The End Of The World: Ranking - 85

      The End Of The World

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 2/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 85

   'Here we are at the end of the Earth's life. What, prey tell, has lasted from the planet's greatest poets writers, thinkers and philosophers. What's that? The Spice Girls? Zigazigah? Aaaaagh!'

 

‘Rose’, the first episode of the new revived series, had been such a relief in so many ways: it felt like Dr Who had always done, with a slightly modern twist and a bigger budget but not so much that it got in the way of all the old things that made the series great: the ideas, the action, the humour, the people and especially the imagination were all present and correct. An updated version of ‘Terror Of The Autons’ it felt as if the spirit of past series writer Robert Holmes was alive and well. It was already clear that DW was in much safer hands than it had been with the Paul McGann TV Movie (I mean, Americans? Making Dr Who? Unthinkable!) However the second episode piled a whole load of extra pressure on: was new-Who just a one episode wonder? Could it possibly sustain that run of form for a second story in a row? Was there enough of a story without making most of it about getting to know the new cast? Would this new Dr and new companion Rose continue to grow across the series? Would the storyline be as good with a new invention in place of Holmes’ old reliable monsters ‘The Autons’? Would this brave step into the unknown, after that brave step into the half-known, still feel like Dr Who? Had the budget been saved for episode one and run out already? Russell T Davies is no mug though – he’d sat through enough Dr Who revivals and revamps to know that’s what we fans’ll be thinking too so for his second story he makes it even more obviously Dr Whoy than ‘Rose’, with even more spectacle (way more aliens than we’ve ever seen in one go in old Who!), an even bigger budget and a script that now adds script editor Douglas Adams into the mix with a ‘Restaurant At The Universe’ scenario crossed with a Chris Boucher ‘Robots Of Death’ style Whodunnit that’s mad and daft and silly but also sharp and cutting with a lot to say about humanity in the future and right now. This might be the ‘end of the world’ but it’s a whole new beginning for the series, the template for all that’s possible stretched as far as it will go. 

 Our first trip into the future doesn’t do things by halves – it goes right to the very end, to the final days of humanity and the end of the Earth, where we’ve never ever been in Dr Who before (‘Frontios’ came closest). It could easily have been silly, leaving the audience behind and making them uninterested in a future so far away as to be nearly unimaginable, but Russell cleverly moulds the story into one with lots of parables about now, In the grand tradition of past Who stories. In this story he takes an old Dr Who theme of embracing who you are and rejecting immortality at the sake of your humanity, of never outstaying your welcome and making your way for the people that come after you and not holding on to things past their sell by date. It might be the year five billion but Russell T Davies shows us how little humanity has changed in that time. The planet finally dies, unseen, because we’re too preoccupied with greed and taking advantage of others to make the most of it – how human. It looks pretty darn impressive too, especially the glowing orange as it dies (which is so good an effect they use it on everything for the next decade). What’s more, though sadly we don’t get to see much of it, humanity is by now unrecognisable because we’ve mingled and interbred with all the other aliens out there which, again is as it should be: Dr Who is a series that’s all about change and a lot of this story’s best moments come from how naturally the 9th Doctor takes this all in his stride while even as open-minded and hearted a person as Rose struggles to catch up with the culture shock. 

