Quick wins and comfort reads

‘Quick win’ books and ‘comfort reads’ are similar concepts with differing agendas, but which share a common raison d’etre in my view: you are fond of reading but don't like lingering too long with one book. Here's a few thoughts from me on the subject.

We’re all voracious readers in my little family. My son is only two and a half and he’s been read to daily pretty much since birth. He’s already started to ‘read’ books to us for himself, and to be honest the stories he’s telling from these books – whilst following the general lines of the established story – sound much more exciting and lively the way he tells them!

My wife adores a broad spectrum of novels, with a particular fondness for Agatha Christie, Narnia, some of the classic Nineteenth Century ‘chick lit’ and also Harry Potter.

I tend to read Doctor Who and related books at the moment, because I’m still catching up on published fiction I should have been reading regularly between 1991 and 2005 but was too busy reading English Literature classics at the time for my A-Level, undergraduate and Postgraduate studies! But the perceived quality of the reading material makes little difference to my point.

My son has a lot of books. A lot. We try to read new and different books to him, and during the day he can be very receptive to this. However, at bedtime he has his favourites, his ‘comfort reads’. So Room On The Broom, Whatever Next, Peace At Last, and Alfie Gets In First get read over and over again on an almost nightly basis, occasionally punctuated with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, A Squash and A Squeeze, The Snail and The Whale, The Gruffalo’s Child,  Monkey Puzzle and a few others. He knows what he likes and what he’s comfortable with.

Similarly I see my wife returning time and time again to read the Harry Potter books, or The Chronicles of Narnia, mixed in with the mass of Agatha Christies – of which she also has her repeat favourites. These are her comfort reads; reading these isn’t necessarily about discovering something new, it’s about popping in to see an old friend who isn’t going to suddenly surprise or upset you. You know what’s going to happen over the page but you like the safety and security of knowing that and you can just enjoy being with the characters as they journey through the story, fully aware of how it will all end up. And if not everyone in the book is going to make it through to the end you can cherish the times you do spend with them. Your relationship to the text still changes each time you return to it, but the comfort comes from you as reader feeling that you are in control.

It’s because reading is an immersive pastime; it’s a relationship between the writer, the reader and the words on the page. Sometimes that relationship can be about surprise, or threat, or laughs, or sorrow; sometimes those reactions are totally dependent on this being the first time you’ve read that particular book, and sometimes as a result people may think ‘been there, done that, move on’. But there are times in everyone’s lives where there is a lot going on, and the resultant stress and strain can mean that you don’t necessarily want to read a new book right now (or discover a new album or watch a new film – the same applies). You want predictable escapism, you want the comfort of knowing that no matter what else is going on that may or may not be under your control in ‘real life’, that there on the page during your cramped commute or half an hour’s down time with a cuppa is what you know and love, somewhere familiar that you can lose yourself.

With comfort reads it’s not necessarily important how long the book is, or how long it will take you to finish it. However, because you are comfortable with the text you will tend to finish a comfort read more quickly when you re-visit it.

But purely on length alone, enter the ‘quick win’.

Quick win reads fall into two distinct categories:

• short books
• books you’ve read before and know won’t take you long to get through.

I know that these aren’t hard and fast rules – I made the mistake years ago of choosing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a supposed quick win during a Nineteenth Century Culture module at University. Ay caramba! A pleasant afternoon’s read, I thought, over a coffee or two. Several days, plenty of coffee cups and ninety five difficult pages of stodgy Modernity later I finished it. Ho hum. But knowing what I’d be letting myself in for could I now pick it up and treat it as a comfort read? No, let’s not go there!

You have to love your comfort reads. You don't have to love your repeat-read quick wins, and you don't necessarily choose them for comfort.

I don’t think I have any comfort reads myself. There are books I’ve read over and over again but I don’t necessarily pick them up in times of stress or concern, I just decide that it’s about time I visited them again. So I find I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels or The Hound of The Baskervilles, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy 1-5 far more than most of the other novels I own. But I also have some all time favourite texts that I haven’t read that often but hold in very high esteem – Ulysses, Trainspotting, Dracula, Don Quixote, The Lord of The Rings amongst them. I guess I’m a predictable ‘canonist’ in that these are generally era or genre-defining texts but by the same token they are what they are for good reasons.

But whereas I don’t seek comfort in the predictable contents of a book I do have issues with how long it takes me to read some books – which is a difficult one because it’s not always the book’s fault!

‘I just couldn’t get into it’ must be one of the most common criticisms aimed at books in general. I recall at University we spent the first half of one semester studying George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I read about two hundred pages in that first six week period for that very reason - because I just couldn’t get into it, I couldn’t come to terms with the style of Eliot’s prose or engage with any of the characters. But I wasn’t able to cast it aside because it was a set text and essays beckoned. Then something happened, something between myself and the book clicked, and I raced through the remaining eight hundred or so pages in about a week. Madness! But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, it just… was.

