The Halloween Apocalypse: Rank - 291

  The Halloween Apocalypse

(Season 13, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 31/10/2021, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Magnus Stone)

Rank: 291

'Whose that doggy in the window? The one with the waggly tail? And the hyperdrive powered spaceship? The one that's disguised by a scifi veil? 

They call them the Korvanista, Come to save the Human race from alien threat, They've got guns and gadgets galore And make the dearest trained pets  

There's one just taken a trip to Liverpool, because of an evil threat called The Flux, He's giving our Dan a new home, though it's not exactly deluxe 

Their nose is all wet and shiny, their outer casing of fur so warm, dedicated to saving us from robbers and evil aliens like The Swarm'

Happy Halloween everybody! I hope you’re all tucked up cosy in your beds with the ghosties and ghouls wander about outside, the veil between the physical and supernatural realms at its thinnest. Dr Who has had a long standing tradition of horror stories woven into its scifi based standing so it seems only natural the series should join in with an official Halloween story, set on the day of transmission of October 31st. If anything it’s long overdue, a mere 58 years after the first episode. Though it’s ambiguous whether ghosts exists in the Whoniverse let’s face it too there’s no end of spooky monsters that are nearly right for the part who could have been roped in to celebrate too: the pentagram-loving Fendahl, the Gelth from ‘The Unquiet Dead’, the aliens from ‘Hide’, the shimmering Cybermen from ‘Army Of Ghosts’, ‘Light’ from ‘Ghost Light’, the Carrionite witches from ‘The Shakespeare Code’. Or maybe they’ll create some great new monster that will finally explain for once and for all what ghosts really are, with a scientific rather than supernatural origin. Whatever it is, they’ve gone to town with the publicity of the broadcast date for the first episode of the new series and look at that name! It’s sure to be atmospheric and kooky and spooky. I mean what else makes you think of Halloween more than…a big dog?!? Wait what? That’s not spooky, that’s cute.

‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is not what any of us were expecting. Sometimes in Dr Who that’s a good thing: this series would have ended long ago if you truly knew where a story was going to go just from the title. But sometimes its need to go in a different direction to what we were told is perverse and this is very much one of those times. I mean, it’s all very well doing the old switcheroo on fans but we live to speculate over titles and clues and blurry location filming snaps: by the point this story – the start of a much hyped interlinked series where every story fitted round the same theme, utterly different to anything Dr Who had done barring ‘quest’ seasons or ‘Bad Wolf’ style hints or Steven Moffat-driven seasons that took a break from the main storyline to have fun with pirates – hit our screens we’d invented a million plausible stories, all of them better and more exciting than this one. By 2021 the ratings were in freefall and it felt as if Who was going to the dogs: having a story where the dogs came to us might have worked as the throwaway cutesy story in the middle of a generic season, but as the big blockbuster opener to brave new era that desperately needed to win over new, hardcore scifi fans? Not a chance!