There’s one last pureblood still standing though who refuses to accept how things are and she’s one of Dr Who’s great xenophobes, up there with Davros and any number of cyber-controllers, but with the added character trait that rather than just being straightforward and ranting she can actually ‘do’ sarcasm. Zoe Wannamaker was the first big name to get involved with the new-look series and was no doubt expecting something closer to her standard roles on telly: a slightly harassed mother in over her head. She was one of the first big celebs to take a chance on this new series that nobody except the people making it expected to be a hit and having her was quite a coup at the time (in the week this episode was on the papers were full of her guest appearance and still not that fussed about the series as a whole). Clashes with other projects meant she wasn’t able to be there and recorded all her lines early, but unlike a lot of voiceovers it feels as if she’s in that room and inhabiting that body (well, what’s left of it). I wish I’d been in the room when that job offer was being made too: ‘Err Zoe, the BBC here, you remember that weird children’s series that got cancelled in the 1980s because people stopped watching it? They ‘re thinking of bringing it back and have written in a part as the oldest human alive and everyone immediately thought of you! Hello?...Hare you there?...) Zoe’s gamble (and let’s face it, this was a gamble) is rewarded when she gets the part of a lifetime in Cassandra, whose wicked and evil and (spoilers) ready to kill all sorts of aliens for pure greed, a motivation true for humanity in every era it seems. She’s obsessed with her looks and her own importance and a prime example of a DW character who can’t see the bigger picture beyond herself, that mankind has moved on from such right-wing views and prejudices a long time ago (in a throwaway line Cassandra says a parent once came from Texas. Of course they did. Yeehaw!) Russell also throws in a very Dr Whoy idea that simply wasn’t a thing when old-Who was on the air: cosmetic surgery. Cassandra’s willing to commit awful atrocities to stay pure (she’s had 708 operations), to the point where Russell brings things to their logical scifi conclusion and makes her a sheet of skin with some eyes and a mouth. She really is the worst of us, not because she’s a monster, but because she’s got her priorities all muddled and can’t find it in her heart to embrace differences. So she lives on, clinging on to life, even though she’s reduced to being just a thin sheet of stretched skin afraid of every wrinkle, the logical scifi extension of all our own preoccupations in the 21st century. Though to Cassandra she’s the only ‘true’ human in existence, the kicker is that Rose finds her less human than the weird looking aliens and talking tress walking around and she’s right to because Cassandra, though human through and through, is inhumane. Having plastic surgery has made her, well, plastic but to Cassandra’s she’s oblivious how silly she looks and still thinks she looks gorgeous (Russell has said since that he wrote this story after watching The Oscars and concerned at how many previously beautiful women looked gaunt and sick where they once glowed with life, particularly Nicole Kidman, saying ‘It’s like we’re killing these women in public – we watch while you die’). Yet what Russell also does is also make Cassandra quite a pitiable character deserving of our sympathies (after all she was just born in the wrong time: there are all sorts of Cassandras walking about today and were in 2005). It’s such a clever idea that enables Russell T to make so many good points about ourselves and our role in the universe. We’re really not that special or extraordinary, except for the very fact that we’re alive now, in this special and extraordinary universe. 

Though Cassandra steals the show and gets all the best lines there are plenty of other things to gawp at too. Russell knew that one of the complaints thrown at Dr Who was that the small BBC budget meant we only ever got two or three bedraggled looking aliens in any one story so he sets out showing the Dr Who equivalent of the world-building in Star Trek or Star Wars, announced and then wheeled out in a scene that seems to go on forever, like Eurovision or an Olympics opening ceremony, evidence that the universe is teeming with life. They don’t just make up the numbers though: Russell has sn ability to let you understand and care for these characters in minutes so that it feels like they’ve lived a whole life before we meet them. Dr Who has had so many other gifted writers but no other shave this ability as consistently. Its most on display here because there’s so many of them. The Moxx of Balhoon is our first blue alien (an in-joke this: in the old days blue used to be the colour used for special effects, so that anything blue against a screen disappeared to be covered over in effects; nowadays its green more often than not, which is why so many modern DW aliens have shifted tones slightly to brown being the default). He was scripted to be a large puddle on the floor but this was a special effect too far so he’s Jimmy Vee in costume. He doesn’t do much but he has a lot of background, working as a lawyer (her certainly looks as if he’s built for a deskbound job if you know what I’m saying), while – oddly given Russell’s 2023 decision to kick Davros out of his wheelchair and have him stand on his own two feet in case people see it as a disabled slur, the Moxx is pushed around by everyone from his wheelchair. Then there’s The Face Of Boe, a big old face in a jar and though a throwaway joke here there’s much much more about him in the series to follow not least (spoilers) that he might well be future character Captain Jack in the future, calcified because the season finale dooms him to immortality (apparently not what Russell was thinking when he wrote this script but it mirrors well Cassandra’s plight, desperate to stay alive while Jack is condemned to life against his will and would rather die given the guilt and shame he carries around with him). Russell’s not spoken about this either but I like to think he’s a sort of vague memory of The Rills from ‘Galaxy 4’ who, were considered the most obscure monster in ‘old’ Who, with such a single grainy photograph existing in 2005 (though a full episode starring them was discovered and returned to the archives in 2012). Like them ol’ big head is a face in a jar that has to be filled with a particular kind of smoke to stay alive and while he doesn’t say anything here in future episodes he’ll share the Rills’ surprising ability to talk in proper received pronunciation English. He was a bit of a last minute dilemma too and evidence of just how ‘new’ making this series was to everyone: Russell hadn’t yet started his infamous ‘tone meetings’ where people from every department met up at the start of a story to decide on things and it was discovered, very late in the day, that no one had built Boe yet: props, models and costumes all thought it was the job of another department; considering it was thrown together at the last minute it’s amazing how good it looks. Why so many faces by the way, with Boe and Cassandra? It’s almost as if humanity has evolved to follow smartphones and we don’t need bodies anymore as part of our identity, just a face… 

