time and eats dog shit with Divine.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Curtis is a sentimentalist of the worst kind, as seen by his buying into the mawkish, fatalistic and rather 2-D folk memory of World War One in the disappointing 'Blackadder Goes Forth', or the worst excesses in overrated rom-coms like Love Actually or 'Four Weddings...'. Don't even get me started on the historical liberties he took with 'The Boat That Rocked' or the Soma-and-Victory-Gin-sodden distortion of British life in shit like Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary. He is the epitome of British luvvie culture - a hack with a lazy reliance on cheap schmaltz and a complacent view of the world echoed by his click-step behind the bien pensant and the banally liberal.

His script is fittingly uneven, then, with a flat and shallow story line and little beyond the three leads (and Bill Nighy, here playing a bow-tie loving art historians) to fill the episode with any real human emotion or meaning. This draws attention to the main test that the episode fails: When its main conceit is so silly, it had better damn well have some depth to it. But "Vincent & The Doctor" just doesn't - it makes no use of van Gogh's world beyond using it as a source of victims to be killed and angry mobs to throw stones.

Worse still, the alien is awful. other than having that fake CGI look, it also looks like an enormous plucked turkey. While not as bad as the oversized Vespid in 'The Lion & The Wasp', or as embarrassing as - well, 60% of all Who monsters, c. 1963-2010, if we're being honest - it still hints at CGI for its own sake. Whereas, the fact that it can only at first be seen by van Gogh (or the Doctor, if he's using the right equipment) should have been the case for the whole episode, the creature remaining invisible to the viewer and so remaining enigmatic. That would, however, have required giving the audience the benefit of the doubt and not indulging Nu Who's over reliance on special FX, so of course, we got a naff killer Bernard Matthews' instead.

Matt Smith puts in a better performance, continuing to become ever more his own Doctor. The only question is whether he can do this in time to justify both his own long-term place in the series, and indeed the future of that series. Certainly, as gratuitous archive shots of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton show, the show is desperate to place Who XI into the canon through association, as if it feels like it has to overcompensate, which is rather worrying. Karen Gillan is blahblahblah etcetera, etcetera, crap but shows a flicker of depth when she is confronted by the mortality of her favourite painter. (As per usual, she turns out of the blue to be a van Gogh groupie, in that make-it-up-as-you-go-along Nu Who way.)

Tony Curran's Vincent van Gogh is good stuff and shows a lot of effort, but plainly lacks the time and space to be a fully developed performance. You can't really jam van Gogh into 45 minutes with a TARDIS and a space monster and properly explore the character - there isn't the room, but at least Curran does what he can. Again, the lack of length to many Nu Who episodes turns out to be something of an Achilles’ Heel. And the episode's doubling up as a tribute to Van Gogh isn't always that good. The gushing sentimentality that takes place when Vincent is taken to 2010 and an exhibition of his own works is truly vomit inducing. The only redeeming moment is when the trip proves less lifesaving than Amy hopes, van Gogh's fate still etched in stone, or rather onto the canvas with those striking, primal colours. At last, a harsh reality creeps in.

For the good parts, when they are there, are very strong indeed. The clever set design, which recreates the many settings for Van Gogh's paintings, stands out and even serves as an effective plot device. While the scene where the evening sky is transformed into 'Starry Night' is actually a sight to behold, inspiring and rousing, and one of only a very, very few highlights in what has been a worn-out and disappointing series. And then there are the little touches: The fact that the TARDIS translates Dutch into Scottish English or the pointed comment from the Doctor that he uses the Sonic Screwdriver too much hint at a script that is more than willing to admit its own ironies. Van Gogh's musing that the monster isn't that much different from the dumb villagers who fear and harass him is a genuinely sad moment.

And the Doctor's closing speech, that life can and must be a combination of both the good and the bad and that one doesn't always overshadow the other, has a maturity the show hasn't had in years, nay decades. Curtis is, then, more like RTD than Moffat - he can very occasionally do good things when he's not entangled in his own tropes or writing cheesy dialogue for floppy haired twats like Hugh Grant. Still, it could have been better, which is pretty much the case for the rest of this benighted species, but at least it isn't as bad as some of the lamer episodes.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 9: Squeaky Bum Time.

