outside the government

Not so much bovvered as… dead, really.

It’s December 10th, 2006. Booty Luv’s “Boogie 2nite” has slipped into a newly formed gap between Take That and “Smack That.” Gwen Stefani, Lazy Town, and Jamelia also chart. In news, Joseph Kabila is inaugurated as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kevin Rudd becomes leader of the Australian Labor Party, and Robert Gates is confirmed as United States Secretary of Defense. Also, Igor Smirnov wins the presidential election in Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, which is generally considered not to be a country so much as a particularly ornery region of Moldova.

Random Shoes, on the other hand, is something of the forgotten man of the first season of Torchwood. Called Invisible Eugene until two weeks before it aired, and in fact still listed as that in the Radio Times, this is, quite frankly, the bit of the season where it becomes aggressively, painfully obvious that Torchwood proved a little too much to manage alongside Doctor Who and that things got dropped. It’s an astonishingly sloppily done episode.

Somewhere in here there’s a good idea. Doing Love and Monsters for Torchwood may or may not have actually been it, but even that feels at least vaguely admirable. Love and Monsters was, in many ways, the gem of Season Two, and an approach worth exploring again. But Torchwood is an odd venue for it. Love and Monsters is ultimately one of the most optimistic statements of Davies’s basically hedonistic theme. This theme is present in Torchwood – it’s reiterated in its darker way in They Keep Killing Suzie via Suzie’s “This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid, tiny stuff” line. Indeed, it’s central to Torchwood, with its myriad of wondrous spaces alongside ordinary life pitched against the absolute oblivion of death. But Torchwood takes a rather darker view than Love and Monsters, to say the least, and the Love and Monsters approach doesn’t port over.

Mind you, Random Shoes basically gets that right by realizing that Eugene, unlike Elton, has to actually die at the end. The problem is that this happens a week after They Keep Killing Suzie, and thus the ascent into the heavens in a blaze of white light with a halo is… metaphysically incongruent, to say the least. A more thorough and accurate assessment would be that it plunges headlong into the bathetic – which, actually, the whole thing does starting roughly with when Eugene’s father breaks out into “Danny Boy” at the funeral. The result is a completely miscued ending that attempts to pull off a darker and more cynical ending than Love and Monsters and ends up with what is arguably the Russell T Davies era’s second most stunning moment of shooting for camp and ending up in “what the holy hell am I even watching.”

This is a big problem, though honestly, mucking up the ending after a good buildup is less of a problem than it might sound. There’s lots to really like about Random Shoes.…

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The real tragedy is, it’s a better logo.

It’s December 3rd, 2006. Take That are at number one with “Patience,” just ahead of “Smack That” by Akon and Eminem. Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Emma Bunton, and Muse are also charting. In news, Michael Grade, by now BBC Chairman, is poached by ITV. The British government declines to extend copyright protection from 50 years to 95, though the EU eventually took care of it for them in 2011. Clive Goodman pleads guilty of conspiring to hack the phones of Princes William and Harry, and Augusto Pinochet has the heart attack that kills him.

Speaking of death, with They Keep Killing Suzie Torchwood finally comes to what, in hindsight, was always its theme. All of the wondrous spaces we’ve been exploring over the preceding seven hours turn out to be metaphors for the big one: the realm of the dead. This is not, strictly speaking, surprising or complicated. The argument that the wondrous cultural spaces that Torchwood has been playing with – ones we’ve already seen are deeply entwined with the larger British culture – are metaphors for death. The spirit world is in many ways the archetypal wondrous space – the one that all other wondrous spaces are just echoes and reflections of.

Jacques Derrida, who I don’t think I’ve annoyed you all by discussing yet, suggests that one of the key aspects of writing is its battle against death. Writing preserves the idea of the speaker after the moment of death, albeit in an altered form that is not so much the speaker as a haunting ghost of them. Similar ideas abound in media studies – Friedrich Kittler has, in his landmark Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the lovely declaration that “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” The idea permeates so many different sorts of books and movies as to be inescapable; it’s also the underlying fantasy of detective fiction, which Torchwood owes a huge debt to. Solving the mystery is a way of communicating with the deceased – receiving one final message from them.

