The Idiot's Lantern: Ranking - 236

  The Idiot's Lantern

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 27/5/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Mark Gatiss, Director: Euros Lyn) 

Rank: 236

'Are you sitting comfortably children? Then I'll begin. You remember dear old Muffin the Mule? He's really a Terileptil out to destroy the world. Rag Tag and Bobtail? They're Cyber-bunnies. Andy Pandy is a Slitheen. The Woodentops are really a cult of daleks on the run from Skaro turned into wood by arriving on the planet Christmas. The Flowerpot Men are The Master and The Rani and their friend Weed is a Vervoid. We're all going to take over the world day by day. First though it's time for 'Picture Book' and out first picture is of the destruction of the universe. Pleasant dreams everyone...' 

Well, this one's going to hit differently in a few months' time. Essentially it's the tale of a parasitic entity feeding off people through their television screens, numbing them to the pain of exactly what's happening in the real world and turning them into literal faceless zombies, all while sowing division and discontent as everyone in Britain comes together to watch the programme that held the UK TV viewing record for years...The coronation. Maybe we’ll get a sequel this year when King Charles takes to the throne. Maybe he’ll be in league with the Krynoids this time?

‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ is one of those Dr Who stories with such a daft premise that it’s hard to take seriously. We all know the stories about youngsters hiding behind their sofas when watching Dr Who because they were afraid of what was on their TV, but Mark Gatiss takes things a stage further and has us hide behind our sofa because of the TV and the way it’s been inhabited by an alien creature known as ‘The Wire’ that became a bodyless bolt of electricity in some unseen accident before the story started. Knowing our luck it’s probably inhabited ‘The Whoniverse’ on BBC i-player too and is feasting on our brains right now. Really though it’s a story about new technology and that old Asimov adage that technology that always existed before we were born is normal and not to be thought about too much, how technology that arrives when we’re a child is new and exciting and how technology that arrives when we’re an adult is against all sense and out to steal our souls. You can see it in this nuclear 1950s family who, like so many people in the country, have just bought their first television. They’ve never been able to afford one till now but have been able to fool themselves that getting one for the coronation of Liz II will be ‘educational’ and a worthy investment and besides, the local shop is selling them cheap for a fiver rather than around £100 (mind you, £5 was still more than half a weekly wage back then which makes it more or less equal to what TVs cost now – and cost back in 2006 when this story went out). Just watch at how the family reacts: young lad Eddie is thrilled at this bright new world coming to life in his living room. Dad Eddie and mum Rita are more concerned with keeping up with the neighbours. And Grandma (in the Tardisode more than the actual episode) thinks it’s a work of evil that’s looking at her funny. This was also the era when people knew such little about the technology that they seriously believed the people in the telly could look back and see you through the screen, with talk of people dressing up for the coronation just in case The Queen spotted them at home – this time Grandma does have a point seeing as it rips her face off soon after. The story’s premonition line, ‘you’d think she was in the room for you’, is easily the best of the episode setting up both sub-plots of the story. Even before that though she’s warning her grandson that TV will ‘rot your brains until they start pouring out your head’, a phrase that someone in the 1950s could well have said but those of those who grew up in the 1990s and 00s remember being said about youngsters being addicted to video games (only, this being Dr Who, it turns out to be taken more literally than she expected). Every generation has a new invention that’s ‘theirs’, which all the older generations will try and pooh-pooh. This time its television but you can bet the children of 2006 will find something about their children that annoys them (if they had children young and weren’t very young watching this then they’re probably moaning about screentime and tiktok now, such is the way of the world).

‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, set in 1953 a decade before Dr Who started, is about generations in other ways too.  We’ve said it lots of times before how Dr Who feels like a discussion between generations and how it started as a child of the 1960s exploring how different the world might be when the hippie children grew into adults and whether this was a good thing or not. It’s a theme that largely died out across the 1970s and 1980s until right near the end, when Gen X took over from their war and baby boomer babies and started making programmes that better reflected their world (the stories Andrew Cartmel and his younger pantheon of writers had a hand in basically). Mostly the comeback series, also made mostly by Gen Xers, has just treated the audience as younger versions of themselves, remembering what they were like at seven and throwing references to mobile phones and t’internet in there too to make it seem contemporary. Gatiss is the first to step out of line though, first with ‘The Unquiet Dead’, the first historical of the 21^st century series that goes back to doing what the series always used to do (showing how like the present the past could be) and then with this story, which again speaks to the generation who were young adults when ‘Dr Who first went out as if all those years since 1963 never happened and which makes the generation that were the grandmas and granddads of the new demographic watching the ‘audience identification person’. People don’t talk about how weird this is in the context of the rest of the series: that would be like an episode in 1963 written for the point of view of a child growing up in the Edwardian age (and if you don’t know how old that’s William Hartnell’s childhood). 

For fifty minutes though the children of 2006 are made to enter the shoes of a ‘war baby’, one who grew up half-expecting to fight in a war that became a ten-year-old just when things are changing (New technology! Sweets off the ration! Rock and roll!) but whose elders haven’t caught on to a changing world yet. Eddie, for instance, is portrayed as a bully and a coward –the man of the house demanding things are done his way, scaring his wife and child with his temper tantrums and shopping his mum in law and all the other Wire-attacked bodies in the street (to 1950s Torchwood, so it’s hinted).He’s the old school that hasn’t realised the new school is here yet. It’s a wonder he got a television at all (and it was only his patriotism that saw him cave in). We don’t ever see it on screen (which is a shame) but you can bet Eddie is also the sort of man that would tell any foreigners in the street (there are an awful lot of them for 1950s London in the ‘street party’ scene) to get lost, they’re not welcome here, etc. Tommy doesn’t feel able to speak up about how he, his mum and Gran are treated though because you just couldn’t do that in those days – something, Gatiss hints, worth bearing in mind the next time you visit your grandparents and start speaking your mind to them. You can feel the rebellion in the room though, of rock and roll and kicking up society’s cobwebs starting in this room, of this nuclear family that’s about to go nuclear when the decade arrives in earnest. When the Doctor and more especially Rose turn up and start bossing this bully around, laughing at his patriotism (I mean, Rose knows just how tiny Earth is by now never mind middle England) and his ego and tick him off it’s a great moment, exactly what Dr Who should be doing, and encouraging Tommy to do the same by standing up to his dad with an impassioned speech about how the war was fought ‘so little oiks like me could make our minds up’ rather than be kept in place – because that’s what fascism is. It’s a very Dr Who argument that’s been fought over since at least ‘The Daleks’ back in 1963, that freedom means giving people the chance to become something over than you.

You would have been forgiven for thinking that this is a personal story from a writer who lived through this time and remembered it firsthand, but actually Mark Gatiss was born in 1966 (in between episodes two and three of ‘The Tenth Planet’ to be precise). He was and is, though, a big aficionado of early television and a walking encyclopaedia about it (just the year before this story went out he’d been one of the big movers behind a live re-enactment of ‘The Quatermass Experiment’, that seminal first British scifi series that inspired a good half of the stories in this book directly and the other half indirectly, which also happened to be David Tennant’s last job before doing Dr Who). He was always Russell T’s first choice for a story he had in mind set in the 1950s about rock and roll and how an ‘alien’ sound took over those who heard it, causing nice quiet kids to suddenly become rebels overnight. Titled ‘Mr Sandman’ it reads like a cross between ‘Delta And The Bannerman’, Gatiss’ own later ‘Sleep No More’ (where that song plays a key role), ‘The Abominable Snowman’ (alines communicating through sound) and Davies’ own ‘Devil’s Chord’, which tells much the same story but updated to the 1960s and involving The Beatles. Gatiss though was struggling to make a story about sound visual enough and asked to change it to a story he knew more about, like television. The 1950s dating is the only part that stayed the same in all drafts, the sense of change in the air. Gatiss had been fascinated, when researching rare tapes in the BBC archives for ‘Quatermass’, by the continuity announcements with the plumy received pronunciation tones of everyone who sounded as if they came from another world.  The owner of quite a strong local accent himself (he grew up in Durham) he marvelled at how different his career might have turned out if he’d been born back then and been made to talk the same as everyone else, in a language that was the same wherever you came from and sucked all the individuality away (not unlike The Cybermen). The reason people spoke like that was a decision by the BBC to make the announcers understandable and friendly to all areas, back in the days before subtitles. They wanted these people to seem like nice respectable people you’d want to invite into your homes, rather than anyone you would actually meet in the real world. For Gatiss, though, they just seemed alien and creepy (and like a Dr Who monster). 

