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