Onward Who: Why I still look forward to the new Doctor Who era (in spite of the politics)

Well, I can't put it off any longer. It's time to review the first offerings of the new Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who, "RTD 2" as the fans refer to it. It's not a straightforward business for me. I was torn about the three 60th Anniversary specials that I'd been looking forward to so much. They weren't bad by any means – I thought Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker was great fun, as I knew I would – but they didn't quite live up to my, admittedly sky-high, expectations. They felt more like three solid episodes from series four of Doctor Who (with Tennant back as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna) than anniversary specials. I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I think Chibnall did a better job of celebrating the show as a whole in The Power of the Doctor.

No prizes for guessing what my other major gripe against the specials was (mainly the first one). U-huh, that's right: politics.

I can at least take credit for having called it, to some extent. I knew we could expect some attempts at political commentary from Davies. The problem is that his judgement, when it comes to deciding how much of his own opinions it's OK to put in a show and how, seems to have got worse. The worst example of clumsy commentary was the way he botched the character of Rose – not the companion of the Ninth and Tenth Doctor, but Donna's trans daughter – in the first special "The Star Beast".

It started all right, with mother Donna's furious reaction to Rose's jeering classmates, and a conversation between Donna and her acerbic mum Sylvia about Rose which felt genuine and down-to-earth ("I just get so clumsy", Sylvia complains). I could have gone with this simple, no-nonsense message: This is Rose, Rose is nice, don't be mean to Rose. But then the jargon creeps in. Rose tuts when the Doctor "assumes 'he' as a pronoun" about an alien being; if the point had to be made, why couldn't she say something like "How do you know it's not a 'she'?". 

Then we learn that Rose has inherited a mind-melding condition linking her with the Doctor from her mother, which has resulted in her non-binary-ness as "the Doctor is male and female, and neither, and more". The lecture tour ends with Donna and Rose explaining that they can cure themselves of their condition by just "letting it go", something a "male-presenting Time Lord will never understand". I think most of the Doctor Who fandom collectively cringed at that line.

What bothers me so much about RTD's handling of Rose is his intention. That kind of speechifying isn't going to convince anyone who's still on the fence about trans issues, quite the reverse. Davies has done trans persons no favours. He's not even preaching to the choir, as even the choir seems to think it's a bit on the nose (and I gather the notion that Rose is only trans because her mum melded her mind with an alien has not met with universal approval). No, I can't help thinking that what Davies wanted to do here was purposefully annoy fans who've complained about the right-on-ness of the Chibnall era, along the lines of "They don't like woke? I'll give them woke!" Generally, putting something in a TV series just to annoy some viewers (maybe more than Davies had bargained for) doesn't make for good writing, and it's not good for the ratings either.

The "colour-blind" casting of Isaac Newton in "Wild Blue Yonder" seems to have been done in the same vein. Doctor Who has never resorted to this form of diversity-boosting before, as it has always (well, since 2005 anyway) had plenty of roles for actors of different ethnicities playing roles with the same ethnicity, which is surely preferable to "look, let's just pretend they're white"-casting. The charming Nathaniel Curtis was thus wasted in a cameo that will mostly just irritate people. In "The Giggle", as a contrast, we see Charlie (who happens to be black) enter a toyshop in London in 1925. The Toymaker, posing as a toyseller with a blatantly bogus German accent, remarks that Charlie must be "used to warmer climes". "I'm from Cheltenham", Charlie informs him stiffly. Better.

All in all, I liked "The Giggle" quite a lot. Commentary-wise, I think highlighting the wish to be always right as a 21-century vice is fair and cuts all sorts of ways. The dig at a faux-Boris PM was a bit cheap and also dated, but this is the kind of thing we saw in RTD's first run as Doctor Who showrunner as well. What with my tolerance already stretched by "male-presenting Time Lords" and the like, though, I would have preferred as little commentary as possible, and more focus on the game-playing between the Toymaker and the Doctor (the games they do play are disappointingly simple).

And then came the Christmas special with Ncuti Gatwa as the new, Fifteenth Doctor. And I loved it.

Not because of the goblins, honest. One could suspect that I'd be onboard with almost anything as long as you put goblins in it, but as adversaries go I have to admit they were a bit silly (their song was really catchy, though). But this was just a fun adventure and a promising set-up for Gatwa's Doctor and his new companion, Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday. I can't have been the only one to complain, when the casting was first announced, that it was uninspired to give us yet another pretty English girl from present-day Earth as a Doctor companion, but Gibson won me over. Her Ruby has great matey chemistry with Gatwa's Doctor and just rolls with the improbable scenarios she finds herself in instead of wasting time questioning reality and her sanity. Goblins exist? OK. Best save that baby from being eaten, then.

