The Interstellar Song Contest: Ranking n/a (but #140ish)

 

 

 "Interstellar Song Contest, The” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 6, Dr 15 with Belinda, 17/5/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Juno Dawson, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director:  Ben A Williams)

Ranking: #N/A but #140ish reviewed 18/5/2025

 

‘Hello and welcome to the two Ranis. In a fully packed programme tonight we have the genetic scientist who was late to work because he was too busy making up his mind…and topping it up with some Tetrap brains [ta boom thh!] What did the genetic say to her experiment’s chromosomes? You need to get in line and follow the correct sequence! [ta boom thh!]  What do you call it when a neuroscientist is about to unleash a really successful plan to take over the world one gene at a time?  A cell-abration! [ta boom thh!]  Next, Mrs Flood in a sketch where she brings death upon the whole universe. Wat-er way to go!...  

Greetings ladies, gentleman, Alpha Centauris, Doosbury Giants and others, to the greatest show on Earth, the Intergalactic Song Contest! Wait, what’s that? Everyone else is at the Interstellar Song Contest? You could have told me! Now I’m not saying Russell T is copying me or anything but the Eurovision is such a perfect setting for a scifi series I had the idea too  and wrote ‘my’ version five years ago (quick plug: it’s ‘Insurgence’, book two of the ‘Kindred Spirits’ series and if you happen to be reading this the day or the day after this review goes up then it’s still available for FREE! amzn.to/4bZ1VOR Along with another seven scifi-romance-comedy-adventure-philosophy books to read. Well, a writer’s gotta keep himself in Dr Who DVDs somehow!) After all, they’ve let Australia join in nowadays, it’s not much of an extension to involve aliens from outer space too. Russell T Davies no doubt saw the same things in it that I did when he commissioned this story from new writer Juno Dawson: the sense of competition and conflict overlaid with a veneer of unity and fun as nations come together for one night, the sense of drama of not quite knowing what will happen, the fact that music and arts bring out the best in humanity and hopefully in other aliens too, allowing us to transcend barriers of language and politics to come together. It’s the time when, for one night a year, it feels as if the world is working properly the way it should, as we judge each other not for the way we look or dress or think or what our politicians demand, which is so very Dr Who. It’s like Christmas without all the tinsel and having.

Yet we’ve had a slow invasion lately. Eurovision managed to ride above politics successfully for its first fifty odd years – no matter who was at war with whom everyone tended to leave their war of words, swords, pistols and anti-matter ray guns at the door – but the past decade things have changed. With such a big platform (the biggest global outside that doesn’t revolve around sport) it’s a target for splinter groups to make their squashed voices heard and nowadays you’re as likely to come to the end of a Eurovision night relieved that everyone is still here (as much as the fact we didn’t score nul points again). Wars between Russia and Ukraine and one hand and Israel and Palestine on another have brought Europe as close to outright war as it’s been in the history of the competition. In 2018 UK singer SuRie had her performance interrupted and for a second we all expected the worst 9something sped in this year’s competition by Estonia’s ‘mock’ stage invasion while Tommy Cash sings a deliberately harmless song about the wonders of coffee). It’s a night when peace should reign, but war is more often than not waiting in the wings these days, despite anything political being banned in song (even so we got an awful lot of songs about being depressed and lonely and scared this year, while the UK entry was an escapist song about getting drunk to forget your problems and missing a shoe, or something. I don’t know, I was too busy grooving to Latvia. Ireland – with a very Dr Whoy song about Laika the dog the Russians sent into space – were the true winners but were robbed and didn’t make it out the semi-finals).