DOCTOR WHO

"Cold Blood”

29/05/2010

BBC One

Whilst previous Who two-parters tended to start out well, or at least not totally crap (or in "The Time of Angels'" case just plain crap), they tend to then flop badly in the next episode. (Or get really crap in "Flesh & Stone".)

"Cold Blood", the second episode in Series 5's re-launch of the Silurians, bucks this trend by following a shit episode with an average episode. Yes, it's that impressive.

The good parts are, your intrepid (Wh)Ovine can report, surprisingly many. The character interactions are well written and performed, and the 'are we any better?' debate (wherein the viewer is asked to ponder whether humans are the worst monsters) is effectively handled too. Here both sides of the argument are put across, but the final word, care of the Doctor, leaves no doubt on the real message. Humanity has to learn to be a better species. Throw in some subtle digs at Malthusianism and racism and you have a surprisingly moral episode, for even if the present sees an opportunity wasted, a better future is predicted in a blatant no-tension-really sort of way.

Of course, there's a lot here that is a wasted opportunity. Silurian Elder Eldane (as played by Stephen 'Marvin The Android' Moore) is brought in clumsily and not enough is made of him. Likewise with last episode's vivisector Malokeh (Richard Hope), whose Miyazaki-style change of heart is a bit disjointed and his character wasted. Celeb guest star Meera Syal has very little to do that Amy Pond couldn't have done on her own, and while Neve McIntosh's warrior Silurian Alaya affects a Iago-worthy forked tongue and a rather scary death wish, her sister (also played by McIntosh) is simply a vengeance-crazed cardboard cut-out.

And no, it isn't a patch on 'Doctor Who & The Silurians'. Overall, it lacks consistency and is badly paced, even rushed. The subtleties of the original are 40 years' away from the sledgehammer approach of today and the introduction of Amy's Crack (fnarr!) is equally as heavy handed and blatant. It took six 30-minute episodes to tell a story that unfolded organically in 1970. 40 years later, it takes two hyperactive toddler episodes at 45 minutes each to just churn out a slapdash narrative. Let's hear it for progress.

Matt Smith does of course make some progress of his own in this one, beginning to ease into the role, even though he's still talking like Who X, and doesn't actually do very much again. Arthur Darvill's Rory remains hapless yet also displays a dignified and heroic side that's well performed. And while he snuffs it and then gets erased from history (as usual with Nu Who, it's the Doc's fault), you just know he's not gone for good - the character just works so well and has certainly earned his place on the TARDIS. Amy Pond/Karen Gillan? Eek. But she does show some depth FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER when her character loses Rory, then forgets him with equal poignance after he's been rubbed out. (It's that naughty Crack of hers again, I tell you.)

It could have been better, but avoided being worse. That's pretty good going by this series' standards.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 8: Hungry A**e.

DOCTOR WHO
‘The Hungry Earth”
22/05/2010
BBC One

"Doctor Who & The Silurians" is one of the classics of the old series, an epic Shakespearean tragedy where the real monster is not in the form of the Silurians themselves - ancient subterranean reptile men from Earth's past - but hubris, pride, stupidity, fear and bigotry, of which all sides, the Doctor and the Brigadier included, are guilty.

Forty years later, and the Silurian comeback "The Hungry Earth", part one of a two part serial, has quite a task on its hands to follow up on that one. So it doesn't bother. Instead it just reuses plot ideas from "...Silurians" and loads of other Old Who stories. Drilling into something awful? Inferno. A church and a forcefield? The Daemons. Welsh setting with loveable boyos in peril? The Green Death. The only way they could have made it any more derivative was if they caught Liz Shaw in the Tardis reversing the polarity with a giant maggot.

The ethical dilemma at the heart of "...Silurians", as to whether we are any better than them or perhaps worse, has meanwhile been buggered up. This time, to spare you the tedious details, it is hamfistedly executed, with the inevitable fuck-up that makes us all ashamed to be human slotted in for next week but telegraphed so loudly you can pretty much guess how it will turn out.