So the story became about The Coronation, the biggest visual event of the decade. This also fitted the ‘gap’ needed to slot a Dr Who story into in that the vast majority of 1950s television went out live, lost to the ether with no way of being recorded, so we don’t know for certain that there wasn’t a broadcast by The Wire sucking people’s brains out in a trial run before The Coronation when it would get so many brains (but just the British ones: you wonder how the news might have gone in other countries if The Wire had sucked most of Britain dry and what they would have done next to stop it: I mean, you can’t shoot or nuke an invisible electrical entity. Would it have taken over American TV next? Would anyone have noticed?) So we end up with a story (titled ‘The One-Eyes Monster’ in deference to the TV and gay sub-plot but dropped for being too innuendo-filled for Who, then simply titled ‘1953’ until Gareth Roberts suggested ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, a phrase his dad always used about his family TV) that was a homage to all the early TV Mark loved (particularly Quatermass: Russell got so sick of the references he took most of them out by the final draft but still missed a few little ones): listen out for references to the decade’s other big hits ‘Watch With Mother’ (‘Are you sitting comfortably?’), ‘What’s My Line?’, ‘Children’s Hour’ (‘Goodnight children everywhere’), ‘The Epilogue’ (a weird five minute slot that ended each night with a Christian thought for the day) and of course ‘Muffin The Mule’, the first series to be regularly pre-recorded and thus the earliest thing in the archives beside The Coronation that a lot of people have seen. It seems really odd, in retrospect, that the two series that actively were talked about as Dr Who’s biggest rivals, both for dominating audience ratings and for being just as long-running for a time, aren’t here; ‘Dixon Of Dock Green’ and ‘Z Cars’; even the festive episode of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ had fun playing around with them precisely because of the assumption that they were so famous that everyone would have seen them. Regrettably they cut a fun scene that had Rose telling the Doctor to shush as he keeps guessing that decade’s most popular quiz show ‘Animal Vegetable or Mineral?’ first time out without even trying.

