Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead

Easter Saturday, 2009. By the machinations of a small hand-held device unlikely to be picked up by Apple any time soon, the Doctor is sucked into a wormhole and ends up in a Bond movie, complete with Bond girl (Michelle Ryan) and Q (Lee Evans). Is there any way out?

With the Christmas specials bound to be Who Mood A - dark, overblown, with fantastic cliffhanger at the end of episode two ruined by dreadful quasi-religious resolution in episode three - this Easter special was Who Mood B: big, dumb fun, sweet as a chocolate egg and not nearly as sickly.

It could have gone horribly wrong. Amidst the schmaltz of the "forget about the fact you're on an alien planet with three suns, what really matters in this life is chops and gravy" scene - not a very Doctoresque sentiment, I might add - I feared that this was going to be yet another "ordinary folk pull together" type morality tale, but the episode pretty much abandoned the bus passengers after that. Instead, what we got was a lot of flirtation between the Doctor and that Michelle Ryan character - what was her name again? Tickle McWim? Yup, it wasn't only the desert that was hot.

This was Doctor Who: The Sexy Special (PG rating, contains mild peril and a lot of embarrassing innuendos.) Poor Michelle Ryan: not the most convincing actress at the best of times, as Tickle McWim she had to deliver a lot of lines which may as well have been suffixed with the words JUST LIKE SEX. "I like things extreme" - JUST LIKE SEX. "We could be good together" - IN THE SACK. Unfortunately this bled into every other line that she said. "There's sand in the engine" - AND IN MY PANTS. When she wasn't being sexy, she was being sexy and posh: "That's how the aristocracy survives, by being ready for everything" (AND BY SHAGGING LOADS), she says, before diving down some kind of giant vent thing to rescue a crystal (shades of The Crystal Maze, anyone?) Everything, except for the Icelandic banks collapsing, apparently. Poor Daddy.

But who cares? It was good to see the Doctor getting flirty and dirty. The harder it gets the more he loves it, apparently - me too, baby. His tongue got an excellent workout, both licking the sand and snogging Michelle at the end, with not a DNA transfer excuse in sight. Of course, he kissed and ran - you can't have shagging in the Tardis, as DT often says. Perhaps Ms McWim will turn up on Torchwood? I'd like to see her face off with Captain Jack - BETWEEN THE SHEETS.

This wasn't the only love affair in Planet of the Dead. The other, and, I hope, the more lasting of the two, was between the Doctor and Lee Evans's Malcolm, a UNIT boffin and sort of genetic splice of Q and Rob Brydon. Watching Evans in action it was hard to believe he hadn't been a series regular since day one. Doctor Who needs a comedy scientist, stands to reason, if only to say lines like, "Doctor, what if I reverse the proton polarity of the anhydrous electromagnet and increase to a force of fifteen Bernards? Oops, my glasses have fallen off." [Disclaimer: may not actually have been what he said]. By the time they were back-and-forthing on the phone, I felt as if they had known each other for years. When they finally came face to face, and Evans delivered his excellent and heartfelt series of "I love you"s, I thought he was going to go in for the snog too. Disappointingly, he didn't, but if Malcolm loves the Doctor, I love Malcolm, and beg Mr Moffat to please bring him back soon.

There were other fabulous details, too numerous to mention. The shit-eating alien flies, who don't have ears but who do have perfect ear-shaped communications devices lying around their spaceship. The fact that a skeleton falling out of a wormhole is "Emergency Code One" which rather makes you wonder what happened at the meeting where they dreamed up the emergency codes, and whether Emergency Code Two is "Tower Bridge unmoors itself and starts dancing the Macarena". The fact that the only thing that can make a London bus run on time is an ancient gold cup "worth 18 million pounds". Have I made myself clear yet? I absolutely loved it from beginning to end.

Next time: "Water always wins": the Doctor is unexpectedly killed by a urine infection.

In case you were wondering...

...why I've gone so quiet, it is not, as you might have thought, because I am Twittering all the lifelong day, or because I really did eat too much pudding and then die, but because I am working. In fact I've been working so hard I've barely been playing Facebook Scrabble. I know. I'm surprised too.

But don't fear, because there's a Doctor Who special over the weekend to write about, and I am also poised to review the astonishing Romeo Castelucci trilogy currently being staged at the Barbican (seeing the third part this evening.)

Are you relieved? I am completely relieved. Phew.

Our third...

...and final blogger-reviewed Future Me post is up here for your perusal. While not quite as positive as the other two, Rob nevertheless pulls a four out of five out of the bag, and thoughtfully talks you through the toilet / drinks options / etc too.

I think I'll shut up about this now. Until I go myself, natch.

Every Author's Worst Nightmare

Poor Michael Crichton. Not only is he dead - a state I'm not particularly looking forward to myself, except for when I've eaten much too much - he now has to put up with the indignity of this. Yes, somebody has been kind enough to go through his computer and dig out his half-finished novels, and now they are going to publish them.

Hideous. If, by some terrible happenstance, I was to go out today, eat far too much pudding, and then die, and somebody was to go through my computer, they would find at least five half-written novels, sometimes including (as the Crichton piece says) notes for how to finish them, but that doesn't mean that I actually (a) ever want them to be finished by me or (b) anyone else, and certainly (c) ever want to be read by anyone, especially (d) actual readers. There is a reason why these novels are not finished. It is not because I am (theoretically) dead. It is because they are terrible.

The fact is, writers start and don't finish terrible novels all the time, and sometimes they even write and finish terrible novels, but some kind of sanity / vanity / responsible feelings towards the well-being of the world kicks in and instead of publishing the damn things you keep them on your computer just in case one day you wake up knowing exactly how to make that terrible novel into a good novel. Here's a hint: the day that you wake up with that knowledge is highly unlikely to be after you are dead.

Aha, you might say. Michael Crichton did not know he was going to wake up dead. Therefore he might have been working on something that was actually good. Novelists might die halfway through writing something good; in fact, I bet they do all the time.

I would reply: firstly, you have a very sweet and elevated view of how much of a writer's time is spent working on something good. (I would suggest: not very much.) Secondly, you might be right. But there are *two* books that have been salvaged from Michael Crichton's, and so I would wager that one of them is a grotesque embarrassment which he'd rather was put in the coffin with him and buried.

Shall we hazard a guess as to which? Is it the "technological thriller" that he was a third of the way through writing when he died? Or is it "Pirate Latitudes, [which] is set in 17th-century Jamaica, and follows the plans of a pirate called Hunter and the governor of Jamaica to raid a Spanish treasure galleon?"

I rest my case.

Meanwhile, on a similar theme, The Onion.

Seeing as it's the theme of the day...

...Londonist loved it too.

And there's more

Rupert Hill (the lead actor) blogs about Future Me over here on the Guardian website. All the best people are blogging about Future Me today, dontcha know.

Present, um, him.

A while ago I posted an interview with Stephen Brown about his play Future Me, and invited three interested bloggers to go along and post their own reviews afterwards.

Well, the first review is in, from the lovely Jane Henry, and it's a rave. Hurrah! (Warning, the review contains spoilers.)

Future Me runs at the Only Connect Theatre in King's Cross, London until April 26th. Tickets from www.pleasance.co.uk or 020 7609 1800.

How Not To Talk...

As I'm out and about during the day, I often see adults with learning difficulties out with their carers. Over time, I have got to recognise the carers' way of speaking: very firm, very clear, a touch of what from the outside sounds like patronising but probably only the result of speaking to adults in a manner and vocabulary we're more familiar with using for children, sometimes a note of exasperation if the carer is having a particularly trying day. Checking out the new Waitrose in Angel today, I heard one such carer obviously on the edge of losing his temper with his indecisive charge, lecturing them on the correct way to buy pasta sauce. And then I turned around. It wasn't an adult with learning difficulties. It was his girlfriend.

Are Baby Chicks Intelligent Or Not?

In the blue corner: they can do maths.

In the red corner: they can form emotional relationships with small pieces of plastic.

The chicks were reared with five plastic containers of the kind found inside Kinder chocolate eggs. This meant the chicks bonded with the capsules, much as they do with their mother, making them want to be near the containers as they grew up.

Stupid chicks. Stupid.

Oh my god, where is my iPod? I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT IT.

Hmmm...

Super-Maman To The Rescue!

My mother is amazing. She went to John Lewis and got them to agree to repay the cost of the assembly of the filing cabinet. I have no idea how. I asked her "were you armed?" and she said "yes" but I think she didn't hear me properly because of bad reception on her mobile phone. But we can't entirely rule out the use of weapons. The only thing I can say for sure is that I have seen my mother when she is angry, it doesn't happen often but by god it is terrifying.

Super-Maman 1, John Lewis 0. Next time England needs a new coach, I think we know who to call.