The characters are pretty cardboard too, with the Doctor and Rory scripted to operate as if on autopilot, right down to the already overused 'HOW COULD YOU NOT SAVE HIM/HER?' routine. Speaking of clichés, the episode also maintains the 'Doctor Is Christ/Doctor Is A Wanker' binary opposition, with no nuance or subtlety in-between. The Doctor we saw in "...Silurians" was a much more well realised Time Lord.

Amy Pond remains fucking annoying, as per usual, and the episode seems to toy with the viewer when it seems she's going to get dissected next week. (She won't of course.) But her growing lack of interest in what the Doctor does suggest some character development, if not all that much.

The worst character is the boy, whose Dad gets suctioned down into the bowels of the earth at the start of the episode. Now, please do not see that as a slur on the young actor playing him. It's just that there's something incredibly depressing about the underlying notion of a character whose only real purpose is to be precocious, then run off and get in trouble and, to top it all off, suffer from a disability-du-jour, which in this case is dyslexia. Britain, if you really want to help dyslexics, don't patronise them with token sufferers being bullshitted by Matt Smith. Actually invest in their education, stop discriminating against them and actually put some effort in assisting them in their day to day lives. But of course, this is a mainstream TV show made in Britain c. 2010 we're talking about here, so the feel-bad-but-in-reality-do-fuck-all consensus rules supreme.

Did I mention that the New Model Silurians are shite? They don't look like the old Silurians, and instead go for a generic reptilian humanoid look of the sort that Star Trek at its least imaginative might use. The makeup didn't look like a reptilian humanoid so much as an actress in reptilian makeup, which might sound obvious, but there is a clear difference between the two, in the same way that a bloke in a cheap made-in-China gorilla suit doesn't look like Chewbacca.

Throw in a plot full of holes and inconsistencies, and which often just marks time until the second episode's preamble is set up, and then mix firmly with infantile, flat characterisation. Voila! You have this episode. Fittingly, it was written by Christopher Chibnall, responsible for some of the worst Torchwood episodes ever (and that's saying something). Perhaps he took Stephen Moffat at his word and wrote the script for 11-year-olds, but that rather insults 11-year-olds, doesn't it? Last week's episode, 'Amy's Choice', was indeed a fluke, because we are back to Business As Usual: Poor scripts and shallow narratives, produced and performed in a slapdash and inconsequential way.

WHOPOINTS 4

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 7: Dreaming of the Valeyard.

DOCTOR WHO
‘Amy's Choice’
15/05/2010
BBC One

In the words of the Doctor's future wife, SPOILERS!!!

Now, with that formality out of the way, let's dwell on the first truly great episode of this series. 'Amy's Choice' is simply far more mature, believable and nuanced than any of the episodes that have gone before it, and probably every episode that will follow. The dialogue is excellent and the script is competent and well thought out. The story line is compelling and the pacing is wonderful. What more could you ask for? Well, maybe a plot that’s not akin to The Mind Robber, but you can’t have it all one supposes – nigh-on fifty-years worth of Who will led to some repetition after all.

The plot, for those who want it over and done with, is this: Via some psychic contamination, the Doctor's hate, guilt, self-loathing and sadism manifests itself as the 'Dream Lord' who puts the Doc, Rory and Amy through a literal nightmare (or three), forcing them to make some serious choices...

...This is ingenious simply because it allows the characters to either develop or reveal hitherto hidden depths. Amy learns she really loves Rory, while Rory proves how much he loves the deranged ginger tart in turn. The Doctor meanwhile is revealed as both solution, villain and matchmaker, using the experience to lead Amy away from him and choose Rory. In fact, it could be read as the Doctor using the experience all along to teach Amy that lesson, that one day the Doctor will have to leave her, and Rory is what she really wants. Rory meanwhile leaves behind his ideal, sterile 'reality' for the imperfect but more human and genuine reality that awaits him. He learns that having a house, a child on the way and a job as a country doctor isn't enough - he needs the truth more, his self-indulgent ponytail cut off as a gesture of adulthood.