Mostly, though it’s a story about being someone you’re not, especially if you’re hiding behind someone posh when you’re doing it. The Wire isn’t really plummy-voiced announcer and national institution Maureen Lipman pretending to be 1950s BBC announcer Sylvia Peters (who recorded all her scenes in a single day off from her musical on at the West End ‘Glorious!’ to sit in a drafty studio in front of a green screen in a dress she had made specially for a series on Joyce Grenfell a few years earlier shouting ‘hungreeee!’) It’s an impersonator who uses the mouths of the 405 channel lines to turn into a character that interacts with you. Equally Magpie the electrician isn’t really selling these televisions cheap out of patriotic duty – he’s doing it because of the hold The Wire has over him. Eddie is using patriotism and shouting and  throwing out his war stories every few minutes to cover up the fact that he’s scared of this alien creature that’s attacked his mother-in-law. Rita is pretending to be the good devoted housewife because, back in 1953, there’s no alternative: divorce is unthinkable and she’d be the neighbourhood pariah so she swallows her pride and keeps up appearances. Tommy is pretending to be a good and devoted kid but secretly he hates his dad and considers him an oppressive monster far greater than what’s in his television (it’s an odd point but at no time in this story do mum or son ever seem scared of their TV or try to throw it out; they might not quite know what’s going on but they’ve all heard the rumours about this technology and their mum/nan was sitting in front of it when her face disappeared; that would be enough for me to throw it into a skip, especially as they didn’t pay much for it).  For a draft or two this story sent even further and very much was personal to Gatiss even if it explored his very 1970s childhood as a gay young boy told to keep quiet about his sexuality. Tommy gets attached to the Doctor and Rose; his mum thinks its sweet he’s discovered ‘girls’ even if Rose doesn’t seem to be the most suitable of young lasses in that short skirt and makeup, but secretly Tommy only has eyes for the Doctor: he wants to be with him, wants to be like him, this daring male role-model who speaks out for the oppressed and is brave enough to shout back at his dad. He even dresses in the 1950s version of Tennant’s very 1960s costume. It is, if you will, a love story to the wind of change that blew so strongly across the 1950s and into the 1960s that created shows like early Dr Who that helped change society and make it what it is now, a series that encourages you to be your true self. There’s a reason so many gay kids growing up loved Dr Who: he’s a rare male role-model who uses his brains over brawn and isn’t scared to go his own way and do his own thing. Only of course this is 1953 and Tommy doesn’t even have the same chances of being his true self that Mark did. I wish they’d kept this aspect of the plot, bar the line about being a ‘mummy’s boy’ and Tommy ‘having that beaten out of him’: given the amount of gap people working on the comeback series (including one whose running it) Who were mighty slow at this sort of representation. Indeed the plot point was dropped simply because Gatiss discovered the plans to introduce Captain Jack and didn’t want to overbalance the series with too many gay characters (although they would have been doing two very different things: Jack is already there to being who he wants to be, but Tommy is in a position where he doesn’t see how he can ever get there). 

Where ‘The Idiot Lantern’ excels is in making the 1950s dating seem like an entirely different age. Generally speaking most Dr Who historicals (very much including ‘The Unquiet Dead’) are about making the past come alive and seem like the present. This story doesn’t do that: it feels a lot longer ago than a mere 53 years (at the time of broadcast). As befits someone who’d so recently been rattling round dusty archives this story is cleverly made as if this a film from a pilot episode of Dr Who that happened to be made in 1953 and only just re-discovered: there are those sort of ‘film noir’ angled camera shots (technically called ‘Dutch angles’) you only see in films of the time and the film is sepia-toned, so that it looks like surviving footage we have from that decade. It all feels alien even before the scenes of the television talking back to us and like we’ve gone past to an impossibly old and dusty time (just check out the angle that women should be indoors doing the housework in a story where Rose rides a motorbike). The costumes and props are, as always, bang on (they even hired some King George post boxes and some period cars to cover up the anachronisms where locals wouldn’t move their modern cars for filming purposes). More than that, though, both dialogue and acting feels as if it could have come straight from that era: yes people shout but it’s in that peculiar 1950s way of sudden bursts after long glaring silences rather than your modern drunken mob coming home from the pub. Everyone glares quite brilliantly in this story, saying a great deal with their eyes that they’re afraid to say out loud, especially Eddie – the only one who can’t stop talking early on – when the TV starts talking back.