Then there’s Raffalo the blue caretaker who was added at the last minute when the expense of Cassandra meant a lot of her speeches had to be trimmed down, but as will happen a lot in new Who this last minute added scene, written months after the rest, is the best. We need this scene where we learn that Earth in the year five billion still has a hierarchy of the rich and their employees who are servants and not allowed to speak so we can feel outraged. It helps Rose’s character a lot, too, that after her understandable culture shock at first she wanders off to talk to everyone she can and ignores the protocols of the day by treating everyone as equals, because she’s Rose and as a working class girl feels more at home there than talking to emperors and queens; Raffalo’s delight at someone actually talking to her rather than down at her is the most Dr Whoy moment of all in this story and the point where I knew beyond doubt this show was in safe hands. We also finally get a sentient tree in DW that isn’t embarrassing (Jabe feels like an attempt to win old Dr Who fans over who are still scarred by ‘The Mark Of The Rani’ by saying ‘look it’s alright, the ideas of the old days were good ones even if the execution was sometimes a bit lousy, but we can put that right now, hush, don’t worry!’ and has the tree flirt with the Doctor rather than outright grope the companions for good measure too). Jabe doesn’t get many lines (poor actress Yasmin Bannerman would have had a miserable time under all that makeup and those prosthetics) but Russell makes the most of the ones she gets: as with all of Russell’s writing he sketches a whole backstory in just a few lines, with little details like the fact she’s not supposed to show her roots in polite society (an extension of the 2005 obsession with dying hair?) and that she had ancestors from trees on Earth that really sell the idea that she had a life off-screen before we met her. In other words Russell takes the best of all the writers from Dr Whos past but throws into the mix this ability he can do better than anyone. 

 Other races we see in just this one story but don’t learn much about include ambassadors from the City State of Blinding Light (pig-like aliens wearing what seem like masks who look as if someone was truing to re-make the ‘Alien Autopsy’ video and got it slightly wrong), the Hop Pyleen Brothers (reptiles who look as if they’ve wandered in from ‘Deep Space Nine’), Mr and Mrs Pacoo (space vultures who look hungry), Cal Sparkplug and his un-named plus one (the dudes in giant timelord like robes with hoods over their faces) and students from class 55 at the University of Rago (who have various masks and faces but are dressed in the same white robes). We never see this many different alien species in Dr Who again, brief shots of previously seen monsters in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ aside, and certainly never have before; it feels like the big showy-odd moment this new series needs, that proves to a whole new audience that the Whoniverse really is teeming with life and there are lots of aliens to see not just one and that they actually have the budget to show them unlike the olden days (while providing lots of extra mileage for any writers if there’s ever a second ‘wilderness years’ if the series gets cancelled again). It feels not unlike the shows that every young (and sometimes not so young) fan makes up at home when they aren’t restricted by budget and can throw all their ideas and inventions and figurines into the mix to tell a truly epic story. And just to prove that this really is the same show there’s even a crawl through a ventilation shaft, just like everyone’s folk memories of Dr Who (even though it only ever happened a handful of times). 

