Not even habitually in-the-know TV desks on national newspapers have much idea as to what lies in store in The Day of the Doctor. No preview copies are available, so only those reviewers with the ability to time-travel will have had the scoop about Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary episode. Aside from the production team, cast and insiders, the rest of us are all subject to the same hazy expectation. But how many, I wonder, will be cowering behind the sofa in a true state of excitement and dread?
OK, so the old “sofa-test” may be a rather worn, frayed and inexact means of measuring the effectiveness of the country’s longest-running sci-fi series. But fade out the drum-beat of hype over the past month or so and can anyone say they heard the nation’s pulse audibly quicken at the approach of Steven Moffat’s latest opus?
As prompted, I “saved the day” but I can’t say I raised my hopes particularly high. Nor has there been much stirring of anticipation in the Cavendish household. Lucas, 12, and Anna, nine, should represent the ideal demographic for the new wave of Who adventures and when the show burst back into view in 2005, I envied them the infinitely more sophisticated special effects their generation was being treated to. But although they’ve grown up along with the revamped series and been intrigued by each reincarnation, they reached a turning-point sometime before this landmark episode. They have become quite take-it-or-leave-it about the whole thing.
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23 Nov 2013I don’t particularly blame them, and I suspect they’re far from alone. I haven’t tracked every episode since Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor first emerged from the Tardis to do battle with Autons and his old enemy the Nestene Consciousness in modern-day London. But I’ve watched enough to get a sense of a huge, laudable enterprise gradually losing its way and at points even disappearing up its own fundament. You don’t need to be a theatre critic to observe that the charisma and acting chops of those playing the Time Lord – and his companions – have often helped lend vital credibility and a sense of jeopardy to hectic scenarios too light in dramatic tension and to scripts groaning with backstory and piled-on implausibilities.
Last Christmas, I reviewed The Snowmen – promoted as “the scariest episode over”; the kids barely shuddered. Earlier this year, watching The Rings of Akhaten – in which menace on a bombastic scale was defeated by the production of a single leaf of sentimental value – we all wondered what planet Moffat and his team were on. And I defy people to read the Wikipedia synopsis of the most recent episode, “The Name of the Doctor”, which went out in May, and not find the word ‘gobbledygook’ apt.
As a child of the Seventies, I have a partisan loyalty to the era of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. But the resurrection of the Zygons this weekend – another villain from the vaults – inevitably invites a comparison with 1975, when Baker’s scarf-trailing Doctor faced Terror of the Zygons, a gripping yarn set in the Scottish highlands.
Matt Smith and David Tennant in Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor
Running my eye over some of the episodes from that year – The Sontaran Experiment, Pyramids of Mars, Genesis of the Daleks, The Android Invasion – I don’t think we have yet seen an equivalent run of certifiable classics since producer/writer Russell T Davies successfully engineered the reboot. The best of the good old days remains unsurpassed. Built around weekly cliff-hangers, the episodes dominated Saturday night for months (no longer the case); what they lacked in state-of-the-art effects they made up for with mood, pace, suspense and an open invitation to our hyper-active imaginations.
The most memorable and perturbing episodes of the past eight years, in my view, have harked back to the early lo-tech Whovian virtues of less being more: The Empty Child, Silence in the Library, Midnight. What’s scarier than darkness, absence, the unknown – the threat of being imprisoned, tortured or killed, the stuff of nightmares for adults and children alike? I applaud those who brought Doctor Who back from the dead but it’s still in recovery, and too reliant on a sense of fast, furious, here-today, gone-tomorrow overkill. Looking ahead, those in charge should take a bigger leaf out of their predecessors’ book and be less afraid to, well, give themselves more time.
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