As you’d expect with Gatiss, too, the horror quotient is really good: the bank of televisions stacked with lots of trapped souls all calling for help in the TV shop, the effects as Maureen Lipman (one of the biggest names the series ever got!) goes all gonzo and the faceless victims, including Rose, who stare out of us with expressions and features removed. It looks the way I imagined ‘The Faceless Ones’ did from the novelisation before I saw the missing episodes and found it was just actors staring blankly, scary and weird (although the effect itself is a direct steal of a Sapphire and Steel story, ‘Assignment Four’ aka ‘The Man With No Face’ aka ‘The Man In Photographs’ that did the effect rather better forty-five odd years earlier – we’ve mentioned this a few times in this book, it’s the one about a man who lives in photographs, can hope between them and put you in them while leaving your lifeless husk in the ‘real world’). The central idea of television being the ‘evil’ is a brilliant one too: after all if there are aliens out there who haven’t discovered life on Earth yet chances are the first thing they’ll pick up from us are our satellite broadcasts which are slowly moving out into space: not to worry you or anything but they date back further than you might think and one of the first was the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. So the aliens probably think the whole country is run by a racist power-mad Fuhrer sitting in a gold chair and trying not to grimace when black runner Jesse James beats all the Aryan athletes to multiple golds.  There’s a great shot, too, of the Doctor and Rose riding a motorbike actually inside the Tardis that’s rightly spoken about and remembered by a lot of children who saw this story on first transmission, even if they stopped watching the show long ago and haven’t seen it since (actually a stunt double and not the Doctor at all: it was assumed that as David Tennant was pretty wonderful at anything they threw at him he’d be able to ride in a straight line no problem and hired an instructor for an hour’s lessons in the morning before filming in the afternoon but he was hopeless: Tennant had got a car driving license yet and was at risk of running everyone over no matter how hard he tried).

Alas, though, there’s just not enough story to sustain ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ and while you can be silly with a frivolous script this is an intriguing one with lots of good strong powerful ideas treated like a low-budget joke. After a promising first half things totally grind to a halt in the second and even before then too much of it just looks stupid, the soret of thing written to get a bonus slot on that year’s ‘Totally Dr Who’ kiddies behind the scenes show rather than proper television. It’s a thin line between ‘daring’ and ‘daft’ and the shots of people being sucked through their TV screens are just the wrong side of silly (I mean, it’s going to take more than toggling the horizontal hold to sort that out). Maureen Lipman, hired because she sounds a bit like The Queen, is too nice to be truly scary though she tries her best. Honestly though the dialogue doesn’t do her any favours: this is an alien that seems to instinctively know it needs to put on airs and graces from the faces it ‘borrows’ but it can’t stop itself turning into a typical ranting primal alien intent on world domination (you’d think it would be able to zip it a bit longer without shouting ‘hungreeee!’ like a starved toddler and giving the game away). Half the story takes place up a TV antennae (just like the radio one the 4^th Doctor falls from in ‘Logopolis’ – cut dialogue has him speaking about how he’s still afraid of them but knows he has to climb anyway; like a lot of the cut scenes I wish they’d left it in). It goes on for so long I felt as if I used up at least three regenerations watching David Tennant gurning and looking panicked, while Murray Gold’s choir tries to make us think this is the single biggest epic ever seen on television (rather than a man standing a few feet off the ground waving his arms in the air, one of them attached to a screwdriver). While I’m pleased Tommy get his one great scene standing up to his dad and mum hounds him out the house the production team seemed to get cold feet about children banishing their parents out to the garden and back-pedal, undoing all that good work. Rose tells Tommy to make it up ‘because he’d your dad’, even though she’s seen how he’s been acting: it would make more sense if she was thinking of her own dad and gave a speech about how precious they are and how much she wanted to see her dad one last time post-‘Father’s Day’, but she doesn’t. Instead she treats Tommy as a child and orders him to talk to his dad, in complete contradiction of the moral of this story (which is about having the courage of your convictions and not being told what to do: honestly we’ll never get rock and roll if everyone starts being nice to their abusive families ‘just because’). 

In fact Rose has never been more irritating in this story, treating time travel like a puzzle to solve and never stopping to think – as her younger self from series one would – about the real people involved in this story. It’s read by everyone that 2006 is a time so much better than 1953 in every way and that everyone is more woke and with it now, except they weren’t (this is why John Barrowman could get away (with stories about making his co-stars uncomfortable by getting naked on set in 2005 and not in 2020; times change at speed). Yeah we had Dr Who back so I wouldn’t swap this era for the 1950s but look what else we got: illegal wars, hideous music, Terf wars and even before the credit crunch broke poverty was still hidden away, more frequent then-now than then-then. Plus the TV was a lot better in 1953: I’d take the charm of ‘Muffin The Mule’ over almost anything of the bland mediocrity made for children in 2006, Sarah Jane Adventures aside (and I say that as a child of the 1980s). Rose’s experience is in real danger of making her as ‘alien’ to us as the Doctor and she never once seems scared. Her best scene is where she gets off her face, as it were (although again a cut scene, of a panicked faceless Rose staggering round streets she can’t see, crying out for the Doctor, got cut for being a ‘bit strong’; this is an audience who have just seen a parallel Earth crushed by Cybermen and about to descend into the depths of Hell: I think they could have taken it, especially if they cut to the Doctor doing something heroic).