And Torchwood, in particular, was always going to be about death. It had to be. The basic conceit of its lead character necessitated it. You can’t do a show whose central mystery is “why can’t Jack die” without having death become something of a major theme. You certainly can’t after combining the premise with a first episode about a glove that brings people back from the dead. The show committed itself to being about death from its first episode, a fact that continues to have profound implications right up until the last episode.

Given all of this, Torchwood’s actual take on death has to be one of the most striking things about it. In a show where everything has a wondrous dimension, where the world is vast and full of mysteries, and where some notion of the soul is clearly bought into on a fundamental level, we have a depiction of death that is frighteningly simple: when you die, you’re dead.…

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Well that’s all a bit SHODAN.

It’s November 26th, 2006. “Smack That” has been unseated by Take That, with Emma Bunton, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and Girls Aloud also charting. In news, Michael Richards has his racist meltdown at a comedy club, and Alexander Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London. Israel and Palestine declare a ceasefire over the Gaza Strip, and Augusto Pinochet accepts, in one of the greatest euphemistic hedges ever, “political” responsibility for everything that happened in Chile during his regime.

On television, meanwhile, we have Toby Whithouse’s second contribution to the world of Doctor Who, Greeks Bearing Gifts. Those who suspect Torchwood of largely being Joss Whedon’s Angel have their work cut out for them here. Technically the underlying plot here is actually nicked from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically the third season episode “Earshot,” as Angel only ever did a demon who could read your thoughts if you were singing, but that’s largely beside the point: this is still the most Whedonesque episode of Torchwood to date.

The basic premise of either of Joss Whedon’s fantasy shows is that the horror is always a metaphor for something personal – in Buffy either for an aspect of high school, college, or early adulthood, in Angel, whatever puts it a few years ahead of Buffy at the time. In this model whatever supernatural goings-on there may be in an episode, the point is really for the supernatural to illustrate character development. Phrased this way, for all that the supernatural investigation team of five people, three male, two female, led by a mysterious immortal with a dark past is not actually the most original concept Russell T Davies has ever come up with, Torchwood can actually be seen as a reasonable advance of the Angel format, in that it moves from the comparatively narrow structure of the supernatural as a metaphor for individual experience and towards a story about the psychic relationships of various cultural spaces.

Greeks Bearing Gifts, on the other hand, is a perfectly competent episode of Angel with the Torchwood cast. Its central piece of supernatural technology, the mind-reading pendant, is strictly there to provide a metaphoric representation of Tosh’s isolation and awkwardness. Her ability to know what other people are thinking becomes a metaphoric contrast to her own social ineptitude and inability to express herself to her colleagues. This is not, prima facie, a bad approach – Buffy and Angel were great shows, and Tosh needed a focus episode, making this sort of approach a more tempting match than it might have been. We might also note that they hired Toby Whithouse for it, he having already written the Buffy homage School Reunion for Doctor Who this year.

But it feels slender for a Torchwood episode. Interestingly, it’s not slender in the way of Cyberwoman or Countrycide, which had reasonably nuanced premises that were then wedded to high-octane action episodes. No, Greeks Bearing Gifts is slender conceptually, offering very little to talk about in its themes.…

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Did you know that the New York Times Crossword Puzzle has something called the “breakfast test,” which declares that you can’t use any words in a crossword that would be upsetting to read over breakfast? This is one difference between the New York Times Crossword Puzzle and TARDIS Eruditorum.

It’s November 19th, 2006. Akon and Eminem are at number one with “Smack That,” a subtle and nuanced look at contemporary sexual relations in much the way Day One isn’t. Justin Timberlake, Take That, Robbie Williams, and Westlife also chart. In news, around 98% of the population of South Ossetia votes for independence from Georgia. Nobody cares. Java is released under the GPL. Mitch McConnell becomes Republican leader in Congress, succeeding Bill Frist. Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, becomes Speaker of the House. The Playstation 3 comes out, Tony Blair describes Iraq as “pretty much a disaster,” and, the day this story airs, the Nintendo Wii comes out.