This is of course probably the most brutal episode in years. There's at least two suicides, killer aliens hiding in the bodies of old people murdering children and postmen in equal measure, betrayal and barely repressed bitterness, a pregnancy that never comes to be, bereavement, major existential crises and the Doctor finally becoming what the new series has always seemed to want him to be: a villain, a monster and a dire foe.

This does of course fit in with one of Nu Who's worst traits, its deranged obsession with diminishing the Doctor and making him look like a total wanker. (Sort of a Reverse Spike, for all the Buffy fans that Nu Who in part is rather keen to woo.) This is so 1980s, when you think about it, but 'somewho' it all seems rather lame, an adolescent iconoclasm in an age where po-mo is dead and we really do need to pick sides again.

But that's the only quibble. This same conceit is inspired in many other ways - the 'Dream Lord', played with tangible malice and cruelty by Toby Jones, is both the conscience and the Greek chorus of the story, haunting the Doctor up to and including the last frame. You may care to watch the episode twice to see all the clues that reveal who he really is. It also puts the Doctor in a new light, no longer falling in love with his assistant but trying to save her from that fate and do the 'right thing'. (Everyone chooses to in this one, which may or may not be redemption, or simply a delay of the inevitable.) And yet, it is probably not the last time we will see the Dream Lord: He echoes the Doctor's future evil regeneration, the Valeyard (from the Colin Baker era, for all the completists out there), and may be seen as his warm-up. It isn't too much like Fight Club - just in case you're wondering.

So maybe they should just give in, stop trying to make the Doctor a hero and just make him a monster for a series or two, or at least make him amoral again, like William Hartnell's Doctor. But that might blow the gaff - after all, he's still meant to be at least officially a 'hero', albeit one that has shit hurled at him non-stop, and yet this episode suggests there's much to be explored if they actually had the balls to take it as far as it can go. They won't of course, but 'Amy's Choice' shows how it could be.

Matt Smith is also getting better, slowly but surely moulding his Doctor into something that's not entirely Tennant, but with much work left to do. Arthur Darvill's slightly beleaguered Rory really shines this time, his journey every bit as taught and troubled as the Doctor, whilst the non-stop low-level love/hate between the two is wonderful. Shockingly, Amy Pond (or Karen Gillan as her parents call her) is bearable here too, mainly because the script reins in her worst traits and forces her to evolve as a character too. 'So what is the point of you then?' she spits, as the Doctor reveals to her what we all know but which she was too immature to accept: the Doctor can't always save the day, and only a child can't agree with that fact. A child like Amy.

And yet the story is ultimately about love. Rory and Amy realise how much they love each other, and the Doctor reveals how much he loves them both too. But it's not a romantic love, but the kinf that is necessary if sometimes monstrous, leering back at the Doctor on the reflective surface of his Tardis console, not gone but simply waiting.

WHOPOINTS 8.5

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 6: Venetian Vampires Without Bite.

DOCTOR WHO
‘Vampires In Venice’
08/05/2010
BBC One

One truth often overlooked about Doctor Who is that the men are better than the women. No, that's not sexism. What I mean is that the male companions always seem more interesting and fleshed out than most of the female companions as a rule, the only exceptions being Liz (Who III), Leela & Romana (Who IV) and Ace (Who VII) who instead were women who were trying or were able to be part of what was still a men's world, and so had much more going on under the surface.

But the male companions still stand out, because the dynamic was different. With female companions, it was often a fatherly relationship with the Doctor, as opposed to today's non-stop Electra Complex love affairs. But with the men, it was often more complicated and dynamic, the glorious spectacle of two or more difficult blokes travelling through time and space and getting on each other's tits.