The biggest problem by far though is that this world never quite seems ‘real’. We can’t invest in it is story the way we can other worlds or other timezones: everything here is slightly arch, slightly fake, artificial. Everyone here is a caricature, even the Doctor and Rose (perhaps especially the Doctor and Rose: you can tell that this script was written for Eccleston originally and changed without any ideas who the new Doctor is (you can see the 9^th Doctor as a James Dean ‘loner’ on a motorbike but the 10^th Doctor is pure 1960s mod), while Rose is completely different to how Gatiss wrote her in ‘The Unquiet Dead’, as if Russell emphasised to him ‘how much she’s changed’ across seasons.  Even the detail of Jackie Tyler being a Cliff Richard fan makes absolutely no sense given what else we know about her, she’d have been too into glam rock with posters of Marc Bolan on her wall. ‘Summer Holiday’ is beloved to Whovians though even so: that’s ‘Space Museum’ star Jeremy Bulloch on the bus alongside Elvis and Una Stubbs as the plucky female twenty years starring before starring opposite Jon Pertwee in ‘Worzel Gummidge’ and a full half century before being cast by Mark Gatiss as Mrs Hudson in ‘Sherlock’). Everyone speaks the way people do on telly or in films. There’s no sense of nuances or back stories or bigger emotions. Magpie, for instance, could be a great villain’s henchman, struggling to get by. Maybe he got his disfigurements in the war, maybe he truly believes in Queen and country and is fooled by what The Wire tells him, most likely he’s really scared by what Maureen Lipman’s face might do to him next.  But you don’t feel that. His change of heart, helping the Doctor on the tower where he pays for his past misdeed with his life, should be a really harrowing moment but we just shrug because we don’t really know him. Eddie, too is just a bully: no reason given for it (perhaps his own parents were bullies to him, or maybe he’s afraid his son will have to fight in another war like he did). Some of the lines are just odd: a good half of them only seem like the sort of things people would say if they were on TV rather than real and a lot of the rest don’t seem like the sort of things anyone has ever said (I mean, what does ‘smart as paint’ mean?)
There’s a sub-plot about grief here trying hard to break out: in the pre-credits scene this is a happy family who seem genuinely all smiles until losing Gran when Eddie becomes nasty, Rita becomes withdrawn and Tommy becomes sullen, her loss sucking all the life out into the room. They could have really played up to that, but they end up making this a story about aliens instead. Equally there’s a slight theme about what TV does to creative people, sucking them dry of ideas until they end up a caricature of people presenting a fraction of their lives on screen, from a writer who had been long enough for the magic of the industry to rub off by now, or even a ‘Vengeance On Varos/Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ comment on audiences demanding entertainment even when it’s bad for them and sucks out their brains. Only the script raises the idea then refuses to go there, even though it really doesn’t have many interesting places left to go. There’s a brief frisson that this is meant o be a contemporary story, damning the 2006 political rhetoric gearing up for yet another election, with the Conservatives boasting about turning the clock back to the 1950s when people were happy with a nuclear family in a colourful world just like a Cliff Richard film (with a story that shows they were more in denial, unable to be themselves and that it was a tough time if you were poor, black a girl or all three).The story dangles the idea of patriotism being bad, of people spouting British values even though the empire is dead and gone and it’s just a cover fort their racism, but once Rose has made a pedantic point about the Union jack flag being hung upside down this gets kicked to the curb too (I mean, even in the 1980s and ‘Mawdryn Undead’ they were laughing at people’s respect during the jubilee of 1977 as if it was another alien age).They don’t even turn The Queen into a monster, which is how it seemed from the trails and publicity: not even a shape-shifting Silurian lizard. Maybe the production team heard that The Queen was a fan (requesting the series on box set during the Christmas holidays of 2005) and left her alone, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have had the alien at least trying to take her over – and if not her then Prince Andrew’s clearly an Abzorbaloff in hiding (and why else hire Maureen Lipman if not to play The Queen?)