The story, of course, is Countrycide, which is widely beloved and popular and which nobody has anything bad to say about. Ah, no, you’re not going to buy that? Fine. Countrycide is Torchwood’s second effort at a big spectacle of a story. Much like Chris Chibnall’s previous contribution, Cyberwoman, it’s a straight action story, designed primarily to be thrilling. It’s not what you’d call an enormously complex concept. That said, it’s still at least somewhat clever in its approach – this is the first televised Doctor Who thing to feature no alien or supernatural intervention since Black Orchid nearly a quarter-century earlier.

No, “it’s not aliens, it’s humans, who are far worse than any aliens” is not exactly the most innovative twist in the history of Doctor Who. But it’s a solid one worth dusting off every once in a while, and the fact that Torchwood can take the “rational explanation behind seemingly irrational events” motif from Scooby Doo and make it into a piece of sickening horror is a fair justification for doing it. The ingredients of this are all familiar, but that’s writing for you. There’s a perfectly serviceable nexus of ideas underlying this story.

The problem is that the execution is a bit… well, but even here there’s a defense to be mustered. The story amounts to doing The Wicker Man for the modern day. We should pause and contextualize that. For all that The Wicker Man is treated as being primarily about pagan rites, mostly by geeky pagan types who are understandably eager to lay cultural claim to one of the best movies ever made, it is in fact not about the supernatural at all, but rather about the fear of the rural. The closest cousin to The Wicker Man is probably Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes, the latter remade in 2006 as part of a general and unfortunate trend in . It’s a story about the remote parts of the country and the bizarre things they get up to there.

So basically we have Torchwood trying to do horror in a particularly bad era of horror.…

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Dance Magic Dance, O Human Child…

It’s November 12th, 2006. Westlife are at number one with “The Rose,” with U2 & Green Day, Beyonce, Girls Aloud, and Madonna also charting. In news, Democrats regain control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994, and three men are convicted of racially motivated murder in the 2004 death of Kriss Donald in Glasgow, a case notable because Donald was white and his killers were of Pakistani descent.

A reminder, then, that the question of alien worlds and wondrous others contains an at times brutal dimension. This is always the unsettling possibility of the “other world.” What if it simply does not want us? What if we are wholly extraneous to its wonders, the relationship completely one-sided? What if we are just raw matter, like trees or meat, granted no value save what we can be transformed into? This is the horror at the heart of Sapphire and Steel, a show whose cosmology was deliberately incomprehensible so that all that could be interpreted was the basic fact of something scary and the outline of its narrative rules.

It’s difficult to think of any decision taken in setting up the first season of Torchwood quite as sound as getting Peter J. Hammond to contribute an episode. Still an active television writer, but mostly better known for his crime and mystery output (he contributed two episodes of Midsomer Murders the same year as this), Torchwood was the perfect fit for him – the shell of a cop show wrapped around the supernatural horror he used to write to such effect. True to form, he strips the underlying metaphor of Torchwood down to one of its most basic forms – the cultural original of the “wondrous space alongside the mundane one,” namely the Land of Fairy.

The value of using the basic form is that much of the narrative is pre-existing. As long as nothing is inconsistent with the basic high concept tagline of “evil fairies” the story can hang together without much explanation – which is basically the trick Sapphire and Steel used. This means that the fairies do not have to be evil fairies in any sort of conscious or motivated sense. It’s sufficient that they look like they belong to the broad category of evil fairies. In practice what we have is something far more unnerving – indifferent fairies. Fairies who simply do not care about us or our world, and who are best understood as features of nature, not as an “other civilization.”

So the fairies are presented as creatures from the dawn of time – as an unfathomable order of things that only Jack can truly understand, and that only because of the weird span of his life. Even given this his understanding is choppy – it consists mainly of having been alive enough to have had his world intersect the Land of Fairy before. Jack’s description of them is at once evocative and vague: “something you can only half see like a glimpse, like something out of the corner of your eye with a touch of myth, a touch of the spirit world, a touch of reality, all jumbled together.…

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It’s. Not. Funny.