Things are changing in Europe so quick that even our night of fun feels infected these days. How do you solve a problem like this? Well, in my universe the different planets come together to form an intergalactic peace orchestra that raises the issues that ordinary people can’t see peacefully, with a series of protests led by a filibustering Clandusprod (Okay, I’ll stop plugging my own work now, honest). In the Whoniverse, though, even the Doctor struggles to patch things up when a group of horned Hellia take over the space station and decide to evict the people watching into deep space and use a signal to kill the ‘three trillion’ people watching at home (they’ve clearly been watching ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ where The Wire planned to do this in one poxy country with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which is hardly in the same league. Although that said three trillion people really isn’t very much at all if the whole universe is  meant to be watching. The viewing figures must be in a terminal decline the next few thousand years to be that low). Everyone appears to die, including The Doctor at first and Dr Who goes impressively far for the supposedly ’jokey’ episode in pushing that button. Think again, it pleads to any viewers watching who wants to put politics above fun or people who inflict cruelty on others, because this is where it ends up. It’s a theme that’s been running across series two of the Disney years, that cruelty begats cruelty and that if you hurt someone they often feel they have no choice but to hurt someone else to feel more ‘powerful’. That cycle has to stop somewhere or things will just go on for perpetuity getting worse, the trick being to thaw the ice someone puts in your heart rather than stabbing someone else with it in a warm fever of anger. That’s why Russell created the bi-regenerated Doctor, to allow Dr 14 to spend a lifetime healing and take away some of the Doctor’s darkness and angst. So far Dr 15 has been merrily breezing through life for the most part, yet still things keep happening to make him angry and this story is where he finally snaps, with a darker nastier cruel streak to this Doctor we’ve never seen before and, even if his actions are justified in some ways, we’re in ‘The Runaway Bride’ territory all over again as The Doctor only stops when someone else stops him. In the face of so much anger, so much hate, so much callousness, even he forgets his Doctory vow to do no harm and ‘The War Doctor’ from the time wars peeps uncomfortably out from behind his shoulder all over again. The real crux of this story comes when the terrorist Kid is told ‘You’re a monster’ to which he retorts ‘That’s what people have said to me my whole life -  I’m only doing the things you expect of me’. It’s the same when migrants are parked into the edge of towns and told to be lucky they’re living in slums and excluded from society – one day one of them is going to lash out at the unfairness and injustice of it all. If you get told you’re bad just for existing and it doesn’t matter how much good you do then of course a number of people are just going to be bad. In other words putting perhaps the two campest television programmes together doesn’t make for the big party fans were expecting, but instead kind of cancel each other out.

To understand how we get here, though, first a history lesson – two in fact. This story makes most sense when you realise that, for a second story in a row, Ncuti was pushing to make it or at any rate suggested it. His family come from Rwanda and fled to Britain when he was small when genocide broke out there. The local caste known as the Tuthi were all but wiped out during a two year attack that left the world in horror (it’s one of the first times post WWII that showed up how powerless the rest of the world was, not wanting to intervene in a ‘local’ conflict that could easily have broken into all-out war. I remember lots of charity singles and fundraising but not much practical political help). Ncuti isn’t acting when he taps into the darker side of this Doctor as he is so disgusted by seeing murder firsthand, he’s remembering, which gives his performance an extra power this week (all the more for coming after a scene where he’s saved himself by using the burst from a confetti canon – a homage to the equally unscientific scene of the 5^th Doctor using a cricket ball in ‘Four To Doomsday’ but somehow more atheistically pleasing). The story also makes more sense when you know a bit of Eurovision history. People have debated long and hard whether Israel should be allowed to compete after their ongoing war (genocide?) of Palestine when Russia were (rightly) kicked out for invading Ukraine. Like all these things, it’s complicated. This wasn’t a sudden unprovoked war the way the Russian one was but one that’s lasted longer than Eurovision or indeed Dr Who. Where do you draw the line? Pro-Israelis will also tell you that it’s because Palestine caused the biggest amount of casualties in one go (the October 7 massacre) and this story makes so much more sense if you remember that that was another music festival, when Israelis (and guests) were enjoying themselves and thinking about peace not war (though whether a music festival should have been held so close to the frontlines of a war is another matter; even so, that’s the organiser’s ‘fault’ not the attendees). Even so, after Israel retaliated in such a colossal way, all but determined to exterminate all Palestinians, it’s made their attendance at a music festival meant traditionally to promote peace a little…uncomfortable. All the more so when you learn that one of Eurovision’s biggest sponsors is MorroconOil, an Israeli company. Who wiped out a grove of Palestinian olive trees to dig for oil, just as the poor Helions’ world is destroyed for crops .

