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Damn Russell T Davies. Just when I think I’ve got him all worked out and he’s basically rubbish, he comes out with an episode like Doomsday.

Even the final sequence, which could have been horribly sentimental, seemed right. Yes, a little bit overblown, but in context appropriately so, and the shot of the Doctor with tears running down his face… I’m sure I wasn’t the only one sobbing quietly to myself.

As for the story itself (and there was one – an excellent development which I hope will be carried on in the next series) – well, I nearly got it right.

James Casey has the answer.

I dreamt that the Footlights tour show was using a big buffet on a long table as its set for each performance, and every sketch used a different item of food in some amusing way until it was all used up.

In my dream at least it felt like exactly the kind of inventive, experimental comedy the Footlights ought to be doing…

An item I sent in the post was damaged recently and I popped onto the Royal Mail website to see if there was somebody I could mouth off to. It all seemed very friendly and easy to use, and I quickly located a customer complaints form. “Aha!” I thought, “an online form – this should be quick and simple.”

So I filled in all the relevant boxes, typed in my polite complaint, scrolled up and down the page to see if I’d missed anything, then clicked on the “Next” icon, imagining that it would submit my form to the nice people at Royal Mail.

But no. The next page was exactly the same, but with the added instruction “please print off this form and post it to:…”

Now, I can understand that Royal Mail like posting things and maybe it seems natural enough to them. But I can’t help feeling that I’ve been duped. It’s not so much that the supposedly simple online form had suddenly turned into a process of printing something out on my paper, affixing a stamp worth 32p and all the effort of actually going out and posting it. No, it’s more the feeling that their customer complaints form is little more than a thinly disguised piece of self-promotion.

It’s a complaints form that ends by telling you to go out and use the service that you’re complaining about. They make a 32p profit every time somebody complains. Imagine if you went into Mothercare to complain and just as you’d finished making your complaint they sold you a rattle. It’s just like that.

I’m almost tempted to print off another form complaining about the system and claiming back my 32p.

It’s worth pointing out that Alastair has responded to my comments about saturday’s Doctor Who by explaining exactly what is wrong with the current series. I suspect he’s stolen many of the arguments from me, so read his blog, it’ll save me writing the same.

He doesn’t pull any punches, mind. Really harsh, actually.

I rather liked it.

Somewhat insane, but great. [Via JWZ.]

Makes you wonder what Ummagumma would have been like if the original idea had come off.

Here’s a fun game you can play with friends if you’re slightly inebriated: if somebody famous comes up in conversation, why not write them a letter by committee, a word at a time each?

This evening, for example, four of us produced the following email for 90s child prodigies Hanson, after downloading their perrenial hit “Mmmbop” (that is how it’s spelt).

Subject: Your song is quite

Dear dear alarmingly high-pitched,

Having you tantalises our long alarmingly receptive eardrums. We mmmbop infinitely; however, under us your exceptionally dulcet vocal imaginative melody is quite quiveringly improvable. Particularly in the seventh bar whereupon inside our hearts, alarmingly almost, we lost absolute musical poise and sounded derectionlessly sorry.

Yours moistly, girlishly and James.

And ceaselessly, amen.

Now, it’s not the greatest email ever, but it does demonstrate quite how important it is to put somebody in charge of the punctuation.

It put me in mind of an occasion about a year ago when somebody called James made me a Nigella Lawson bread and butter pudding, except that instead of bread it recommended the use of stale pain au chocolat. In fact James admitted that he used fresh pain au chocolat, but it still tasted jolly good and inspired the following epistle:

Dear Nigella,

We both wish to write to tell you what fun we had with your absolutely positively good motherfucking recipe which we must tell you was frankly the tops. No mean achievement! What you have done must count among the top recipes ever written by human beings in our country. To begin – the “pain” was not only stale, but slightly hardened as was the cream. What we wanted to do was put our faces into your general face to tell you how much we enjoyed eating your face.

Believe us, dear Nigella, when we inform you of our undying desire to eat your face every minute of the day, we remain slightly inebriatedly insincere.