There are so many unanswered questions too: how did Grandma come to live with a son-in-law anyway, one who appears to like her before her, erm, ‘face-off’? Poor actress Margaret John: she waited 38 years for her second Dr Who appearance – she was Mrs Jones in ‘Fury From The Deep’, holding the record for longest gap between appearances in the series until being beaten by William Russell in 2022 – and really makes the most of her few short scenes here, the character who seems to have the most layers by far, then is never seen again. Did Grandma secretly start watching telly s escapism from Eddie’s bullying? We never know. ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ isn’t unique in this regard goodness knows (especially in the modern age when 45 minutes simply isn’t long enough to write an entire back story for every character) but in a story about The Wire using people’s features to disguise themselves as somebody they’re not, without really understanding what Humans are and how they differ, it’s more important than ever that everyone in this world should seem ‘real’. This isn’t the time for everyone to start doing their one-dimensional ‘Coronation Street’ acting (and talking of which the name of the road this story is set down, ‘Florizel Street’, is famous to TV aficionados as the working title for that series: Gatiss switched it back as an in-joke about this being a ‘coronation viewing street’. It’s actually shot in a combination of the usual Cardiff and London’s ‘Muswell Hill’, round the corner from where the Davies brothers in The Kinks were born a mere fraction after Tommy would have been. In the first draft it was The Powell estate again fifty years earlier to emphasis the changes and how differently Rose’s life might have turned out if she’d been born forty years earlier).

Rory Jennings is excellent too as the teenage Tommy, making him more than just a naughties kid in fancy dress (he’s even better as a teenage megalomaniac in Big Finish’s masterpiece ‘I, Davros’), but the script could have played up the differences and similarities far more: there’s no sense here of what Tommy risks when he finally stands up to his dad or his fear that’s prevented him doing so in the past. Even so, his sub-plot is the saving grace of ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, the moment when he stands up to his dad, inspired by the Doctor and Rose,  the crux of the story far more than Tennant hanging from a TV mast or defeating the brain-sucking alien. For Tommy, after all, facing up to his abusive dad who has all the power is much harder than anything the aliens can do to him and across 45 minutes goes on a quite believable journey from bullied son to a moral crusader standing with the Doctor. This is Dr Who at its best, when the Doctor saves the world by saving the people he meets along the way and we don't always get enough of that. Had Gatiss stuck with what I believe was his seconds script, made it more personal and less ‘Dr Whoy’ about how all generations need the Doctor in their lives to inspire them this story might yet have become a winner. Instead all too often it falls into the pitfalls of Dr Who at its worst, with a nonsensical plot (I mean, just why is ‘The Wire’ taking over people’s televisions? Why does The Wire need all those brains? We just take it as read that she’s an evil alien doing what evil aliens do, but she’s a bolt of lighting searching for a body. Shouldn’t this plot have turned out more like ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ taking bodies over instead?), a ridiculous action sequence and everybody ham acting. It’s a great idea having a monster that only lives on television (and one ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ will go one better with) but there are so many ideas here that just don’t land. ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ talks a good talk about how important and powerful television can be, then gives it all  up to be just the sort of dumb television that risks sucking the brains out of your head that everyone in the story complains about. You can’t have it both ways. A story with such promise that everyone talked it up behind-the-scenes as that year’s winner and with a plot synopsis in the Radio Times that sounded so cool ended up being Maureen Lipman talking to herself and a man hanging off a ladder. And I can’t tell who the bigger idiots are: us for thinking a B-movie script like this could ever work or the production team for not going the extra mile and smoothing out the rough edges to make it the A-movie script it’s so crying out to be.  Broadcast ten years to the day after ‘The TV Movie’ with Paul McGann went out this feels like a similar hodgepodge of great ideas and awful ones, a cul-de-sac the series never went down again: the only difference this time is the confidence with swagger with which it’s all done, something that isn’t always earned by what ended up on screen.