So what we have is a metaphorical story that explores complex politics in a very Dr Who way, that doesn’t just have one point of view but juggles several at once. At first it’s obvious: the Helions are bad, pure and simple. All those poor innocent people who were only trying to enjoy themselves! And it’s a horrible way to go times two, either freeze-dried in the unforgiving echelons of space or destroyed with a delta wave (last seen in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’) while watching your TV Of course the terrorists are wrong. And just look at them, they even have horns! That Kid is clearly a horrible being too, unforgivably smug and righteous. And then he does something that terrorists aren’t meant to do: he freezes for a second when he gives the final order and suddenly he looks like the little ‘kid’ he is (a really clever name choice, making him both innocent and like Billy the Kidd, who was a mass murderer despite the romantic image), before screwing up his eyes and clearly remembering what ‘the Humans’ have done to him and going ahead with it. The more we hear of his background, too, the more we understand: his people had little anyway but even that was taken away by conquering forces. His own mother was killed by these interlopers before she even had time to give her son a name, which is why he’s just a ‘kid’. They’re exactly the sort of people The Doctor would help overthrow their tyrant masters had he met them earlier in their story (‘Colony In Space’ is perhaps the best match). Things get even more complicated when sweet kindly Cora, who really looks after Belinda when she thinks The Doctor is dead (something that seems to be true for so long you really begin to wonder…) reveals that she’s a Helion who had her horns cut off and everyone treats her differently because of prejudice. So even though we’ve been willing The Doctor on to go take revenge and stop all this killing, when he finally gets there and goes into peak ranty mode, talking about the ice that’s in his heart, you’re conflicted. And then, when The Doctor starts attacking Kid, physically giving him pain, you don’t know where to look. I mean, you understand and everything but, not like this Doctor. You don’t understand. You don’t know the full picture.   
To quote this year’s UK entry ‘What the hell just happened?’

 And that’s where this story works best, by making you sit up and think when you weren’t expecting to, showing that sometimes when Humans make things complicated for themselves there is no right or wrong, or at least only wrong that begats wrong that begats wrong. It’s the tale of quite a few stories this year from the spurned boyfriend Al to the Midnight monster to the UNIT-baiting Conrad, though this story makes it even more explicit than usual. For how far back in the Israeli-Palestine conflict do you go? The first stone thrown in anger? The first injury? The first death? The war keeps going and escalating and one day we’ll wake up and three trillion people will be dead. I’ve seen a lot of fans complaining that this scene with The Doctor made them sick and uncomfortable, that it was jarring, as if it’s the product of bad writing. But you’re meant to feel like that. This is a timelord who thinks he’s the last of his kind (even if we seem to see more timelords around in the modern series post time war than we did in the old when Gallifrey was still around!) The Doctor hates feeling like this, the same way he felt watching his people die. But he’s only ‘Human’ for lack of a better word, he’s going to get triggered like anyone else. To him the Helions are just the Daleks all over again and nothing is worth death. It’s very clever. At last, after decades of wanting to see something like this, Dr Who is doing a ‘political’ story in a ‘Blake’s 7’ way (the sister series created by Terry ‘Dalek’ Nation) where what one side calls ‘terrorists’ are really ‘freedom fighters’ to the people they’re trying to save, neither good nor bad (I mean, Servalan is wickedness personified, the love child of Putin and Thatcher if you can imagine such a thing, and the empire are under tight control, but at least they’re safe and fed. You cheer for Blake and co rescuing political prisoners who merely pointed this out but, nevertheless, for ‘goodies’ they don’t half create a lot of headaches and supply problems for the majority of people just trying to live their best life).  It’s done a bit clumsier than it perhaps could have been in places (I wish Belinda had pulled a Steven or an Ace and properly told The Doctor off, passing some of that same anger on to him and physically clawing him off Kid; talking about how scary he looked for a second doesn’t cut it as deeply. Equally I wanted Kid to break, to call for his mum, to say after The Doctor’s attack he knows firsthand now how his family felt, something to change The Doctor’s mind and make him uncomfortable). Yet equally, of course The Doctor’s anger is justified: he nearly died, his friend was nearly stranded, so many people around him died. No cause is ever ever ever worth another death, even if its revenge for a death caused to someone close to you. Dr Who has never believed in an eye for an eye so to see the Doctor turn his cheeks in flared anger you know how far he’s been pushed. Above all else it’s exactly what Dr Who is for, exaggerating and explaining what is going on in our everyday world in a way that doesn’t not take sides but takes every side in turn and it’s incredibly brave for the BBC to not only agree to put this sort of controversial story out but air it directly before their own Eurovision coverage when it’s such an obvious parallel. ‘It’s just a bunch of songs’ says medic Mike. ‘It’s so much more than that’ says Gary. They could have been talking about this story. Douze points for courage this week then.