Unlike Davies or Moffat thus far Chibnall-penned season openers had tended to be grown-up rather than child friendly. ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ has, at least on paper, very adult themes of loss and grieving while ‘Spyfall’ goes to some very dark places despite the colourful James Bond feel. ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ though is trying to set up a threat that’s genuinely one of the darkest in the series: The Flux, an event so spectacularly powerful that it’s slowly turning the universe inside out and The Swarm, the beings behind it, have a power seldom seen in the series (again, at least on paper). Both feature in this story but are noises-off, weird little cameos that we cut to in between the main action, which is the heartwarming tale of a man and a dog who comes to rescue him from outer space. For a while it looks as if they’re going down the werewolf front, like ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ or ‘Tooth and Claw’, with humanity turned canine every Halloween (technically Korvanista is a single member of the race Lupars, though Korvanista also seems to be used interchangeably for the whole f his kind) but nope: The Korvanista are a fully alien species and while the one we meet has a fine line in dry sarcasm and lots of alien weaponry ultimately he’s more Pound Puppy than rabid wolf, his bark clearly worse than his bite from his opening scene. I'm all for aliens who don't just look like Humans but an oversized dog costume just makes him look like one of the Chucklehounds instead. There's no real reason for him to even be a dog in the script either, beyond a few predictably lame jokes. The Korvanista costumes are great, believably doglike yet with enough human traces of actor Craig Else beneath the makeup to make them vaguely believable as a person rather than a puppet. The idea behind them though is a bit daft: apparently all Humans have Korvanistas bonded to them, ready to save them from imminent destruction (which is hilarious if you’ve come to this project from my sister site Alan’s Album Archives, where our mascot is the pub-going booze-swigging musical canine Bingo the red-nosed basset hound: typical, instead of saving me he chose to put his feet up and borrow my CDs instead). In the context of the series though: the Earth has been in danger so many times before and I don’t remember seeing any Korvanistas coming in to help before. I mean, where were they preventing humans from jumping to their death in ‘The Christmas Invasion’, saving us from the Dalek-Cyberman wars of ‘Doomsday’ or more Dalek invasions than you can throw a stick at. And surely at least one companion would have met one by now: I like to imagine that Katarina was saved from the vacuum of space by a giant Greek poodle and Adric by a Chihuahua, while Peri had a Rottweiler to keep King Ycarnos’ paws off her, but of course all of these changes would be a typically Chibnall colossally huge re-write of Who folklore and, if that’s what he intended when he sat down to write a first draft, the fan re-action to the meddling with the Doctor’s history in ‘The Timeless Child’ arc seems to have put him off. If they’d even paired the Doctor back with K9 again, to hammer the point home about dogs being ‘man’s best friend’ I’d have accepted it more, but no. And that’s the plot really, as far as this first episode goes: a dog from space comes to save a human that the Doctor and Yaz save from him, sort of: had this been a plot on ‘Scooby Doo’ we’d have been moaning about it being too simple (not least because we actually know who did it). The result is a great fudge of a story that’s something of a dog’s dinner in plot terms.

Well, that’s the whole ‘A’ plot anyway: for the ‘B’ plot take your pick from all the different elements that keep interrupting the action seemingly at random, from across all time and space; one second we’re down in the Mersey tunnels in the 19th century, the next we’re in the Arctic Circle in the future, next we’re watching some dude chilling in a space station and then there’s The Swarm and what they’re up to. Oh and there’s a girl called Claire who randomly walks into the plot three whole episodes too early just to say goodbye to a Doctor that hasn’t met her yet, a mystery that’s ignored for three whole weeks (it doesn’t help that she looks very like Diane, Dan’s sort of girlfriend, which doesn’t help my face blindness: Diane only has one arm so they ought to be easy to tell apart except you can’t see Claire’s arms in most of her shots this episode, another extra confusion the story really didn’t need). And a Sontaron on vid-screen. That’s at least three timezones (goodness only knows when The Swarm are speaking but presumably it’s the same time the Doctor hears them, in 2021) and six different locations. That’s at least four plots too many: in the olden days vernacular it would be like trying to do ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in a space the size of ‘Mission To The Unknown’. At the time, when we hoped it might be worth the journey, we ran with it but given how ‘FLUX’ turned out, with plots that didn’t go anywhere and cul-de-sac episodes that undone everything, it all seems even crazier in retrospect that none of these ideas had anywhere near enough room to breathe. It’s as if the scripts for the rest of the series were thrown into the air, dropped, then stuck together at random where they fell. We don’t know how any of this relates to the concept of ‘Flux’ and honestly even after we get to the end I’m still not that convinced all the pieces of this puzzle fit: I mean, as far as Dan and his Korvanista are concerned the Flux hasn’t happened yet, so there’s no excuse for the sort of playing-with-time jiggery-pokery that we get in future episodes. The result is such a stylistic mess, with characters coming and going from one scene to another, without any sense of what’s going on. Chibnall has clearly been listening to the main criticism of series eleven that his plots were ‘too simple’ and he’s gone away and watched the Moffat era scripts and figured ‘oh I see, you just need to have a lot going on at once’. The difference there, though, was that Steven only gave the viewers what we needed to know for any one story in an order that made sense when you got to the end, with the knowledge that come the end all the threads would be unravelled if only we had patience (admittedly not all of them well, but every puzzle had a solution by the end). Here, though, so much is being thrown at us at once that the threads all get knotted into a big ball and honestly the solutions aren’t interesting enough when we get there to make the effort of unravelling them worth it and there’s no excuse for why we get the story told as relentlessly, perversely out of order as it is. A series in difficulty, that desperately needs to hook a new audience, simply can’t afford to show as much disdain for the casual viewer as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ does. The result is a mostly unwatchable, tonally deaf story where the cute comedy bits fall flat because they’re in the middle of scary exposition and where cameo parts sit on top not so much like the cherry on the cake as cherries in cement.