 One of the best things the 21st century series did that the 20th one only touched on was that we get to see the regulars grow: The 9th Dr, who was almost cuddly back on Earth during ‘Rose’, reveals for the first time just what a weight he carries on his shoulders from his past and while the references to the time war every five minutes will become irritating in future episodes it gives you a real frisson of anticipation the first time we hear about what was going on for the Dr when the show was off the air. For the Doctor, as with so many fans, it was a traumatic time filled with anger and frustration and an absence of the thing you loved and the Doctor’s still coming to terms with it all. He’s not yet convinced that Rose is his salvation either and seems to almost resent her being around and holding him back. Rose, too, is more than just the wide-eyed hopeful of her first story as she holds her own against Cassandra and the Doctor, while worrying about what she’s just got herself into with a grumpy timelord whose suddenly seems so different. While her best character trait is her ability to understand and identify with anyone from any race or timezone, her second her trait of teasing the Dr and treating him as the kid who needs looking after while she’s the proper adult – a real joke given their 600 odd year age difference and her lack of experience that ends up seeming like a plotpoint by the time ‘bad Wolf’ turns up and Rose is in control of everything in the universe and sending herself messages back in time. Rose’s worst trait is her impetuousness and she begins to wonder whether she did the right thing by travelling with a stranger. In many ways the Doctor’s uncharacteristically cruel or at least oblivious by taking her to see the end of the world – what he sees as a beautiful natural end to a perfectly rounded story she sees as the end of everything and everyone she loved. Only a call home puts her mind at rest at the thought that everyone she ever knew has been dead and forgotten for billions of years (the bill must be quite literally astronomical if roaming charges are still a thing, though maybe all of Rose’s bills will be postdated 5 billion years in the future?) It’s at one with a story that’s about making the most of the present, whenever your present happens to be, and not waiting for a better time to come along and make your life worth living – because it’s worth living now, a neat riff on the age-old idea of Who being about the past, present and future intermingled (a cut scene from ‘Rose’ had her mention an odd call from her daughter that was going to be revealed as this one, but was dropped for timing reasons). This is a story that, over and above the alien spectacle, is about his trauma at being the last of his kind and Rose’s shock on finding out who the last of her kind turns out to be. 

 In one sense this is a very bleak view of the future, the equal of the dark scripts written by Bob Holmes and seems to be the antithesis of Star Trek’s optimism; even five billion years in the future Earth is still hampered by such human frailties as greed and prejudice and the planet is run as a commercial venture, overseen by the few people with money to see it even though Earth (and the universe outside it) ought to be there for everyone. We never do get those AI robots to give us a cushy life; instead there are still maintenance workers living a stressful mundane haphazard life for the rich who pay to keep them alive. ‘Platform One’ is just a platform for the rich and the posh to be seen by their followers, the Earth turned into one big club with an exclusive membership list and Russell clearly doesn’t want to be in the orbit of any planet that would accept hi but keep others out. Watching this story it’s easy to wonder if we’ve evolved at all in all that time, still divided into haves and have-nots far more than we’re divided over race or gender or species. 