Top of the pile has to be Jamie, whose relationship with Who II swung from father-and-son to pissed off married couple to squabbling children, often all in the same scene. Or the Brigadier, whose relationship with the Doc was that of a brother who'd lay his life down for the other and vice versa. Of course it was also the sort of brotherly relationship where they just couldn't fucking stand each other, the frustrated spite of the Doctor and the barely suppressed hurt of the Brig masterfully played out by Pertwee, Baker and Courtney. Or poor put-upon Sergeant Benton, who took all the flak from those angry posh gits with a very British stoicism. The star turn that was Harry Reid. Or the looming Shakespearean Tragedy that was Adric. Going back to the Hartnell days, there was Ian, serving as the angry conscience for what was then an essentially amoral Doctor, and Steven, through which the show began to properly explore the implications and ironies of the Doctor in a way today's angstfests can't even begin to ape.

Even latter day male Who companions are more interesting than the Roses and the Amys. Poor old Mickey, shafted by his woman and overshadowed by a transdimensional prima donna, his reconciliation with the latter coming at the cost of the former who had long since cast him aside. Or Captain Jack, who might have been a poster boy for shagging everything that moves and which can consent, but was still told off and bossed around by the Doctor like a father, for all Jack's romantic overtures. Or Who X's last companion, Wilf, who had the deepest and most intense bonds with the Doc, despite the brief time they spent together.

This brings us neatly onto Rory, whose masculinity is as stiff as lettuce and whose macho credentials are less pronounced than his nursing degree. He's also Amy Pond's great unintended, even forced to dress up as her 'Raggedy Doctor' as the love of his life went ever more loopy. As mentioned in my interview of "The Eleventh Hour", Arthur Darvill brings a real wounded pathos to his poor sod character, right down to the timid, vulnerable body language. And in 'Vampires of Venice', last night's episode, we finally get to see him in action, so to speak.

In this one, the Doc - still reeling after Amy tried to have her wicked way with him on the night before her wedding - decides that only a romantic weekend in 16th Century Venice with Rory will save their marriage before it's even started. Of course, shit magnet that he (or the TARDIS) is, the Doctor beams them in to the middle of an infestation of vampires, or rather, Saturnynians: Blood-drinking fish monsters with mind-camouflage. I'm not making this shit up, you know.

So it's a bit of a shame that this episode was plainly written by Toby 'Being Human' Whithouse for Who X, Rose and Mickey, then dusted off and rewritten for this series. Apart from all the Tennantisms, Amy says and does a lot of Rose Tyler things (i.e., be a brave, gormless arsehole) and Rory is left doing what Mickey would have otherwise done (i.e., mope around a lot and shout at the Doctor.)

Meanwhile, the way Doc XI and Amy Pond jump up and down with joy or look excited whenever something bad happens is actually an old trope from the Doc X/Rose days, where they treated it all like a big laugh despite all the bloodletting. This was how the RTD era tried to justify punishing them for having too good a time (yes, he said this), which is a bit odd when you consider that they came across less as ghouls and more like how the audience itself was feeling. RTD himself seemed to hate the Doctor and delighted in making him miserable, which of course just kept getting in the way of the storytelling.

But when Matt Smith and Karen Gillan do it, the effect is more like two actors trying to play someone else, namely David Tennant and Billy Piper. Or perhaps two happy but delusional mental patients living in a shared dreamworld with Rory the nurse taking them out for a supervised trip to a museum. NOW THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A PLOT TWIST

Poor old Rory, meanwhile, is reduced to saying Mickey's words, right down to the crybaby denunciation of the Doctor being a threat to everyone he knows, which is a bit like accusing the Fire Brigade of endangering lives every time it leaps into a burning building, or a surgeon being accused of being a potential mass-murderer because he works in a Casualty/ER ward. Isn't it the aliens and assorted baddies who were the killers and threats here, or did that get in the way of all the lazy RTD-era revisionism?

Things do get better as the episode develops though, not least because Whithouse's re-jigged script lets the team dynamic evolve away from its roots. Amy morphs from Who groupie to would-be menage a trois participant, the animus between Rory and the Doc giving way to an understated warmth and a very traditional love-hate relationship. Rory could be another classic male companion in the making here, if it wasn’t for the sinking feeling that they’re going to bugger it up like they always do.

Amy remains awful as usual, annoying and stupid in equal measure, and whereas last episode, you were rooting for the angels, now you're rooting for the vamps, who again fail miserably and let her live. On the other hand, it's not hard to cheer when the Doctor finally gives her a patriarchal bitch-slapping and tells her to fuck off back to the TARDIS. Not that she listens, of course. Oh nooooooo...