There are treats amongst the tricks mind. Needing a new companion to replace Graham and Ryan Chibnall sensibly decides to combine the two in Dan, an older-than-average male companion who has a mixture of the former’s dad joke patter and the latter’s nonchalance at suddenly being whisked out of time and space. Dan's the man (literally: he’s rescued for being ‘Human’): to take an era at random he’s as sarky as Tegan, as cool as Nyssa and as natural a picked-on victim as Adric. John Bishop is great, adding layers you suspect aren’t there in the script and more natural with Chibnall’s sometimes odd patter than Bradley Walsh ever was: there was a lot of groaning when they cast a comedian in the role rather than actor but weirdly Bishop is far more natural than he ever seemed on stage as himself: he’s just enough like Dan to be comfortable with this character and imbues him with his own laidback smart-aleckyness. He’s also far more believable as a Liverpudlian than the others were as Yorkshiremen (and women), Chibnall continuing his worthy desire to have companions who live outside London and who aren’t orphaned by some tragedy. Dan is a Scouser through and through: not the way they were portrayed in bad sitcoms as quasi-criminal slackers either but big-hearted comedians who would give you the shirt off their back then tease you about your need for it for the rest of your life. Dan has a real love for his city and a big heart and the opening scene where we meet him is one of Chibnall’s best setting the new boy up not with endless exposition we need to remember but as someone likeable, pontificating not about himself but about his city, to a bemused set of Liverpool Museum goers, before the pay-off line that he’s just a local whose wandered in off the streets (there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal that the exhibition is about the Mersey tunnels of the Victorian era that will sort-of very-nearly play a role in the rest of the series). Dan works at a foodbank despite being in apparent poverty himself: I was hoping for some acerbic commentary here about how no other eras of British history ever needed foodbanks (and how uncomfortably close it was to the Victorian workhouse) but alas it’s a detail that gets lost: even so it tells you much about Dan that he can’t rub two pennies together yet still gives his time to the community and his last food is the sweets he gives to the trick-or-treaters. Only Dan’s whisked off to an alien spaceship and trapped in a cage by a dog and the episode goes downhill from there. I'm just sorry we only got, what? 8 and a half episodes with him as he was a companion with far more potential than he ever got to show yet still makes more of an impression than any of the other three Chibnall companions. I dread to think what non-Brits made of him though: I’ve lived near to Liverpool for twenty years and I still had to put the subtitles on!

Had ‘Flux’ stayed in Liverpool doing for the city what earlier episodes of Jodie’s era failed to do for Sheffield by making it feel just like the real place did if you happened to visit for real then I’d have been happy. Dan also makes Yaz seem more like a real person when in a double act with her: the policewoman’s no-nonsense Yorkshire is a good match with Dan’s dry wit (the rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire – the county that used to house Liverpool before fairly recent boundary changes that made it a county ‘Merseyside’ all by itself – led to a hundred years war for supremacy and a rivalry that still runs deep, one that really should have been explored on screen by a trip back to the War of the Roses, but really there are more similarities than differences between the counties, as summed up nicely here. Had the pair ended up picking on a third Southerner character it would have been perfect). Dan gets his best scenes banging collars with Korvanista though, the pair instantly acting like a married couple tied together against their will – which they sort of are (without the marriage bit). The Doctor is a little better catered for than before: both Chibnall and Whittaker understand her better now, as the sort of person who talks quicker than they can think and then has to improvise their way around what they’ve just said, to explain it to slower people around them or cover up something they accidentally let slip and didn’t mean to. Jodie stil doesn’t seem entirely comfortable though and most of her role can be reduced to gabbling and pointing at things. You never feel she’s an authority figure with enough gravitas to square up to Korvanista, never mind The swarm to come. Still, on that account things are getting better after the wasted opportunities of series eleven and twelve.