POSITIVES + The Earth is saved by (spoilers) recording The Wire onto a Betamax video-tape and wiping over it. No other show would even think of a scene like that; certainly no other would dare to actually go through with it. This is a perfect depiction of what this book is calling ‘the ordinary hitting the extraordinary’, though to the people of the 1950s the idea of home-recording is at least as alien as a television sucking your face. As a fan whose family used to have a lot of Dr Whos on Betamax, the smaller home recording system that VHS made obsolete that then couldn’t be played back, thus giving me an early tantalising glimpse into the idea of ‘missing episodes’ that then couldn’t be played, this was a thrill. Especially as the tape is covered in Gallifreyan symbols, suggesting that the most powerful race in the universe still uses it. This is also all perfectly in keeping with the story theme of changing times and inventions rising and falling out of fashion. After all, had say The Queen taken to the throne a decade earlier or later without the boost to sales television might still have gone the way of betamax, minidiscs, laserdiscs and zeppelin balloons as technology that for one reason or another never quite took off.  

NEGATIVES - Then of course there's the 'other' scene no other series would give you and which is ripe for mocking by those who don't 'get' this show. On paper the idea of a hundred extras mouthing 'help me!' from a bank of TV monitors before a disembodied voice threatens to 'gobble them up' is the stuff of nightmares. In practice it looks like a bunch of bored and confused extras, annoyed at not having met David Tennant in person, going through the motions with a torch shone straight in their faces while beloved actress Maureen Lipman screams 'hungreeeeee!' like she's regenerated into The Cookie Monster (it’s a steal from ‘The Little Shop Of Horrors’ where at least it was meant as a joke as the sort of thing a sentient alien plant would say). It’s ridiculous. Not even so ridiculous its kind of good they even tried like the Kandy Man or The Taran Wood Beast. It’s just plain ridiculous.  

BEST QUOTE: Tommy: ‘You don't get it, do you? You fought against fascism, remember? People telling you how to live, who you could be friends with, who you could fall in love with, who could live and who had to die. Don't you get it? You were fighting so that little twerps like me could do what we want, say what we want. Now you've become just like them. You've been informing on everyone, haven't you? Even Gran. All to protect your precious reputation’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  All the stories from series two had their own ‘Tardisode’ mini prequel that could be downloaded to mobile phones or seen on the Dr Who website in the run-up to broadcast. The one for ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ was a fifty-five second piece that featured the Connolly family unpacking their new TV set, all smiles. Especially poor Grandma who is super excited until the set starts playing up and as she goes towards it to thump it, the TV sucks her in!  This is followed by a very 21^st-century sounding trailer not for the story itself but for the Coronation! One of the simpler Tardisodes around. 

‘Parasite’ from ‘Torchwood: Soho’ is how Big Finish got round the fact that, post-Barrowman’s antics, nobody wanted to be associated with the range much in 2020 even though the range continued to sell well with the public. A bunch of new actors (plus a slumming-it David Troughton) were revealed to be working for a hub in America in the 1950s who also kept an eye on events in Britain such as ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ where they’re working undercover (they’re revealed to be the ‘men in black’ who turn up and take the bodies away in this episode, thus solving a plothole- the Detective Inspector does mention ‘Torchwood’ under his breath in a scene in ‘Idiot’s Lantern’ though). Most of the plot does the single biggest obvious thing Torchwood never did on TV though: Nazis who never died in WW2 on the loose with alien guns. It’s every bit as silly as it sounds.

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