If you’re a Eurovision fan then it’s also heartwarming to see the attention to detail that really does make this feel like your typical Eurovision contest. They get the endless arm waving and goofy smiles worn by almost every contestant spot on. There are cameos by a freeze-dried Rylan Clark and Graham Norton – the former is a well known paid up Whovian who’s made no secret of wanting to be in the series playing something, while the later has interviewed all the Doctors since the comeback and has a notorious reputation amongst the fandom (when a trailer ‘rehearsal’ for a rare ‘live show’ went out accidentally during the opening seconds of all-important comeback ‘Rose’. Graham apologises for it – again – in this week’s ‘Unleashed’ even though it was a technician’s fault not his and says he’s grateful he didn’t accidentally swear). Both are fine, though Graham seems an odd choice for an exposition-giving computer programme  (is this a joke about Norton anti virus filters? In which case I did that gag first too in an April Fool’s Day issue over on sister site Alan’s Album Archives) though Ryan steals the show with his deadpan humour which sounds exactly like something he would say, especially the self-depreacting line in humour (and I’ve been following his career since he used to get scared of ghosts doing ‘Most Haunted Live’). I really like the idea that they’ve been cobbled together from people’s memories of Earth (because of course surviving Humans are going to remember pop culture like this more than anything else). The little pods that the different alien groups sit in are exactly like space-age versions of where the contestants sit now (a more interesting detail than you might think: the design makes it easier for security to see if a protest has broken out and if need to be to shut down a certain portion of the studio to save the majority in case of a full terrorist attack). The two contestants we do see too are superb: the entrant from the planet Lizzoko looking like a cross between a teletubby and one of the delegates from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, gives a wonderful performance of a very Eurovisiony song ‘I Love you but my heart says nooooooo!’ while the Flamingo-like ‘Dugadoo’, a cross between The Birdie Song 'Agadoo' and the Macarena, was the best interstellar entry this millennium! 

The one thing I wish is that there had been so much more of them and many other contestants too. I kind of know why – a combination of budget, time and the fact that when they tried doing this sort of thing with the music festival in ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’ it ended up as one of the stupidest and most hated Who stories of all (what are the odds that two stories in a row should steal plot elements from that unloved, wretched story?) But this is different: the darker elements of that story were shoe-horned in at the end whereas in this story it would have punctuated the serious moments, been light relief and a reminder of the fun people gathered here to have. The terrorist attack takes place more or less at once before the viewer has had tie to settle in and acclimatise. With the Disney money and shooting these episodes so far in advance (this one was made at the start of 2024 so they’ve had nearly eighteen months to edit) they could have really pushed the boat out and filled the place with aliens. It could have been like ‘The End Of The World’ with even more money and more aliens! Plus it worked really well when Dr Who tried this before. Because, yes, this isn’t the first Dr Who Eurovision crossover strange as that might seem. We’ve included the details in the ‘prequels’ section below, but ‘Bang-Bang-A-Boom!’ is pretty similar all round to this story, with tales of a terrorist attack and a walking bomb, even if it’s all handled in a much sillier manner. The best thing about that story, though, wasn’t the plot it was all the different planets we meet or see again for the first time in long time, the charming little cameos that really sold the fact we were in a future where millions of planets had come together (the voting must go on even longer than the original!) For all the clever CGI, multiplying the usual number of extras to make  it look like a giant dome-full, you don’t get that same sense of scale with ‘Interstellar’.