The story itself is rather bland. 'Venice', or rather Trogir in Croatia where this episode is filmed, is shot in a lifeless and sterile way, more a film set than a convincing setting, whilst the baddies' fortress is far too well-lit and tidy to bestow any real menace. In the end, it's all so clean and barren that you don't actually care what happens. There is no humanity here, beyond the three leads.

The vampire-fish are a wasted opportunity too. Less Lovecraftian Deep Ones and more crap CGI newts, their menace is badly handled and their human forms seem more like really bad Hammer depictions than the Gothic Horrors they should be. The faintly oedipal relationship between the Saturnynian Queen and her son is bodged too, neither character having much depth. And while the Queen's justifications for her plot to sink Venice below the waves are aimed at giving her a motivation, they only really make her sound like a delusional relativist loon.

Throw in a sub-plot with an expendable Venetian father and his equally expendable daughter (both of whom have even less personality than the Saturnynes), even more plot holes and ideas that are shamelessly and hamfistedly reused from other episodes and you have a bit of a disappointment. It's doubly disappointing coming from Toby Whithouse, who I - as a Being Human obsessive - can honestly say knows how to write when he can be arsed to. (Three words: REAL HUSTLE and HERRICK.)

Perhaps he needs a whole series to play with instead of just one episode? Whithouse does seem to do best when he has lots of episodes to play with, and fittingly it's the ongoing relationship between the Doc, Amy and Rory that's got the most life in it. In that sense it parallels Being Human - both are about two messed up, haunted men and one crazed woman, though Annie the Ghost is more 'needy' and Amy the Scots Racist is more 'hungry', so to speak.

Yet it works for the same reasons, the human drama giving some meaning that the SFX and expensive location doesn't. And who could dare slag off the glorious opening scene, where the Doctor emerges from a cake in place of a diabetic stripper and proceeds to bugger up Rory's stag night beyond all recognition? It's better to think what this episode could have been, then, than what it actually amounted to.

WHOPOINTS 6

Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 5: Stone Angels Come To Bad End.

DOCTOR WHO
'The Time of Angels'
01/05/2010
BBC One

So, the last time we were here, the Doc, his future wife, his awful assistant and a fair few expendable church squaddies were going to get croaked by weeping angels... But then the Doctor did something crap and out of character (as in, use a gun). One Deus et Machina later and we find ourselves at Part Two, "Flesh and Bone"...

But first the opening titles, where - through the miracle of really bad CGI - the TARDIS churns through the time vortex. It really does look like a large blue turd flowing down the alimentary canal of an enormous suck-beast. The music's cack too.

As for the episode itself, it's more filler than thriller. It ties up of loose ends and preludes for the rest of this series' big story arc, with little thought given to the story beyond some new Moffat gimmicks, like pissing about with gravity or cyborg trees or oblivion through time-crack.

As for the cast, it is not a pretty sight. Riversong is less of a character here and more someone for the Doctor to shout at. Though at least Alex Kingston does her best with expressions and gestures where the decent dialogue is not forthcoming. The big revelation about her is - you guessed it - yet more build-up for the 'season finale' (Joss Whedon: you are a cock) and for the most part, she's underused and squandered.

The Doctor, or Matt Smith, is still regenerating, in the sense that he and the audience and indeed the scriptwriter haven't worked out if he's David Tennant, a new Doctor altogether or something that's getting bodged until they finally work out what to do with Who XI. Sometimes he thrashes about and yet shows signs of becoming of his own man or time lord or whatever. Other times, he just looks burdened, though the way he flirts with his future bride in a sort of sleazy but naff fashion suggests a dash of comic ability that echoes Troughton/Who II.

Meanwhile, Amy Pond still needs a slap. She is obnoxious, stupid, argumentative and unsympathetic to the point that you're rooting for Team Angel pretty much from the start. The character is fundamentally unlike-able, which is quite a departure from the traditional DW formula of companions who, you know, the audience is supposed to like. We also discover she's a potential Time Lord rapist who's willing to cheat on her man the night before their wedding. What a shit. But moreover, what an awful supporting character, seeing that she is so utterly unsympathetic.