At least there’s the Flux to get excited about! An entity described as ‘a hurricane ripping through the structure of this universe… a cataclysm of unknown proportions’. Only how can we when we don’t know what it is yet? The Flux is too abstract to work, too confusing: we needed more exposition about what it as, not less. The first storyline to last a full 6 episodes centred around a single plot since 1978 still feels somehow too short and more than a bit muddled, like the whole thing is on fast forward. There's a lot more to series 13 generally than 11 or 12: rather than characters who don’t seem to learn anything or grow episode to episode now we get a tangled web of just when exactly things happened to whom. Chibnall doesn’t like recurring characters so the next best thing to a ‘sequel’ is a series of episodes where things happen side by side. The problem is we don’t get any real idea what’s happening, ever. The Swarm appears as the prisoner of something called The Division who are never explained properly either, though Korvanista belonged to them and so did the Doctor apparently: he has a great deal of foreknowledge about her that she doesn’t have. I just wish he’d explain some of it (or indeed the plot) instead of gloating. We’re told The Swarm are all-powerful and have been in chains since the dawn of the universe (what, again? What with the Fendahl and the Racnoss and the Gods of Ragnarok and Fenric and the Jagaroth it sure was crowded. Did they all know each other?) yet all we do is see them talk. We’re told they have secrets about the Doctor but all they do is hint. We see that they can change form and shape on a whim, but that’s no good in a story where everyone (bar the Doctor and Yaz) are new. ‘There’s too much happening today!’ barks the Doctor at one point: no kidding! I wouldn’t mind if some part of this episode had stopped to sort everything out but it doesn’t, not really. I mean, we find out that time has imploded in on itself but why here why now? We don’t know. Why is time going inside out? It just is, so accept it. How is this affecting the people we see? It isn’t – not yet. How does this change things for the rest of the series? Goodness knows. Are the people in this timeline already affected by the changes we see going on in the past? Haven’t a clue. The line that sums series thirteen up comes after the discussion that flux is distorting all of time as well as space: 'When does it start?' 'It's already started'. Hmm, if something in a plot is that hard to tell then maybe it’s time to sit down and have a re-think.

To throw the showrunner a bone, though, this episode – and indeed this series – were made under hellish circumstances, the likes of which no other showrunner had to cope with in all the years of making Dr Who. Covid was a far scarier threat to the human race than anything we had on telly. It made every job more difficult to maintain, especially making programmes for television which were by design mostly shot indoors, in poorly ventilated studios, with ginormous casts and a huge amount of technical crew. We don’t know the full story of when the ‘Flux’ series was written and what it was originally meant to be, but I’m willing to bet that it was either written before the pandemic hit (perhaps across the end of 2019) and chances are it was sketched out in Chibnall’s mind as a full-length series, of the usual 12-13 episodes. Covid naturally upturned all that: filming was delayed, then postponed (it was due to start filming in September 2020, later moved to November), then shortened to six episodes. There were many in the BBC who considered cancelling the show outright: TV schedules had been badly hit all year, leading to much dipping into the vaults with constant repeats (though not, sadly, any Dr Who: scifi was a big no-no actually, anything science based-yet-scary considered to be too close to home: personally I was pitching to haveTerry Nation’s ‘Survivors’ repeated, as a public info on how to live off the land in case our plague turned out like that one). To give him credit Chibnall bravely ploughed on as an alternative to giving the powers-that-be an excuse to cancel our beloved show and re-worked the scripts as best he could into a six parter made with minimal cast and crew, all of whom had to exist in ‘covid bubbles’ (which meant sacrificing the family and friends you were ‘allowed’ in favour of your cast and crewmates), downsizing everything from plot length ro special effects to the lack of any extras to extra filming outdoors (where ventilation was easier). The scripts were re-emphasised too so that the big bad was a power that turned the universe inside out and made the ordinary world suddenly feel strange and scary – of the few TV stories being made from scratch in 2020-21 I would argue ‘Dr Who’ was one that came closest to how most of us felt. Everyone in this story gave their all and deserve credit for that – it’s just a shame that they ended up risking everything for, well, this.

You see, a few tweaks and it might still have been okay. The stresses of covid didn’t cause any of the real problems with this story, just exaggerated the problems that were always there with Chibnall’s writing: he really needs a script editor to untangle some of the messes he gets into and to see his stories with a fresh pair of eyes who can point out things that he thinks he’s explained and hasn’t or to point out that it’s all going on a bit isn’t it? Davies and Moffat had them – they never got the credit they deserved because, in this modern age when show-runners suggested every story and re-wrote most of them we don’t really know what they do. Chibnall needs someone, just to help him out a bit. Like a lot of his stories but more so it feels as if ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is one draft away from, if not exactly greatness, then respectable mid-tier level: Korvanista is fun. The Liverpool setting is great. The swarm could have been a real sizeable threat. The bits in other time zones might have worked if they’d been tied into the plot even slightly – had we had a sense from the beginning, in perhaps a pre-credits sequence, about how the universe was being torn apart and how it was affecting everyone past and present. Had this been set up as a great mystery we were tempted to follow, with the promise it would all work in the end, we’d have embraced it: instead it looks as if thirteen episodes got chobbled up in the editing suite into six parts, with the bits that couldn’t fit in one story being stuck in another hap-hazardly. The effect is clearly meant to make us feel we’d been put through the Flux too, our sense of time distorted (a very Covid lockdown feeling we could all relate to on first transmission). But instead we just felt lost – something compounded by the weird mixing which made some lines difficult to hear on first transmission - and there was enough of that going on in the real world to bother with feeling lost in a fictional world too.

