New TARDIS totty revealed

Former Emmerdale actress Jenna-Louise Coleman has landed the role of the Time Lord’s new companion in Doctor Who, the BBC has confirmed.

Producer Steven Moffat announced the actress will replace Karen Gillan’s character Amy Pond when she leaves the show in the next series.

Coleman, 25, has also appeared in Waterloo Road (above) and is about to be seen in Julian Fellowes’ four part mini-series Titanic.

Jenna-Louise said, “I am beyond excited. I can’t wait to get cracking.”

I think it would be healthier for Doctor Who if Ms Coleman was on board from the start. Fresh blood is always good for the series and the sooner the better…

The Amy/River storyline has run its course. It made the last series drag and spoilt some otherwise interesting episodes. I’m tired of hearing the Doctor being called “Sweetie” and sick of the repetition of the oh-so-internet savvy “spoilers”. However, these tedious expressions are to be given yet another airing. More imagination is required.

I suspect Amy will go on Christmas Day, midway through the Seventh series, in yet another emotional tearjerker! The relief of not having to listen to actress Karen Gillan preface almost every other sentence with “I have to say” anymore, on Doctor Who Confidential, will be a most welcome present!!

Breaking the silence

I haven’t written about Doctor Who in this Journal for three months. I’ve not even mentioned the programme in passing! Give the man a medal!! With the second half of Series Six fast approaching, it’s perhaps time to take a little look at the present state of affairs. I wasn’t happy with the cliff-hangers of the last two episodes. Why? After a terrific and traditional two-part story in which The Doctor advocated living in harmony alongside our Doppelgänger cousins, just as he’d done in Doctor Who And The Silurians in 1970, he whipped out his sonic screwdriver and reduced Amy to sludge. The Time Lord had suspected that, for the last half-dozen episodes, his long-standing companion was a double, constantly checking to see whether or not the TARDIS registered her as pregnant. But, why couldn’t he practice what he’d been preaching… tolerance. Why couldn’t Doppelgänger Amy exist together with her flesh and blood counterpart? The audience was fobbed off with some lame excuse about transmitting signals. Confine her where this couldn’t happen would’ve been a more sensible solution but nowhere near as melodramatic as the shock value of seeing The Doctor seemingly bumping off his friend. Writer Matthew Graham, co-creator of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, was asked to add this ending by show runner Steven Moffat to lead into the mid-season finale but, for me, only succeeded in spoiling The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People.

And so to the cliff-hanger of Episode Seven, A Good Man Goes To War, in which we learn the real identity of River Song. She’s none other than Amy’s long-lost daughter, Melody Pond. Doctor Who had been building up to this revelation for some time. Ever since River was introduced in 2008, in Steven Moffat’s two-part story Silence In The Library and Forest Of The Dead, the writer has been teasing us as to her true persona. The resolution is a bit of a cheat, in all honesty, as Amy had yet to be introduced to Doctor Who at the time of her offspring’s inception in the series. Karen’s character was still two years away. It needed to be something that was already in the many and varied worlds of Doctor Who for an audience to be truly taken by surprise. Something connected to The Doctor himself would’ve been best, where it doesn’t matter that Matt’s Doctor was also two years away when River was inaugurated because, central to the concept, the Eleventh Doctor is the same character as the Tenth. Maybe the familial connection, now established as mother and daughter, is a red herring to throw the audience off the scent of a much greater surprise, yet to come over the next six episodes. I hope so because, as it stands, the big mid-season denouement was nothing short of pure soap opera, which wouldn’t have been out of place as the climax to an episode of EastEnders! I wonder when I’ll write about modern day Doctor Who again? Soon, all being well!

Warden’s Watch: Doctor Who - Series Five, Episodes Four to Six

The new series of “Doctor Who” continues to be a mix of the good and the downright awful! Episodes four and five, “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone”, attempt to develop ideas from two of Steven Moffat’s earlier stories, the Weeping Angel statues from Series Three’s “Blink” and Alex Kingston’s River Song from the two-part library story of the Fourth Series. I like the former, not so keen on the latter! All this “sweetie” nonsense, and continued reference to “spoilers”, is a bit cringe-making. For heaven’s sake, it was only in the previous story, “Victory of the Daleks”, that the Doctor called one of the pepper pots “sweetheart”! Despite liking the statues in the Carey Mulligan episode, I’m not so sure it was a good idea to bring them back. The new story seemed to virtually ignore the original concept of what happens to an Angel’s victims. Less importantly, but nonetheless irritatingly, the Doctor loses his jacket to one of the stone beasties, at one point, then, unseen by the viewer, somehow manages to retrieve his tweed threads by the end!

The best scene in the Fifth Series, so far, came in the second part of the Weeping Angel yarn. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best scene since Jefferson’s eulogy to Scooti Manista, four years ago, in “The Impossible Planet”. I’m talking about the marvellous dialogue between the Doctor and Father Octavian upon the latter’s demise. Genuinely moving. The trouble is, it is almost immediately undermined by the ending of “Flesh and Stone”. New “Doctor Who” does this a lot. It’s afraid to capitalise on truly emotional moments. What does Moffat do? He has new companion Amy come on to the Doctor in the most ludicrous manner. We’ve been there before. Russell did all that ad nauseam… for five blooming years! I’d hoped we’d put such crassness behind us. At first I thought it was padding because the story had under run again, like the Dalek episode two weeks earlier, but its dubious purpose is to set up a ménage à trois between the Doctor, Rory and Amy exploited during the sixth episode, “The Vampires of Venice”, written by Toby Whithouse - the man behind “Being Human”, the “Doctor Who” episode “School Reunion” and the “Torchwood” episode “Greeks Bearing Gifts”.

And what a flippant beginning to the much-awaited vampire tale. It would’ve been amusing in any other drama but “Doctor Who”. We’d already had Amy as a WPC kissagram, in the opening story of the series, and so we return to the idea with the Doctor replacing the stripper at Rory’s stag night! I was hoping for some genuine gothic horror, just for once, but “The Vampires of Venice” is undermined before it has barely begun. Why does the series try so hard to be domestic just to appeal to the “EastEnders” crowd? Why doesn’t it simply be itself? It managed it for twenty-six years. I don’t buy into the notion it had to change to appeal to a modern audience. Only if said audience lacks intelligence! (There is a current series does domestic brilliantly, by the way, even though it’s ostensibly a supernatural drama. I won’t reveal its name here as I hope to devote a future post to it.) The vampires themselves were terrific looking, as you can see from the above picture - a scene reminiscent of the Haemovores breaking in through a vestry window in “The Curse of Fenric”, while their two leaders were portrayed suitably seriously until being revealed, predictably pseudo-scientifically, as “fish from space”! “They bite”!!