The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

I know I'm always saying Steven Moffat is the Robert Holmes of the current generation of Doctor Who writers. Aside from writing brilliant stories (though he was upstaged this year by Neil Gaiman's effort) he also has a habit of plundering literary sources for ideas as the last two Christmas specials attest (oh, and I loved the Androzani Major reference too).

Anyway, onto to this years festive effort. It was okay but  not in the same league of some of this years episodes. Matt was as enjoyable as ever and Claire Skinner made a good stand in companion (and it was nice to see Amy and Rory at the end. But would the Doctor really wait two years before seeing them again since the events of The Wedding of River Song?). One thing I did miss was the "Coming Soon" trailer at the end so we could look forward to next years goodies. But that's a minor quibble about what was an enjoyable episode.

"Christmas Day on BBC1..."

... and Boxing Day on ABC1!

Doctor Who Lego!!!

Need it say more?

Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO

My appreciation for Delia Derbyshire is increasing. Not only did she arrange the original version of the Doctor Who theme, she also created this astonishing piece of work for the 1960s anthology series Out of the Unknown (the BBC's answer to The Twilight Zone) seen here performed live at the Roundhouse event in 2009.

Sadly the episode it comes from, The Prophet, no longer exists in the BBC's archives. Which is a great shame as, judging by just this piece of music and the images in this clip, it must have been one hell of an episode.

Time and the Rani

Hmmm.

I suspect, considering how badly received The Twin Dilemma was, that John Nathan-Turner decided to go in the opposite direction with Sylvester's first story. Instead of making the new Doctor unlikable he makes him a total idiot. Fortunately Sylvester did recover from this (especially after Andrew Cartmell took hold as script editor). And then there's the script that makes no bloody sense whatsoever (even Pip & Jane Baker didn't enjoy writing it). And then there's Bonnie Langford of which the less said the better.

Is there anything good about Time and the Rani? Well, it's well directed, the production standards are high with the first use of CGI in Doctor Who. But otherwise it's not that great.

Frontios

Wow! That wasn't what I was expecting.

The only scene I can remember from Frontios' original transmission was the cliffhanger to part 1 when the TARDIS is destroyed. So I was pleasantly surprised when I watched this DVD to discover how good it was.

First things that struck me was the production values. Some scenes looked like something out of the current series. The only thing that really lets it down is the music (not one of Paddy Kingsland's better scores) and the realisation of the Tractators (basing them on wood lice was a good idea, but the costume lets it down badly). All the cast are good, but Peter Davison is really good in this story. It seems like there were maybe only three writers who really got a handle on the fifth Doctor's character and Christopher H. Bidmead was one of them (the other two were Robert Holmes and possibly Christopher Bailey).

I think I'd vote this as being second only to The Caves of Androzani and being one of the best stories of the fifth Doctor's era.