I mean just look at how this ends: the being who was a few minutes ago dangling the Doctor by her ankles over lava has somehow, without us really seeing how, convinced the big dog to not only let her go but call on his fellow 7 billion Lupari ships (one for each member of the human race alive in 2021) to shield the Earth from the Flux even though this mysterious…whatever it is has obliterated everything in its path till now and there’s no reason to think it won’t kill them too. Why are they doing it? I mean, the plan is to save Humans, not transport them into spaceships into more danger: that’s just saving the planet, not the people. Plus it’s never fully explained why the Lupars are doing this anyway: judging by Korvanista and Dan they actively hate mankind. Why aren’t they saving other species who are far more deserving? There should be giant spaceship filled with whales in space (not least because of the Douglas Adams link). And then this plot element is basically ignored hereafter. What happened to them all? Are they ever stood down when Flux is resolved? Did that timeline even happen? Do the people making this even care anymore? Then again do we?

That was barking: and I don’t just mean Korvanista! The result is a comedy opener to a series that we were promised was going to be truly scary, a Halloween apocalypse that could have been set any time (one gag with trick or treaters and Dab assuming Korvanista is more of the same aside) and which doesn’t feature much happening beside a kidnapping, never mind an apocalypse. There are worse Who stories to be had, ones that didn’t have this story’s redeeming features or sense of fun, but there’s no getting round the fact that it’s a poodle in a dogfight, entirely the wrong start to a series that ends up being another beast entirely and couldn’t have been less suitable for the timeslot and the idea of a brave new hurrah. In the end the most Halloweeny thing about the entire unlucky series thirteen (with the 13th Doctor) was that it felt cursed in so many ways, with so many things working against it behind the scenes and hard as everyone tries, with some seriously good performances at times, too many of those problems ended up on screen. They might have gotten away with it without those meddling covid germs but ou come away from this series with the sneaking suspicion that even without the obstacles it wouldn’t have been a lot better – slightly more coherent maybe but still confusing, boring and repetitive. For all the good points and the promising new companiojn this story all adds up to a load of noisy nothing. Tom Baker infamously took to making writers on set cry during his later more megalomaniac years by describing their work as ‘whippetshit’, his favourite phrase (used since mostly to describe politicians). I never heard what his opinion of this story was but it would never have been more apt. This is the point where many fans gave up on Dr Who. I know I nearly did. It was a dog’s life being a Whovian in 2021. But as ever with this series there’s always something that keeps you watching, some grain of brilliance that makes you think that next week they’ll get their act together. Against the odds there are still two classics and two pretty darn good episodes to come in the Chibnall era, out of the next eight (not bad odds actually, better than any since Tennant), to reward our dogged determinism to somehow get through this.

POSITIVES + There’s a nice CGI short of multiple Lupar ships in space which is really nicely done and looks very realistic.

NEGATIVES – That opening scene, where an unseen hologram of Korvanista (at a point where he might have been a respectable foe) has the Doctor and Yaz dangling upside down over lava with just 79 seconds left till their certain destruction, before escaping on a gravity bar that flies through space like the broomsticks in Harry Potter (another half nod but not really to Halloween). It’s as cartoonish as Dr Who ever gets, the sort of things TV Comic would have thought twice about writing for our heroes and the closest Dr Who ever came to the parody ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ for real with an impossible escape from an impossible solution in the dumbest way. All those fans who’d returned to the episode, intrigued by talk of a darker and more complex storyline, turned off in droves. The other problem is that you think we’re going to get an action-packed story, but no: there’s as much movement across the rest of the entire series as there is in this short sequence. Oh and why is Korvanista out to kill them? It’s never explained. Even when they all meet up again later in the story it’s more ‘hiya, oops, sorry about earlier’ than ‘die Doctor die!!!’ What happened off-screen that we didn’t see? The one good bit about this sequence: rthe Doctor can’t undo her handcuffs because she was ‘Scotish’ when she set them up and can’t do the accent anymore now she sounds as if she comes from Sheffield (but was she the 7th or the 12th Doctors or one of the unseen Timeless Children ones? For what it’s worth the subtitles have her trying to open them in the accents of McCoy then Capaldi, who have very different brogues to each other, but that isn’t in the script).