It’s November 5th, 2006, memorably enough. Fedde Le Grand are at number one with “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit,” while Beyonce, McFly, and U2 & Green Day also chart. In news since the last episode, severe flooding breaks out in Ethiopia, and Ted Haggard resigns as head of the National Association of Evangelicals due to his fondness for crystal meth and rent boys. Because who doesn’t.

While on television it’s Cyberwoman. Seemingly content with having set up its basic premises, Torchwood here unleashes a story that can only really be described as a gigantic piece of candy. This is the thrilling runaround with monsters, and offers no pretense that it might be anything else. This is, in and of itself, telling. Torchwood, in its first season, hews closer to the standard model of Doctor Who than was apparent at the time. All four of Russell T Davies’s seasons, as well as Moffat’s first one, follow a simple structure in their first three episodes of doing a story set in the present, a story in the past, and a story in the future. In fact, the structure goes one step further – the past/present/future trilogy is, in each of the first five seasons, followed up by a two-part monster runaround. This was, it turns out, part of Doctor Who’s formula.

What’s not usually remarked upon is that Torchwood, despite its lack of time travel, does the same thing. It moves from an episode focused on Gwen and her world to a fairly straightforward alien threat to a ghost story concerned with the past, and then does its big clanking monster story. And when you decide to treat Cyberwoman as self-consciously being Torchwood attempting to do its version of Rise of the Cybermen or Daleks in Manhattan, to pick the ones on either side of it, most of its excesses become altogether easier to understand. This is meant to be the big action set piece – Torchwood fighting a classic Doctor Who monster.

Clearly they thought better of it, at least to some extent – Torchwood never took on a monster pre-established in Doctor Who again. And yet it’s difficult to say that the exercise was entirely pointless. The truth is that the Cybermen actually work quite well here. Torchwood basically goes back to the principles of Dalek here: a lone and damaged monster locked in the basement of a secret facility housing alien artifacts. This, of course, has a different effect for the Cybermen, who had already appeared in four episodes of Doctor Who in 2006, than it did on the Daleks, unseen in any proper sense in seventeen years when Dalek aired. Dalek set the bar high for the Daleks, establishing that just one of them is a terrifying threat. But Cyberwoman comes after the bar has already been set low for the Cybermen, and indeed after they’ve already been established as the second choice rejects of the monster pool.

The result is that no matter how hard Cyberwoman tries to repeat the Dalek trick of “just one monster is terrifying,” it ends up doing a better job of making Torchwood look foolish than it does of making the Cybermen look terrifying.…

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What do you mean I have to take the battery out to swap games?

It’s October 29th, 2006. McFly are at number one with “Star Girl,” with Beyonce, Razorlight, and Amy Winehouse also charting. In news, George W. Bush signs into law a bill ordering the construction of a fence on the US/Mexico border, and severe wildfires caused by arson rage in California. On television, meanwhile, Torchwood airs its third episode, Ghost Machine.

With Ghost Machine we see Torchwood finally starting to show off its range, moving beyond the straightforward focus on alien presence and into other genres. This is not a surprise as such – Doctor Who, after all, has long used science fiction to do more than traditional sci-fi stories. Nevertheless, it’s another step in the process of Torchwood mirroring the 2005 season of Doctor Who and using each of its early episodes to stake an entirely new claim for what the series can be. Having established itself as the sexy X-Files, Torchwood calmly (and thoroughly in line with how The X-Files actually worked, as distinct from the usual memory of The X-Files in which the day-to-day is completely overshadowed by the godforsaken mytharc) moves on to doing a ghost story in which the eponymous piece of alien technology is little more than a MacGuffin to set up the real plot, a fairly classic ghost story of long forgotten crimes.

Ghost Machine is, however, a thorough oddity. Structurally speaking, it’s bizarre – the first twelve minutes focus entirely on investigating the alien artifact, not on what turns out to be the story’s real plot, the unsolved murder of Lizzie Lewis. Even after that Lizzie Lewis’s plot, if you’ll pardon the choice of a word that tips my hand a bit, haunts the narrative, slowly exerting its influence. This is interesting, because in most regards this is bog standard “and now for the supporting cast” material – having done two episodes setting up Gwen, we now expect that we’ll see focus episodes on Ianto, Tosh, and Owen. (This actually gets quietly subverted with the fifth and sixth episodes, which hold off from focusing on Tosh. If this weren’t delaying the other female character, it would be easier to be happy about that.) And sure enough, Ghost Machine expands Owen’s character considerably.