I wish, too, that more had been found for Belinda to do. She’s been rather badly served this series so far she’s been shunted to the side in ‘The Well’ and ‘The Story and The Engine’ and barely featured in ‘Lucky Day’ at all, while her appearance in this story resulted in a sweet story about staying up to watch Eurovision in her pyjamas (me too, Belinda, me too), a bunch of hysterical sobbing and a tiny bit of nursing. She doesn’t get any one big moment and even her joyful reunion with The Doctor feels a bit under=-sold compared to what it could have been. If this is the end of the road for her after the finale and assuming she appears properly in that (not a given) then that’s precisely four stories she’s played a proper role in, the first two and the last two. Even Ruby fared better than that. And talking of which I’ve wondered  for a while how sudden Mollie Gibson’s leaving really was. The fact that she got the starring part in ‘Lucky Day’ suggests there’s no problems between her and the production team and yet, since ‘Lux’, Belinda sounds far more like Ruby than the character we met in ‘The Robot Revolution’.  Never more than here either: Ruby is the emotional music fan who would love the idea of seeing other alien cultures through their songs. Belinda is a hard-nosed Doctor travelling reluctantly. I mean, people can be more than one thing at a time, but some of this sudden interest comes from nowhere. There’s also absolutely no reason why the Tardis should land here on its way to getting Belinda home – even when The Doctor fiddles with wires there’s nothing that particularly relates to this song contest he needs, so why the stop off? Go to a garage planet, there must be lots in the Whoniverse!

Then of course there’s the two big reveals for which the story is bound to be remembered above anything else, both of which ‘Interstellar’ fumbles to a degree. Look away now if you don’t want spoilers…First up, The Rani. This wasn’t really much a of a surprise. Fans had been talking about Mrs Flood being her since she first appeared and the link of ‘Flood/Rain/anagram of Rani clue seemed to make it ever more likely. Me personally? I thought that might be too obvious and that the fact she was cosplaying as The Doctor’s companions Clara and Romana suggested a return for them or River Song or some future meta God watching Dr Who that we hadn’t met yet (that might still happen, in which case you read it here first. Well, second as I think I put as lot of this in another review): I admit I’d forgotten about the Rani dressing up as Mel in ‘Time and The Rani’ (but then, shudder, who hasn’t tried to wipe that scene from their mind?) The thing is, Mrs Flood has never for a second acted like The Rani. Shes a hard-nosed scientist, uninterested in The Doctor or Earth beyond the use for her experiments. She doesn’t have the burning life-long feud with him The Master has – to her the Doctor is a bumbling idiot who gets lucky a ‘prefect’ type who keeps telling her off for being naughty. Her beef isn’t with him, she just wants to rule the universe. It’s not as if she can only rule it with The Doctor removed either: in her arrogance The Rani always thinks she can defeat The Doctor with a hand behind her back (The Master might say something similar but the difference is she believes it deep down; he’s just paying lip service). In other words travelling round the universe watching The Doctor and laughing is completely out of character for her from anything we’ve seen so far. As for the biregeneration – when it happened to The Doctor in ‘The Giggle’ it was a natural extension of that story, sold to use as a rare event that could never happen again. But if every timelord we meet is going to go through the same thing now  it robs it of its original power. Plus it feels like a copy of ‘Empire Of Death’ where the big bad we’ve been following for two series now ends up a patsy to someone else. It’s also a bit random as a reveal goes: mid-credits with The Doctor not around to witness it. Why does Mrs Flood choose that of all moments to turn schizophrenic?  I have an awful feeling, too, after watching ‘Unleashed’ that Russell didn’t know who Mrs Flood was when he wrote her and ‘gave the fans what they wanted’ after reading the fan forums. This idea of ‘clues’ is Russell’s weakest aspect as a writer. He’s trying really hard to copy the ‘didn’t see that coming’ revelations of Steven Moffat, but that’s not his strength as a writer. He’s better at emotions and delivering ‘justice’ than mystery. Once again the return to Dr Who has been bad for him as a writer if only because he has so many more toys that he wants to play with, rather than re-shaping the series to his own image as he did in 2005.