I also enjoyed Gatwa's Doctor; I liked him well enough in "The Giggle", but wasn't altogether convinced yet that he hit the right Doctor-y notes. Here, he nailed both the enthusiasm, the wish to know more about everything and the serious, heartfelt moments.

Davies is back, and can write up a storm when he wants to. Murray Gold is back, and his music is excellent throughout. Gatwa and Gibson have both made a great first impression. Of course I'm still onboard for series fourteen, or season one as it will be called on Disney +. Let's just hope I can stomach the political bits.

Fuzzy feelgood fare for anglophiles

Looking for an unambitious subject for a pre-travel, pre-Christmas blog post, I decided to pick one of those "I really should give that a watch some day" films from one of my streaming services, watch it and then write something about it. There were a few options: underperforming, gritty versions of the Robin Hood and King Arthur legends respectively (theme: is grittiness really a good idea here?); a soupy Netflix Christmas romcom (theme: soupy Netflix Christmas romcoms); or the first Paddington film (theme: ideal for anglophiles?). Somehow, I ended up plumping for Paddington.

The story is simple. The titular cute bear makes his way to London from Darkest Peru after the death of his uncle (his aunt holes up in a retirement home for bears, which mercifully does exist and isn't a fib just to get her nephew to seize his chance). Years earlier, before the young bear was born, his aunt and uncle – who belong to an unusually intelligent type of bear – ran into and bonded with an explorer from England, which is why the aunt fondly imagines that a home can be found there. 

The young bear finds London a lot less welcoming than he thought, but manages to get a room for the night with the Brown family, who give him the name Paddington after the station where he was found. Paddington, though well-spoken, is accident-prone, and Mr Brown is adamant that he can't stay, so Paddington tries to find the explorer who once visited his family and make a home with him. Mrs Brown is Paddington's kind-hearted champion, he eventually bonds with the children, and well, you can guess the rest.

The first half-hour or so, I wondered if I had made the wrong choice. Of course this is a children's film, but the plot is very standard nevertheless. Also, there's a lot of slapstick, something I didn't really care for even as a kid (at least not in live action), and even less now as a fuddy-duddy adult. When Paddington uses two of the family's toothbrushes to clean his ears, before flooding the bathroom, I shuddered and wished I had gone for the Christmas romcom instead.

What's not simply standard, though, is the script. From the start, a quirky humour shines through, like when the explorer names one of the bears after his beloved mother – and the other after a boxer he met in a bar. There are a lot of nice details like that. Another early example is when the competitively minded daughter learns Chinese and one of the stock phrases is: "I'm accused of insider trading. I need a lawyer". 

The visual style is also very attractive: like the film as a whole, it aims for whimsical charm and succeeds. The doll's house in the Browns' attic becomes an overview of their house as Paddington writes about them to his aunt; later, the camera swoops in on the toy train of antiques dealer Mr Gruber and shows a scene from his childhood when, as one of the children of the Kindertransport, he was met in England by a stiff female relative. "My body had travelled fast", sighs Gruber, played by kindly-eccentric-man expert Jim Broadbent, "my heart took a little longer". It was about at this point in the film that I decided I enjoyed it after all.

This scene is an example of two other of the film's virtues: that it's stuffed to the gills with solid acting talent, and that it can be heartfelt when it needs to be. But it's the wit and the inventive takes on classic comic set pieces I enjoyed the most. Two bored security guards while away the time by guessing the content description of their packet of biscuits, taking a genuine interest in the amount of sugar and other ingredients. Mr Brown, disguised as a cleaning lady, catches the fancy of a guard – so far, so familiar. But then the situation gets increasingly surreal as Mr Brown tries to explain the discrepancies between himself and the cleaning lady's photo id (she clearly looks like a real menace).

Hugh Bonneville is a reliable comic foil to Paddington as Mr Brown and Sally Hawkins a charming Mrs Brown, but it's often the side characters who steal the show rather than the Brown family or even cute Ben Whishaw-voiced Paddington himself. I'll certainly check out Paddington 2 at leisure, but with an awareness that I need to get in touch with my inner twelve-year-old in order to truly appreciate it.