On one level this is necessary, as Owen is by miles the least sympathetic character on the team at first. This isn’t just because of the fact that the first episode sets him up as a rapist – that is bad, but it’s fairly obvious by this point that Russell T Davies was not actually trying to make Owen that unsympathetic and evil. At this point the “obviously not what the writer’s intent was” defense used for Mark Gatiss in The Unquiet Dead applies, though in this case the blindness involved in missing the fact that you’re having one of your male leads become a rapist really does deserve serious condemnation. It really is the single worst thing Russell T Davies has ever written.…

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I’m somebody’s fetish.

It’s still October 22nd. Stupid double bills. In any case, Day One.

Thing one about Day One is all the sex. Torchwood gets a fair amount of stick for being an “adult” show in a childish and superficial way – that is, to be obsessed with sex and violence. On the one hand, Day One rather supports that claim by having the first thing Torchwood does once it sets up its premise by fighting the sex alien. On the other hand, the episode manages to have its cake and eat it too with that absolutely marvelous sequence of Carys walking through the streets assailed by all the images of sex around her. Which is to say, yes, Torchwood is flagrantly about sex on a regular basis, but this isn’t entirely unreasonable given the apparent centrality of sex to our day-to-day lives. And while sex may be frustratingly inescapable, it’s also, if we’re being honest, a topic that is poorly served by the bulk of television, which handles sex very badly if at all.

Torchwood is a mixed bag on this – as I noted, the sci-fi rape in Everything Changes is absolutely appalling. But this episode does quite well with a number of small but deft touches – having Carys’s phone conversation as she’s infected by the alien eventually play into the plot, for instance, or the quiet establishment of her home life. The scene where she confronts Eddie is a marvelous depiction of the real sorts of tangles of contemporary relationships, which don’t follow television’s usual unwavering lines of clear-cut boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s a step more complex than just having her go after an ex-boyfriend, and considerably more honest.

Equally, however, there is something willfully provocative about having your second episode feature the sex alien. Even though it is, all things being equal, a pretty good sex alien, it’s still visibly and tangibly a stunt. Then again, this is in many ways the same structure that Doctor Who used in 2005 – take the second episode and go as far in a given direction as it is possible to go. So, yes, Day One has the sex alien, but it has it for the simple reason that putting the sex alien in at the start means that you effectively settle the “how far will this show go” debate in one handy shot. You really can’t get away with calling Torchwood “shocking” in terms of content after this episode, which is a useful bit of armor for the series. It’s a technique akin to Paul Abbott’s decision to work both an assassination and a nude shot of Chloe Sevigny with a prosthetic penis into the first two minutes of his actually very good 2012 Hit & Miss – by getting all the prurient bits of its premise on the table immediately it prevents the show, in the long term, from being defined by those bits.

I could go on in this tone for a while yet, beginning a defense of Chris Chibnall as a writer, but there’s an underlying issue here I want to address, which is that Torchwood seems to require a level of defensiveness.…

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David, you have to try this. I call it standing in the rain looking dramatic. xoxo, John

It’s October 22nd, 2006. My Chemical Romance are at number one with “Welcome to the Black Parade,” with Scissor Sisters, Girls Aloud, P. Diddy, and Meat Loaf also charting. Since the Battle of Canary Wharf, Twitter launched, a war broke out between Israel and Lebanon, and North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test. While in the week before this story, the US actually gets around to confirming that North Korea had a nuclear weapons test, and the Iraq war keeps going badly.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts with Everything Changes. That Everything Changes tacks fairly straightforwardly to the approved Joseph Campbell playbook for origin stories is perhaps unsurprising. It is, after all, how you do these things, and no matter how popular Doctor Who is as a program, it would have been borderline suicidal to launch Torchwood with an episode that relied on the assumption that everybody knew who Jack was and what Torchwood did. And so we get an episode that, for most of its runtime, is a structural mirror of Rose: girl is witness to strange goings-on, investigates, and after a couple of tries is finally initiated into the mysteries of an already familiar series premise.