 And yet that’s only half the story. What’s great about this story though is that Russell T is an optimist about humanity at heart (even if he hates how a lot of individual humans behave) and rather than kill off the Earth in a B-movie rush that no future episodes can ever match instead it’s a celebration that the Earth lasted longer than anyone ever expected it to and that the planet dies a natural death after a long life, as it should be (and unlike Cassandra), the ageing great-great-grandparent twinkling out of existence now that its children are grown and safe and exploring the far reaches of the universe and all the newer stars that have grown since our day. The Doctor gives a gloriously heartwarming speech about how humanity outlasted the Earth and had time to set off to the stars having adventures and creating hybrid species of our own. All the worries that were present in 2005 (the environment, mad cow disease, wars, nuclear accidents) don’t stop us because we made it (there was a cut scene, dropped when Cassandra cost so much every time she opened her mouth, that tied this era in with the adventures ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Ark In Space’, where humanity had left the Earth and found new homes already). There’s even the nice twist that ‘the trust’ (The International Trust?) had bought up the earth and stapled the continents back to how they used to be in Rose’s day, so presumably there are still charities in the future as well as rich people. Somehow, despite everything that goes wrong for humanity in this episode, you leave it feeling uplifted, though at the same time this isn’t some airy fairy unlikely future either. For a series that was still so young it hadn’t quite worked out what it was yet, this is a very clever way of giving us both. 

 It looks gorgeous too. It’s a sign of how much support Who was getting from the Welsh council so early on, before success was assured, that this story was allowed to be filmed in the civic building given the wonderful name ‘The Welsh Temple Of Peace and Light’ (nowadays re-named ‘Peace and ‘Health’), which is just a fancy name for a sort of unofficial town hall really, where visiting dignitaries can be taken out of the Welsh rain and away from the riff-raff. It was built as the headquarters of a charity that researched TB in 1910 and designed by namesake David Davies (no relation) before being turned into a WW1 memorial. It gives ‘Platform One’ a sense of scale and size and poshness as befits a rich vantage point in space and the series will return to it five more times, making it one of the most recognisable locations in the series. Forget The TV Movie too: this is the closest we’ve ever come to an actual Dr Who Movie on a Hollywood budget and scale and there are more special effects in this episode than any other ever made: everywhere you look there’s a spider scuttling or an alien wandering past a CGI backdrop of stars. The reason we never got as many again wasn’t an issue of money but time: Russell under-estimated just how much he overstretched the independent graphics company The Mill but was shocked when we called in the office to find chief animator Paul Burton asleep on a couch; the deadline was so tight that he’ hadn’t gone home in three days and was snatching hour naps where he could. 

 Of course, there are downsides to the new format too, a lot of which are felt here more than ‘Rose’. The 45 minutes of screentime isn’t long enough to get to know these characters, especially as there are so many of them. The ‘Whodunnit’ aspect isn’t used as well as it might have been: compared to ‘Robots Of Death’ and ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ it’s easy to see who the murderer is, because (spoilers, not that you need them) Cassandra’s not exactly subtle about her prejudices and all the red herrings along the way, of sights of people in cloaks looking shifty, aren’t convincing enough to throw you off the scent (I mean, it’s not going to be the Face of Boe is it? A big head in a jar in the middle of a room has lots of eyewitnesses). Not for the last time in the modern series (or indeed the old one for that matter) Cassandra’s scheme is bonkers too. Her great grand scheme is that very Human method of insurance fraud, but she’s not going to make much money if all the richest people in this segment of the galaxy die and burn and crash the economy with them. Plus, as the only survivor, she’s a shoe-in for arrest from the Judoon tax police so will find it hard to spend her ill gotten gains anyway (as the only person whose a stretched piece of skin she’s not exactly hard to spot. What’s she going to do, wesr a fake moustache and glasses to disguise her features?) Modern Who’s reliance on catchphrases comes on hard and fast here and will never quite let go. For the Dr everything, every few minutes it seems, is ‘fantastic’, while Cassandra says ‘moisturise me’ so many times it feels like that’s half the script and there are a few clunky lines along the way – most of them Cassandra being bitchy, a trait which wears almost as thin as she does. The scene of the Dr trying to run away from his biggest fan trying to chop him and his friend up for firewood also goes on a little too long: this is such a talky episode that that it needs some action in it but this one scene is so long that it makes everything feel top-heavy. There are times, too, when the programme shifts from adult drama to children’s television - not as excessively as ‘Rose’ or ‘Aliens Of London’ but still enough times to make you puzzled, as if Russell’s been ordered to start writing his script down and has forgotten the sort of adult-ish programmes made for children he used to watch when he was young. The Cassandra model is oddly static compared to the sort of things Dr Who will pull off later in the run and is basically a piece of unconvincing rubberlike skin with two googly eyes and a mouth, as if they’ve been stuck on with stickers, animated by not terribly convincing CGI. As it happens Zoe Wannamaker is good enough to make Cassandra come alive just from her voice but I must say some of the leaked photographs from this story (and the Radio Times feature) didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. There are other problems that hampered this story too, despite the budget, which made it seem even more like old Who: the bubbles in the face of Boe’s tank, which worked fine in rehearsals, stopped during filming and had to be dropped, while the Moxx’s wheelchair stopped working early on and had to be pulled on a string, As brilliant as maybe 75% of this story is, as much as it has you pumping the air and celebrating the fact that this is a real Dr Who story well told, full of drama jeopardy and morals, the other 25% leaves you going ‘what the?!’ A quick anecdote too that’s one of the best about the series: a production mix-up meant that Rhodri Morgan, then first minister for Wales, was booked for an interview on ‘Dragon’s Eye’, a sort of Welsh equivalent of ‘Watchdog’ about consumer rights and current affairs, but he was led to the wrong department where the Who costume designers thought he was one of the extras playing the trees…Oops. 