As for the 'clerics' (which, if you don't remember, are the 51st Century church gone militant), their role is simply to die or otherwise get rubbed out. At least you mourned the marines in Aliens, of which this two-parter is ever so slightly indebted to, because there was something to mourn in the first place. But when the clerics' only differentiating trait is that they have funny ecclesiastical names, it seems shoddy writing is to blame.

The only cleric with a personality is Father Octavian. But it's a sort of passive aggressive sulk concluded with a highly improbable reconciliation between he and the Doctor just before Octavian gets his neck snapped by an angel. No disrespect here for Iain Glen, who does as well as most seasoned actors could with such shit characterisation and script. The blame falls squarely on the Moff's shoulders, an inadvertent tribute to those Old Who episodes where the Brigadier was portrayed as a total wanker and Nicholas Courtney just had to swallow it like his own vomit. In that sense, like the Father, Glen can sleep well in his bed at night: he was only following orders.

The episode overall, then, is a whimper. Even the main 'standout sequence' where a shut-eyed Amy has to navigate a forest full of angels is a wasted opportunity – it ends abruptly and has no real purpose. Perhaps Lawrence Miles is right after all - Nu Who is just a juxtaposition of set piece events linked by a lame script. But still - surely they wouldn't be so cynical about it? Well, actually they would, but at least some of the Old Who magic is there: note how one wall bends as the Doc leans on it? Yes, we're back in the era of wobbly sets! Rejoice!

WHOPOINTS 4

In the Brown Stuff - Part Deux.

You may have heard that Gordon Brown didn’t turn his mic off. What happened next and the response to it is, however, the real story.

After all, and whether you agree with Brown said or not, was this not a private conversation? All politicians have them and no doubt say all sorts of things the public would be shocked to hear, and yet we all can reasonably assume that things like this are said all the time. And what about the things we all say in private that are all too different from what we say in polite society? Double standards, anyone? Or is Brown's real crime that he got caught?

And while some may say that different rules should apply to politicians, this seems quite self-serving. One moment, we want our politicians to be like us, and the next minute we want them to be inhumanly perfect. We can't have both. Perhaps we need to stop seeing politics as a calling or a means to the Promised Land, or an epic battle between good 'n evil, but merely as a job full of conflicted, compromised, weak and silly people like us. And in a similar vein, so should politicians themselves.

But the real hypocrisy lies in the response to what Brown said. We demand candour and openness from our politicians and even avoid the ballot box because 'they're all as bad as each other'. Well, actually, they're not and such immoral and lazy thinking is the root cause of our political malaise, along with a dysfunctional relationship with politics itself. Do we really know what we want our MPs to do? It seems to change day by day.

And as ever, it is the voters who are the main villains here. If Gillian Duffy can say what she wants, then so should Brown. Yet we refuse to hear honest opinions if they clash with our preconceptions. This will have dire consequences. On the one hand, it has lead to spin, dishonesty, doublespeak and secrecy on the part of those who need our votes, which has lead in turn to corruption, embezzlement and indeed £1645 duck houses. We have to take a fair share of the blame for this.

But it is even more harmful than that. Whoever gets in next week will have to make cuts. Very big cuts. And so, a lot of enemies. Yet where is the honest debate? Where are the figures? The discussion? The bare facts? You won't get them because no sane politician is going to tell the truth to the public. We would rip them apart because they dared rouse us from our La-La-World retreat from reality. We all know it will come to pass but we're too spineless and stupid to face up to it. We then get the leaders we deserve.

I hate Brown, but I hate humbug and the 'have-cake-and-eat-it' mentality of the British body politic even more. Isn't it sad that Brown is done down, in the end, not for lies but for an honest opinion? And as I have said before, this story has only made the news because we have collectively decided he is a loser again. Never mind why Brown or Clegg or Cameron should be PM – why would anyone want to run a country with such a blind and pig-foul electorate in the first place?