Like Rose, then, the premise of Torchwood lurks in the background of the episode. Much of the audience spends much of the episode knowing more than Gwen does about the show’s premise, and being introduced to it anyway. Captain Jack and Torchwood are both known quantities. Except that they’re not. Torchwood Three seems miles away from the slick corporate excess of Torchwood One, and, perhaps more importantly, Torchwood are clearly meant to be the heroes of this show, whereas just a few months earlier they were solidly villainous.

In this regard the outsider perspective is an odd barrier, in that Gwen asks what are, for the audience, mainly the wrong questions. The audience doesn’t need Torchwood explained so much as they need the relationship between this Torchwood and the Canary Warf operation from Army of Ghosts explained, but Gwen, as a genuine neophyte, doesn’t know to ask that question. Similarly, the question really isn’t who Jack is and where he came from, nor even why he’s immortal (the answer clearly being “some bit of technobabble involving Rose’s resurrection of him), it’s “how did he get to Earth in the present day and what’s he doing running Torchwood,” both questions that Gwen, not having seen The Parting of the Ways, fails to ask.

Which is perhaps the most interesting thing about Everything Changes. Structurally, at least, it hums along at a brisk and followable pace. The Campbell-style call to adventure narrative is so shopworn that it manages to obscure the questions the audience comes to the program asking. We know so much about how this episode works and enough about Jack and Torchwood that we think we have all of its twists figured out ahead of time.…

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The consensus, for reasons thoroughly intelligible to basically everybody, is to pretend this doesn’t exist. Every other Doctor Who spinoff is celebrated. This… was difficult to even find a copy of. I have hunted down some freakishly obscure things in the course of my blogging career, and while this was in no way the hardest, it was still a lot harder than an entire television series based on Doctor Who that came out in the last decade seems like it should be. Similarly, what was the last time anyone mentioned this series? Clayton Hickman’s actually kind of marvelous turn as one of the judges on the “Companion Academy” feature comes up occasionally, and it’s the answer to the trivia question “why in the name of God does The Infinite Quest exist” (but more on that next season), but other than that the phrase “Totally Doctor Who” goes blissfully unmentioned.

So much so that I should probably discuss what it is. Totally Doctor Who was a CBBC… Christ, I actually probably have to describe that too. OK, so, launched in 2005, CBBC is a digital channel where the BBC now dumps most of their children’s programming. It is for the most part accurately described as a dumping ground, and ironically just spun its previous biggest hit Tracy Beaker Returns off into a show actually called The Dumping Ground, but in 2006 it became the destination for Doctor Who’s first spinoff, Totally Doctor Who. Totally Doctor Who was, in essence, a half-hour Blue Peter-style children’s magazine program about Doctor Who. Combining some regular features like “Companion Academy” (a reality competition to find the best would-be companion among a bunch of kids) and the absolutely mind-wrenchingly badly named “Who-Ru” trivia game with interviews and behind the scenes features, it’s…

Really, really bad. There are moments of entertainment to be had here – watching Noel Clarke attempt to be remotely convincing as he claims that the Doctor Who t-shirt he’s giving someone is his prized possession and not something he was handed just before he walked on stage. The dead-eyed stares with which former Blue Peter presenter Liz Barker and future one Barney Harwood present their appallingly badly scripted hosting. The entertaining conceit that the “bigger on the inside” filing cabinet that is recessed into a half-height wall such that it appears far shorter than any filing cabinet actually is might actually fool someone.

There are occasional moments of actual quality, in which you can see how well a children’s program about the making of Doctor Who could have worked, although to be honest it’s fairly rare that Doctor Who Confidential doesn’t seem like it could do the job better. David Tennant actually does quite well with his appearance. He has the decency to show up on Totally Doctor Who for an interview and treat it like a perfectly ordinary chat show, answering questions sent in by kids as perfectly ordinary interview questions worthy of thought and attention. In other words, he makes the completely accurate judgment that the best way to handle talking about Doctor Who for kids is to handle it the same as talking about Doctor Who for anyone else.…

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