Doctor Who

I've been charitable enough with "The TV Movie" in the past. As somebody once put it, some days you love it and some days you hate it. Today I've decided it's rubbish.

We were utterly seduced back in 1996 by treasures we'd never had before. Astounding visuals, glorious lighting, expensive sets. But it's ironic that a show that had survived so long by shaky production values being saved by real heart, sensibility and imagination now had nothing left to boast about but all the money that had been thrown at it. "The TV Movie's" lavish budget hides the fact that there is nothing of worth underneath. Everything that the Movie has in its favour - a perfect Doctor that was part-dynamic part-romantic, two serviceable companions, a lovely police box, beautiful direction - was bought, rather than won. It's a shiny apple with a rotten core.

It fails by completely missing the point on every level. The TARDIS was never supposed to be Edwardian looking, it was always ultra-modern. The theme tune here is orchestral, not futuristic as it should be. The humour is ham-fisted and unfunny. There is no suspense or fear at all - the only reason to hide behind the sofa here is when Professor Wagg, a one-dimensional over-the-top character named after one of the production team, intentionally or not homage's "Planet of the Spiders" by going "Oooom! Oooom!" in the midst of the crisis. Worse still, "The TV Movie" is smug. Drunk and dizzy at squeezing through the door of the biggest and best sweet shop on TV's confectionary map, it makes ill-advised stabs at adding to the myth, just to excuse its blatant robbing from it at all other times. But these attempts don't go anywhere - the Doctor is apparently half-human, but this has nothing to do with the plot (nothing, that is, that makes sense) or no reason to be here. Likewise the infamous kissing antics. They are there, we are told, because in modern sci-fi drama you can't not have a romantic connection between the hero and the girl (Why not? Wasn't Doctor Who always different?). But not only do the shameless and pointless clinches play no part in the story, in an attempt to "soften the blow" for fans they are made almost asexual and excused as celebratory and/or down to post-regenerative confusion. So why have them there at all then?

The answer is because they could. It's the equivalent of somebody with the keys to the most expensive Ferrari in the show room jangling them in the face of his friends.

And then there's the plot itself, which doesn't make sense at all. We can't even claim it's partly missing, as per "Ghost Light". The TV Movie consists of a string of set pieces which have no call to happen. How can the Master control somebody by spitting on them? Why does Grace's window wobble when no other part of her house, or in fact the surrounding area, is similarly affected? When the "TV Movie" tries to forge an actual central story from its arsenal it fares even worse. We seem to have begrudgingly excused the plot as "confusing" but it's worse than that - it's nonsensical. Even the worst of "old" Doctor Who had a justifiable reason for its main threat. Here, there is no reason at all why the world should be "turned inside out at midnight" just because a big eye inside the TARDIS is opened. How can something inside the ship (which is in a different dimension) end the world? Why would it? Why has the Doctor never opened the eye before? Why, indeed, is it even there?

Further questions abound as the story reaches it's conclusion, not least the need for an atomic clock, but what a conclusion it is. Not even at its most desperate did "old" Doctor Who ever resort to simply hopping back in time a day and claiming the trouble never even happened to begin with. As an encore, two characters are then brought back to life (because the TARDIS is "sentimental" - give me strength!) and the TARDIS eats the Master. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Despite all this, how we loved it at the time. How glad we were that they got Sylvester McCoy back, the TARDIS toolkit was authentic and the Doctor was a charming eccentric. We quite forgot that the very series we were so afraid of losing never adhered to such rigid, lovingly maintained guidelines. The very point of regeneration in the first place was to explain why the Doctor was played by a different actor than in last weeks episode. "The TV Movie" didn't have a last week to follow, and yet we still got the regeneration. Again, the point was completely missed. Like I said, some days you hate it. The most important Doctor Who ever made. The TV Movie. The End.