For instance, while the Rani was always the series arc that writer  Juno was asked to write to, he himself added the sudden jarring re-appearance of Susan because he felt the scene of The Doctor waking up in space needed to have something to fight for (please say The Rani doesn’t out to be the biregeneration of Susan…) On the one hand it’s very welcome and overdue – Carole Ann Ford is eighty five now and more deserving of a re-appearance than anyone. Weirdly she’d never actually met Russell before her invite to the ‘Star Beast’ premiere re-launch in 2023 and unlike some other ex companions she’s always been keen to come back, jumping at the chance when Russell offered it to her. They did well to keep this quiet too: there have been a few other leaks and spoilers this year but this was something they managed to keep entirely quiet (unless I just never came across that a particular leak). It really is a surprise and sort of works, both as a ‘life passing through your eyes’ moment for The Doctor and for appearing in an episode about a ‘family’ event like Eurovision. the thing is though, The Doctor wouldn’t remember Susan the way she is ‘now’ and it’s handled ever so weirdly: is the Doctor remembering or is it a hallucination or a message? He never stops to tell us even though that last conversation with Belinda at the end would have been the perfect time. I hope to goodness we do see Susan again and that wasn’t it too because at the moment it seems like a colossal waste of her time and ours (though she might well be in the finale to come).

Overall, then, I admire this story more than I love it. The central idea is so strong and so courageous that I can forgive ‘Interstellar’s flaws but they are very much there and do get in this story’s way a little (though the BBC might well have chickened out of letting Ncuti speak as our official UK votegiver, with the actor announced and pulled within the same week, perhaps out of fears of what a no-holds-barred actor might say about Israel’s participation. Although he or somebody close to him might just be sick to be fair. He was replaced by singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the daughter of Janet Ellis, who was in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, so at least it’s kept in the family. Sort of). The pacing, for instance, is super weird: every scene takes too long and the story is resolved with a full fifteen minutes ago, time we could have spent seeing more music at the beginning rather than messing around with The Rani. If we’d had more sense of the horror of being lost in space, or the anger of the people returned, or a pre-credits scene of Helios being harvested for flavouring (why did they burn the planet? Don’t the corporation  want to grow more?), how Kid ended up the way he did, or more Cora (I really like Cora: you should be cheering her on singing despite the prejudice against her much more than you do) or more time spent trying to find the Tardis that have it materialise happily on an asteroid (again?!)  this episode could have been the best of the year – instead it’s another of the Disney era ‘nearly’ stories, a re-write away from greatness. Watching it felt, indeed, not unlike the Eurovision proper and the weird voting system which means everyone gets scored twice, once by a jury and once by the public, so the entire first half hour of scoring can be made null and void in an instant: it seems fun until the end re-writes everything you thought you knew (the public have no taste: every year I agree with the jury and think the public vote is hopelessly out of touch, although it might just be me that’s out of touch instead). There’s enough to keep the central story ticking over though and there’s some really good acting this week, from Ncuti’s switch from fun and games to dark brooding anger (so McCoylike!) to Freddie Fox making Kid more than just the pantomime villain he could have been. Some nice lines too: of course The Doctor was there in 1974 when Abba won with ‘Waterloo’! Rylan being asked for ‘awe’ and going ‘aww’. Though Kid’s favourite genre being ‘pop’ just as the dome opens is crass not funny and not in character and the Doctor’s cheesy comment ‘I thought it was my ‘Waterloo’ but it turns out it’s my ‘Rise Like A Phoenix’ was so bad it had me throwing things at the telly). I have to say next week, with the ‘screaming sound of May 24^th, was deliciously scary and one of the series’ better end-of-story-clidffhangers. The overall score from the Alonsy Aliens Archives jury then? Huit points – enough to put this story bronze for the season so far, in the top half of Who stories without being amongst the true best. Oh and if you want to know who won the revised Interstellar Song Contest when they ran it a week later Lux won it with a lovely rendition of ‘Love, Shine A Light’ closely beating The Tractators with ‘Diggy-Loo Diggy-Lay’, The Face of Boe’s ‘Satellite Five’ and Cliff Richard’s duet with Servalan, who’s ‘Maximum Power To All My Friends’ was so bad it accidentally created a hole in the universe that caused the deaths of ten trillion people.

POSITIVES + Dugadoo is Murray Gold’s masterpiece. No, seriously. He came up with this fab little catchy ear-worm on his own time, after delivering ‘hearts Says Noooo’ as the episode’s centrepiece and sent the soundtrack to everyone’s inbox for a joke. Murray is always at his worst when up against it and feeling the pressure of having to score a big emotional scene but here he sounds genuinely inspired. The decision of the production team to invent a whole race for this song is fabulous too: we need more fun aliens like Dugadoos and it looks just alien enough to work, yet also recognisably to Flamingos what Terrileptils are to turtles or Karvanistas are to dogs. If we’d entered this as our Eurovision entry we’d have won easily.  Although there would have had to have been a century delay while we terraform a planet and breed sentient flamingos.

NEGATIVES -  That’s a second ‘Space Babies’ reference in a row and yet it seems random in the extreme. What have the babies to do with honey? It also fails to follow on from the random sight of Baby Poppy in ‘The Story and The Engine’ which hasn’t been explained at all. It could be that Russell is writing the series finale around the space babies, perhaps having their storytelling machine the focal point of this year and spreading them across the rest of the Doctor’s recent history ‘Bad Wolf’ style. In which case…No. Just no. Please don’t have the biregeneration be because the Space Babies want stories. Or that the ‘timeless child’ is a Space Babies creation. If you do Russell Im going to spit my dummy out and wah wah wahhhhh [carries on for another six paragraphs] .  

BEST QUOTE: Gary: ‘To do that you’d need to be some sort of insane genius’ ‘Hello, I’m the Doctor!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: All stand please for the Earth national anthem! (How did we ever get it together long enough to pick just one?!) For no, this is not Dr Who’s first rodeo with Eurovision. It was also the backdrop for a lovably eccentric 7^th Doctor Big Finish audio ‘Bang-Bang-A-Boom!’(2002), #39 in the main Dr Who range. Co-written by two of Who’s funniest writers Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman it’s rather different in feel though the plot is still close to what we got on screen, despite dating back to those happy far-off days when political voting meant giving your nearest neighbours douze points so they didn’t invade you, rather than working out which country you were at war and cutting an arms deal with. Like ‘Interstellar’ it takes part on a space station (Dark Space 8 – as close as they can get to the Star Trek name, with lots of jokes at the franchise – such as Dr Harcourt’s longwinded ‘captain’s log’), with Mel (of course it’s Mel!) asking to go see it. Once again the Tardis turns up at just the ‘wrong’ time, as the story is a sort of Whodunnit where people keep dying, with the McCoy Doctor trying to work out whether it’s a terrorist threat, a rogue record company or a music hater. The difference is that they contestants are all so nasty you’re kind of cheering them on as the writers offer up lots of cheeky caricatures from the then-new idea of music reality TV shows, with a Simon Cowell soundalike, a smug popstar (the Doctor and Mel are the only people in the cosmos who haven’t heard of him, apparently) and lots of irritating contestants talking about their ‘journey’ and so on. The main threat comes from a contestant who’s swallowed a bomb that will go off if he gets too nervous. Ooerr! Oh and The Doctor’s in love with a contestant. A real life Valkeryie with body odour issues (it’s his last romance before Dr Grace and Rose, so not sure what that says about his tastes!) There’s a cameo appearance by ‘Logan’, an impressionist who is a future Terry Wogan in the same sense that hologram Rylan and Graham  are playing caricatures of themselves. Best of all though: lots of very alien aliens and the sort of thing you can only do on audio (my favourite is the Golos, a big ball of sentient candyfloss! The biggest surprise: the Drahvins from ‘Galaxy 4’ make a surprise appearance with their song ‘Clone Love’!) It’s all good fun, even with the same serious message underlying it all of the minority spoiling things for the majority and Bonnie Langford especially is having a whale of a time, while McCoy gets to show his earlier silly side once again before turning dark and channelling his inner Poirot for a typical ‘I’ve gathered all of you suspects here today’ ending. You’d never call this story great art or anything but as comfort food audiobooks go it’s right up there with some of Big Finish’s best. 

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