 Still, if that’s all that goes wrong then, well, it’s not ‘The End Of The World’ as it were: this second story of the new run is an enjoyable story in its own right but where it really wins is making you believe that this really is a series that can go anywhere in time and space and it will look magical and believable wherever they go. That won’t always be true as it happens and as things turn out there will be a lot more episodes set in contemporary London than anyone was expecting, with a definite lack of alien worlds and a general air of cheapness in the rest of the run after this story blew the budget so spectacularly, but we weren’t to know that yet: for now this is a story that’s reassuringly like Dr Who always used to be when it was great, only it looks better than we ever dreamed it could, with a bigger budget and in many ways an even bigger ambition, but the same strong messages as the old series at its best. It looks as if they’d finally put one of those gonzo Dr Who comic strips with lots of aliens on screen, only with the heart and logic of the TV stories at their best. Other stories will get better at doing each one of these genres individually, but for now throwing all of these styles into the mix and capturing fans who loved any or all of them was very much the way to go: every previous Dr Who story had to be stingy and throw us just enough to keep us watching but Russell throws everything at us at once. We’d debated long and hard what stories from the past the new series might resemble and now we get lost of them all thrown together at once: the morality tale, the end of humanity, a horror story, a detective story, an emotional story an effects driven story, a character-led story. ‘And this is just episode two’ it seems to say ‘Just think what will happen if you’re still watching by the time of the season finale!’ It’s Important to the future of this series to show just how widespread and normal alien life is in the Whoniverse and on that score ‘End Of The World’ delivers more than we could ever have dreamed of back in the wilderness years. ‘Everything has its time and everything dies’ runs the main plot, but not Dr Who it seems, it’s a series that’s regenerated before our eyes. It’s a near-perfect second episode that shows us a bit of everywhere and then brings us safely home for tea (and chips – a lot of fans don’t like this final scene but I do, proof that ordinary life goes on but extraordinary life is out there somewhere and the gap between the two isn’t so huge. Plus wanting chips made Rose feel like one of us). Watching this episode on first transmission, more than any other old or new, gave me the feeling that this show can run forever. 