BEST QUOTE: Doctor: ‘I can't help feeling that some of this is my fault’. Yaz: ‘Some??? All of this is your fault!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: We scoured the fifty second teaser ‘Welcome To The Tardis’ for so many clues about new companion Dan! There he is moving house: clearly a man from out of town whose stumbled across something…probably exciting new aliens. There were lots of shots of Liverpool…probably about to be invaded by exciting new aliens. Dan gets his horoscope: he’s an Aries who has ‘surprised in store’, to do with the colour blue and the letter ‘D’ with the lucky number ‘13’. Hmm…That’s a toughie. Had they also included the letters ‘ARDIS’ I might have been more impressed with the insight. And who is the bloke Dan is chatting to anyway? We never see him again (at least not in human form: that’s actually Craig Else who plays Karvanista out of makeup, but good luck working that out the first time you saw the story). A salutary lesson in how not to do teasers, following more months of complete silence than any time since the great Who comeback of 2005, this was the moment a lot of fans gave up hoping the show would ever get better. You think if they were going to tease us with premonition about the episode they’d have at least stuck a dog in there.

Much more fun were two ‘lockdown’ episodes released at the start of the pandemic in March 2021 and the very first tweetalong for ‘Day Of The Doctor’, a moment of togetherness in the midst of a scary period in our lives. They are both easily the best moments of the entire Jodie Whittaker era and did much to calm frayed nerves during a very dangerous time when we needed a Doctor more than ever, one happy, one sad. ‘Strax’ is included under ‘Day Of The Doctor’ as it’s more of an introduction but it seems right to add the standalone ‘Incoming Message From The Doctor’ here where it exists in situ, with ‘Apocalypse’ the nearest episode in time. Jodie recorded this at home, in her wardrobe (sadly the same size on the inside), in near-enough costume (because of course she has the coat lying around her house so she can play at being the Doctor, wouldn’t you?) Chris Chibnall wrote the script in discussion with Jodie after they both agreed it felt as if they were living though an episode of Dr Who. Jodie is excellent in this, fully in character but with a more assured and confident Doctor than she ever was in an actual episode and just the voice of reason and comfort we needed; Chibnall’s script is just right too, the perfect judge of funny and serious. Released impressively early on, before other shows did similar things, It will I think be seen by future Whovians as the standout moment of the 13th Doctor’s run and the moment most of the general public remember best about Jodie’s time in the Tardis. Not bad for something written in such a hurry: this book says often that Chibnall and Whittaker’s issues both come from over-thinking and re-writing. Here they don’t have time to that and it shows how right their instincts are over their perfectionism,

The video is worth recounting in full. The Doctor has located an ‘upsurge in psychological signals’ suggesting distress. She admits she’s also ‘self-isolating or as I like to call it…hiding from an army of Sontarons’. Giving us her tips for how to stay calm in dangerous situations they are worth giving verbatim: ‘Remember you’ll get through this and things will be alright, even if they look uncertain, even if you’re worried darkness never prevails 2) Tell jokes, even bad ones. Especially bad ones. I’m brilliant at telling bad ones. 3) Be kind. Even kinder than you were yesterday – and I know you were super kind yesterday – Look out for each other, you won’t be the only one worried. Talking will help, sharing will help, look out for your friends, your neighbours, people you hardly know, and family, because in the end we’re all family. 4) Listen to science. Listen to Doctors they’ve got your back 5) Stay strong, stay positive, you’ve got this and I will see you very soon’. Would that we’d continued to heed the Doctor’s advice as the pandemic rages on and listened to the scientists tearing their hair out over the damage covid continues to do rather than the politicians who want it all to be over so we can make them some money…

Previous ‘Revolution Of The Daleks’ next ‘War Of The Sontarons’

Here's what Bingo my Korvanista looks like for those who haven't met him: