Author: James Lark

…or is the blood op part of this headline hiding an even more sensational revelation?

In the olden days, railway travel was one of life’s great pleasures. When I was little I would arrive at the station, walk through a little wooden gate and buy a ticket from a friendly, smartly-dressed man in a ticket booth, who would give me a lollipop and a cheeky wink, and even if I was a little late the gleaming green steam engine would still be waiting, the driver leaning out of his little cabin saying “hurry along you little tinker!” with a cheeky wink, as I stepped into an airy, pleasant wooden carriage and the train puffed out of the station with a merry toot. And it would naturally arrive at its destination on time.

These days, when you turn up at a station you are thrown into a disorganised scrummage to reach some automatic ticket machines, two thirds of which will be out of service, and you then wait for somebody to open an electronic barrier that obstinately refuses to respond to the ticket which you have purchased. By which time you will have missed your train, which will have pulled out of the station even with five hundred commuters still halfway out of its doors, ensuring that even if you do just about make it through the barriers on time you will never make it through the human wall blocking the way to the grimy, sweaty carriages. And the train will nevertheless arrive at its destination late.

And they call this progress.

How do they do it? After a whole series of derivative (and badly-lit) crapness, how does Doctor Who come up with a two-parter which comes so close to perfection that I’m just not going to quibble over the few bits that didn’t quite work?

Two words: Steven Moffat.

Of course, script writers don’t have any control over how a production turns out, the quality of the acting, or how well-lit an episode is. But “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” showed – again – that if you get the script right first, the rest often follows. Twas ever thus, as the chequered history of Doctor Who amply demonstrates. It’s something that the current production team seem to have been largely ignoring lately, but which Moffat clearly understands – which bodes well for his forthcoming stint as executive producer.

Bring it on!

I knew I’d seen David Tennant’s Doctor with a Donna Noble-style chavvy woman somewhere before…

…what I find more distressing: that the BBC could produce such a pile of bilge as Saturday’s Doctor Who (“The Unicorn and the Wasp”, or “the one where Agatha Christie is inadequately parodied whilst a giant CGI wasp is inadequately explained”), or that The Stage’s reviewer could, without a trace of irony, describe it as “the best edition of the show since its 1963 beginnings”.

Certainly the most creaky, ill-conceived, poorly-executed and illogical edition of the show since its 1963 beginnings.

Actually, that’s not fair. There was the one with the Doctor’s daughter… er… last week.

And has anybody else noticed that they’re lighting the show like it’s the 1980s all over again? Even in 1920s costume drama the LX man found a use for his pink gel…

…are we going to have to watch a lengthy scene in which Martha says goodbye to the Doctor?

For that matter, how much further can they get through this series without a single decent episode?

…sorry about the long silence. I’m MDing a satirical sketch show at the moment and it’s rather taken it out of me. Whatever “it” really is.

If you get bored while you’re waiting for me to get “it” back, have a listen to the wonderful John Finnemore, Apparently.

It just took me three attempts to spell the word “maybe”.

First time round it came out as “maby”, which I could see was going to be wrong even as I was writing it. I decided to try it without the “y”, which I felt was getting in the way, and came out with “mabie”, which was arguably even further from the truth and a silly thing to do because I knew there was a “y” involved somewhere.

I suppose the question is, how long before I am reduced to dribbling and gutteral snorting, assuming this can only get worse?

I dreamt that I was at a Footlights alumni event – not a performance, really, but just a tiny room with old Footlighters standing up and doing old material for each others’ enjoyment (like that would ever happen…). A young Dudley Moore was sitting behind me making sarcastic comments about everyone because he thought it was all a bit crap and wanted to be the centre of attention (I know Dudley Moore was never at Cambridge, but my subconscious seems to have a problem with facts), and next to me James Aylett gave me an encyclopaeidic commentary about all the performers and their material.

Then James Bachman got up with some random bloke and they sat on stools with guitars, and when he strummed a chord the whole room erupted and applauded ecstatically. And James Aylett said, “oh, brilliant, they’re doing the fudge song!”

In my dream, at least, I was well aware of the reputation of the fudge song – it had been spoken of in hushed tones when I was in Footlights as the damndest funniest song ever written by a Footlighter ever.

In actual fact, the song turned out to be a musical setting of the food chain of sea creatures, set to an old musical hall tune. I couldn’t hear all of the words because people were laughing so uproariously and singing along (even Dudley Moore begrudgingly stopped making sarcastic comments) – but I remember feeling a mixture of envy that the song could provoke such a huge response, and bewilderment because it seemed to me that it wasn’t very funny at all.

I woke up before they reached any kind of punchline.