 POSITIVES + The psychic paper is one of the best things Russell T brought to new-Who (he brought the sonic screwdriver back for the first time since 1982 as well). With most stories 50minutes total now rather than 100-odd something in the plot has to give and having a psychic paper that reveals whatever the person expects to see saves on all those old plot devices of having the Doctor looked up because nobody knows who he is and nobody believes him. In future stories it also acts as a means of getting messages from passing psychic aliens, a sort of credit card and an oyster card so the Dr can get on a bus that crashes on an alien desert in ‘Planet Of The Dead’ (don’t ask). It’s also a nicely eccentric sort of invention any of the old Doctors would have carried had any of the past writers been clever enough to think of it and it leads to many a joke in the series along the way when needed to (the best gags are in ‘The Lodger’ where Craig is shocked to find the Doctor has a house reference from The Archbishop of Canterbury and in ‘The Christmas Carol’ where Dr 11 claims to be a ‘mature and responsible adult’ and finds the psychic paper has stopped working because that lie was just too big for it to cope with!) 

 NEGATIVES - I can’t let this column go without commenting that the thought that the last record from the 20th century that still exists billions of years in the future is Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ is...disappointing to say the least (though it’s a relief it isn’t The Spice Girls). Even the soundtrack is an attempt to show off: the last time Dr Who could afford an actual song the audience would have recognised on the TV soundtrack it was ‘The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ playing on a jukebox in a club in ‘The Faceless Ones’ back in 1967. The other records listed on Cassandra’s jukebox all date from 1979 weirdly enough, the year Russell turned sixteen (often said to be the perfect age for pop music, when you’re the key demographic audience before you’re all washed up at seventeen!) Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, funnily enough, has never been released as a 7” vinyl single – even now when everything is, hit of flop alike (the 12” ‘Toxic’ album is out on vinyl, for instance) - and had to be mocked up by the production team. While far from Russell’s only obsession with weird faceless pop at the time it felt a bit…rude. Billie Piper, you see, was ‘our’ Britney Spears and was enjoying a stunning run of success when she was 15-17, and our youngest homegrown talent to get a run of #1s since the 1950s (although, as so often happens, her best songs were written when sales were in decline – while her early songs are all too obviously tweaked by a middle aged manager to appeal to bratty weenies her later stuff is really quite good and thoughtful. I happily had the title track of ‘Walk Of Life’ on my mp3 player long before she got a part in Who and if you’ve read my other books on music you’ll know how snobbish my tastes can be). It was partly Britney who killed off Billie’s career, so having ‘Toxic’ playing whole Rose is nearly illuminated and ‘over-exposed’ to death seems a tad cruel. Then again, maybe Russell was writing all this deliberately given that the ‘other’ thing that scuppered Billie’s music career was her anorexia which she desperately tried to keep out of the papers as she existed on a diet of diet coke, coffee, cigarettes and tissue paper – and whose killing her in this story but a stretch of skin obsessed about her weight? In context having this story end with Billie running off to happily eat chips is either an awkward slap in the face or a celebration that she’s back to ‘normal’ now. In real life Billie survived by dropping out of sight with her eccentric much-older new boyfriend that’s part lover part mentor…no, not the Doctor, radio DJ Chris Evans (with whose she split up while filming this series, which might be why her tiffs with the Doctor are so emotionally charged across the year). If Russell ends up having Rose come back in the series and marrying Davros who has his own channel on Satellite Five where he gets to rant about wokeness gone mad in the 51st century and how aliens should stay purebloods we’ll know that he really was using Billie’s life as fuel for his writing. BEST QUOTE: ‘You think it'll last forever, the people and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day it's all gone, even the sky. My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's rocks and dust before its time’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The start of a loose trilogy followed by ‘New Earth’ and ‘Gridlock’ in series 2 and 3. The Doctor first picks up the psychic paper from the psychic forests of Boda – at least according to a 2021 short story starring the 13th Doctor ‘Paper Moon’, the title story in an anthology of the same name designed for younger readers. This is the Doctor’s return visit (she comments that ‘this paper’s got me out of more scrapes than Ryan’s had Yorkshire puddings!’) and stars The Producers, guardians of the forest and make sure only the most deserving species have access to its magical properties in a story short on plot but big on character. 

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