Doctor Who: Series 1, revisited

My eldest son, Daniel, is back from University for a last holiday before his finals. He’s spending the time with a blend of revision and watching Doctor Who. He’s making his way through Series 1 (2005), the series that launched New Who, with Chris Eccleston in the title role.

It’s really good.

Advertisements

What I’ve been listening to in 2018

Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.)

I listen much more to whole albums than to individual tracks, so each year I pick the ten albums that I listened to the most (not counting compilations), as recorded on the laptop where I listen to most of my music. (So these counts don’t include listening in the car or the kitchen, or on my phone.) I limit the selection to no more than one album per artist, and skip albums that have featured in previous years. Then from each of those ten objectively selected albums, I subjectively pick one song that I feel is representative.

Here they are in ascending order of how often I listened to them.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos: too late, had your chance, muffed it

Honestly, I am getting tired of writing these reviews. I bet you’re tired of reading them, too. The good news is that this is for the last of the present series. The bad news is that I still have the New Year special to watch and write about (though the mentions that I’ve not been able to avoid seeing out of the corner of my eye have suggested that that might be rather better than the series proper).

Anyway, here we go.

It Takes You Away: interesting, and that’s worth something

For one reason and another, I just couldn’t gather the family to watch this one. After the attempts had dragged out long past the end of the series’ broadcast run, I eventually gave up on them and watched it with just my middle son (Matthew). As it happened, this was the first Series-11 episode he’d seen. It was interesting to see his reaction, coming to it cold.

Initial impressions: favourable. I liked the set-up, with the blind girl, Hanne, alone in the house.

The Witchfinders: a collision of irrelevances

If I’ve given the impression of not having enjoyed this series of Doctor Who very much, that’s not too far wrong. Here we are now, after eight of the ten episodes, and time is fast running out for it to pull a rabbit out of the hat. There may yet be a rabbit. But if there is, The Witchfinders is not it.

And the most frustrating thing is that it fails in exactly the same ways as all the other episodes this year.

Kerblam!: yes, but what does it all mean?

Another nearly-but-not-quite episode this week. I feel like we’re edging closer to a really good story without quite having got there yet. A novel setting, an interesting mystery, and some fine moments. But nagging concerns about the resolution of the mystery, about the supporting cast, about the Doctor herself, and about what the whole episode was actually telling us.

Demons of the Punjab: close, but no sonic screwdriver

There’s a lot to like about this one. But, paradoxically, the strengths of the episode have the side-effect of laying bare its weaknesses. It all leaves me still struggling to summon up the level of enthusiasm I feel I ought to have for Doctor Who. That’s not a good feeling, half way through the series.

Set at the moment of the Partition of India — which I knew shamefully little about — Demons of the Punjab takes on the Hindu/Muslim divide head on, by having an inter-religion marriage taking place the day after the line is drawn. To make things worse, the younger brother of the Hindu man who is about to marry a Muslim wife is a zealot who wants the new border to be as hard as possible.