P.S. Eat “pain” and live long and prosperously.

Yours in Christo

James and James

xxxxxxx

P.P.S. You must remember to cook all night or else we’ll be round to put a big smile on your “pain” of “chocolat”. Ever in undying Cambridge affection, without any real trace of irony or insincerity or salubriousness or resentment and without proper care, except for the minute that we pit our wits to find the newest and biggest words to employ to express our devoted satisfaction,

Ever in infatuation,

Christo – only we joke, slightly, of spiritual overweeningness for we are frail and prone to fall into sin.

Sadly, in our word-at-a-time frenzy we omitted to put an address at the top of the letter, so have never discovered Nigella’s response. Let’s hope for better luck with Hanson.

I suppose it was as inevitable as it was predictable: for his “all hell breaks loose” Doctor Who season finale, Russell T Davies has pitted the series’ most popular monster against its second most popular monster. And all in a story which also has to tie up all the threads that have been unsubtly and rather illogically spread across the series, introduce the idea of his new spin-off drama Torchwood, bump off Billie Piper and – apparently – reintroduce the entirely undesirable character of Mickey (the sense of dread I felt when he appeared can’t have been intended by the production team, but it made up for the lack of the same when the Daleks finally appeared after a slow and obvious build-up).

On the upside, cramming too much into his story means that Russell T Davies hasn’t had any time for his trademark padding (at least so far), and although his ideas are still as underdeveloped as usual, it’s all too busy to be obvious. But it is also exactly the kind of story a six-year-old fan would probably write, just without the crayon drawings (that was last week). Pitting the Daleks against the Cybermen is the ultimate fan jerk-off, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In twenty-six years, the original series never once put the two together (unless you tenuously include The Five Doctors – and if there is a place for such silliness it’s once every twenty years in special anniversary stories); put a fan in charge and he does it within twenty-six episodes.

It all goes to show that Russell T Davies is more interested in spectacle than good stories. Alas, in spite of his not inconsiderable budget, his flying Daleks still look like cartoons and the whole thing takes on the look of cheap sci-fi, so the one thing the series (at its best) has (or had) going for it is completely missing.

Quite aside from the fact that it looks crap, using Daleks and Cybermen in a story which already has more than enough story shows a complete lack of restraint; if you’re going to use two such iconic baddies, why not put them in a story where there’s space to use them properly, rather than lazily chuck everything into a two-parter and hope that it will be exciting? What’s he going to do to end the next series?

Of course, there’s one more part to go, so we’ve yet to see the full extent of the folly. But for what it’s worth, here’s my prediction of what we’re in for next week:

The Daleks attack the Cybermen and all hell breaks loose; the Doctor, Rose, her Mother, Mickey and the whole of the Torchwood Institute are caught in the crossfire, but just as they are all about to be extermined and deleted with total deletion, Sarah Jane Smith blasts her way in with K9 and they escape into the TARDIS. The Doctor makes contact with previous incarnations Christopher Eccleston and Paul McGann, who argue with each other in a semi-comical manner.

Meanwhile, the Daleks and Cyberman break out of the Torchwood institute into Albert Square; the alien artefacts in the Institute are also freed and the cast of Eastenders find themselves terrorised by a menagerie of monsters, including the Slitheen and Peter Kay. As the three Doctors try to stop the chaos, the woman in charge of the Torchwood institute traps them in E-space, revealing that she is in fact the Master and engineered the whole thing all along.

However, in E-space the Doctors discover Romana, the Timelords and Gary Glitter, all of whom managed to escape the Time War by slipping into a parallel universe. They travel back to earth using the sonic screwdriver, then confront the emperor CyberDalek, who is revealed to be Davros.

Mickey sacrifices himself to destroy Davros. The three Doctors destroy the remaining Daleks and Cybermen with the sonic screwdriver. Rose realises that if she stares into the heart of the TARDIS the remaining Bad Wolf energy latent in her will open the eye of harmony and time will run backwards, bringing Mickey back to life. But when Mickey comes back to life he is revealed to be the Valeyard, who has tricked them all to try to gain control of the Hand of Omega and eternal life. But when he activates the trilithium raxamaxogelfiagogorian crystal which the Torchwood Institute stole from the Sycorax, he is absorbed into the sphere. Rassilon arrives and explains he arranged the whole thing and returns everything to normal.

Rose dies.

The Face of Bo turns up and tells the Doctor he’s sorry it all had to happen like that and gives him a mysterious message before disappearing. The Doctor is sad and wistful then suddenly returns to his bouncy self, embarking on his next adventure with a sense of wide-eyed discovery.

Some of you might recall my infamous Michael Howard song, which (as James Aylett gleefully observed last year) is no longer in any fit state to be performed purely because its subject has dropped out of the news in exactly the way we wished he would when he was still in it.

At the time I observed that, because the one joke in the song was that Michael Howard’s face looks like an arse, I could very easily replace his name with that of his successor and carry on singing the song.

But that doesn’t seem fair, somehow – I wrote it to make the very truthful satirical observation that Michael Howard’s face resembles a bottom – to apply that to David Cameron would be tenuous and unjust. In any case, there were Howard references like “something of the night about him” and so on – no, far better to move on.

The last time I attempted to sing the song was at the Friday Project launch party, when I was too inebriated to remember any of the words except “yes his face looks like a bottom…yes his face looks like a bottom…” But Paul Carr continued to laugh and cheer every time I sang it so I carried on singing it. Not the best ever swansong for a work of poetic genius.

But speaking of poetic genius, I’ve just uncovered from a pile on my desk a couple of new verses I penned at James Aylett’s birthday party, based on the fact that James has been compared to the new Tory leader:

When looking at the leader of the opposition
I find that I am in a rather difficult position
For though his big mouth’s something that we’d all quite like to hammer on
There’s someone else I know who looks a little like Dave Cameron…

(chorus)
Yes his face looks like James Aylett’s,
Yes James Aylett’s got his face,
To think that there could be such twins
Amongst the human race,
So if you’ve a complaint
And you’re not certain where to mail it
Be careful you get Cameron,
Don’t post it to James Aylett.

I fear it won’t be a hit at private parties because, lovely though he is, James Aylett is even less well known than Michael Howard. Also because it doesn’t use the word “arse”.

Copies of our book arrived at my doorstep today, which was very exciting for a while.

Yes: after about a year of co-writing, criticising each others’ writing, criticising proposed cover designs, proofreading the copy editor’s work, proofreading the proofreader’s work, proofreading the designers’ work, criticising the designers’ work, proofreading each others’ criticisms of the designers’ work, and so on (and we’re VERY criticial people), there is actually a book which I can hold and touch and rub and take to bed.

I’ve done all of these things but haven’t actually read a word of it yet. Satisfying though it has been I hope that people who buy the book will also take advantage of the words we have written – whatever they turned out to be after all the criticising.

Anyway, I’m bored of it now. Oh, it’s very lovely to have a pile of books in my house with my name on the side, and it makes visitors say “ooh, is that IT?”

(Only, I can’t help wondering if they mean “oh, is that it?”)

But it’s not enough. I want to see my book in shops, being thumbed by hundreds of people; I want to see reviews, sales figures and Richard and Judy’s book club chatting excitedly about it. In my head crowds are surging into Waterstones and bringing London to a standstill because they need to have a copy.

So the visible reality – fifteen books stacked up on my mantlepiece – begins to look a little meagre.

As if sensing my end-of-the-evening ennouie with the work in question and deciding to deflate me even further, my last visitor of the day (I have many), Alastair, didn’t say “ooh, is that IT?”

He said, “are these off to be pulped?”

No doubt he feels that winning two rounds of the Neighbours board game justifies such rudeness towards a genuine author.

My own enthusiasm for being able to touch a book that I wrote having faded so quickly, I really need people like Alastair to show how impressed they are, so I interpreted his words as a sign of jealousy which is of course the highest form of praise, and am still feeling good as a result.