Generally these days when I pick up a new book I pick it up because I want to read it for whatever reason and I will finish it whether I like it or not (and be damned!) Recent reads that I haven’t enjoyed and I’ve struggled with include Ben Aaronovitch’s Genius Loci (from the Big Finish Bernice Summerfield range) and Simon A. Forward’s BBC ‘Past Doctor Adventure’ Doctor Who: Drift, featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Now before people think I’m mad or suffering from some obsessive compulsive disorder I will point out these are part of a series of books and they’re not very long – Drift was 280 pages I think – so I’m not wasting great swathes of my life on some pointless endeavour. What tends to happen is these less enjoyable books take me a lot longer to get through than I’d like, so I get frustrated and restless. As a consequence I will pick up a ‘quick win’ afterwards, a shorter book that I know I can easily read in one or two days’ of commuting, that gets me back in the swing and buoyant for my next longer novel.

I tend to set myself unrealistic demands on the number of books I should read each week - but no one’s judging me except myself, so writing this down does make me think that perhaps I may be slightly mad after all…

It must be the legacy from my English Literature degrees, because I embraced the reading lists so fully.

Anyway my main source of quick wins is the old Target range of Doctor Who novelisations. I’ve been reading them since I was a boy – so that would suggest to observers that they are comfort reads. But I tend to avoid the ones I favoured years ago (mainly Fourth Doctor stories novelised by Terrance Dicks) and aim instead for something I either haven’t read before or haven’t read for decades – and there’s plenty of them. So in that respect they’re not necessarily comfort reads (even though I know the stories by now through watching the TV episodes repeatedly or listening to the off-air soundtrack CDs), but they are quick wins, and they usually leave me in a positive frame of mind for my next read.

After finishing Drift late last week I was supposed to pick up another Fourth Doctor book, Evolution by John Peel, from Virgin’s ‘Missing Adventures’ range so I could review it for a forthcoming issue of The Terrible Zodin fanzine (http://doctorwhottz.blogspot.co.uk/). But having taken the best part of two weeks to trawl through Forward’s treacly prose, regularly losing track of who was who and where and why (and ending up thinking ‘what the hell, I’ll just see what happens when I get to the end’) I didn’t want to dive into another 250-odd page novel straight away; I wanted something snack size, around 150 pages that I knew I could read in a couple of days – I wanted a ‘quick win’. My quick win of choice was Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, because it was maintaining the Fourth Doctor theme and I recalled it being a great book from my teenage years. It was indeed, but there’ll be more about that in a separate post.

I suppose where the lines cross for me with quick wins and comfort reads is that, because I set myself demanding targets in terms of how many books I should be reading (and reading properly, not skim-reading), the quick wins give me satisfaction that I am meeting my own expectations. And although the words are new the stories in these quick wins are familiar, comfortable. But then with a book it’s the words that count as much as the story and if the words aren’t familiar how can it be comfortable..?

I don’t know. But one thing is clear to me from all this: both 'comfort reads' and 'quick win' books provide a much needed psychological boost and support to us all, no matter how old we are and how much we choose to read.

Blake's Heaven

Whoops, I should have blogged about this weeks ago since it's been available since May!

It's a charity book compiled from fan memories and opinions about all things Blake's 7 - from the TV episodes through the novels to the current Big Finish audios. I'm proud to have a couple of pieces in there myself. The book is available from Amazon (link below) and all proceeds go to Children In Need.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blakes-Heaven-John-Davies/dp/151199438X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435420728&sr=1-1&keywords=blakes+heaven

It's published by Watching Books who are developing a good range of charity publications. See the link to their website for more details, but I'll be mentioning the forthcoming volume You and Who Else in the future as I've got a piece in that book too...

http://youandwho.weebly.com/

A Target trilogy: The Season 20 Guardian stories

This selection of Fifth Doctor adaptations is possibly remarkable for not having any contributions from Terrance Dicks! He was still very prolific at the time but slowly more and more of the TV writers were taking the opportunity to novelise their own work rather than leave it up to Dicks who, by this point, had honed his story adaptations to a short, concise, fine art.

These three stories, Mawdryn Undead by Peter Grimwade, Terminus by Stephen Gallagher and Enlightenment by Barbara Clegg , are a wild mix of everything that was endemic in 1980s Doctor Who. They are at times challenging, disturbing, garish, gorgeous and disappointing - occasionally all at the same time. They are often directed in a workmanlike way and over-lit to the point where the drama really struggles to assert itself and some very strange costume and design choices are inflicted on the viewer. Fortunately on the printed page one doesn’t have the same kind of up and down experience.

Mawdryn Undead is a perfect example, by Peter Grimwade, of how the writer can meet the publisher’s restrictions whilst still elaborating on the script to a greater degree than merely giving basic descriptions. The representation of the undead mutants, in a way that TV could never have convincingly managed at the time (nor the BBC allowed, I expect!) and the introduction of Turlough as an alien boy stranded on Earth at the beginning of the narrative are areas that stand out from the rest. Also Grimwade uses the novel format to overcome that continual problem for everyone about how Turlough is supposed to be trying to kill the Doctor but doesn’t. So we get Turlough’s inner thoughts, his indecision, those moments where he realises that he’s signed up to evil and that he likes and agrees with the Doctor. We don’t get any of that on TV – due most likely to the restricted format of the show and its mode of production at the time, which concentrated on telling a story through action and visuals, not through inner monologue or adventurous foregrounding of characters other than the Doctor (prime exceptions to this of course being the two Christopher Bailey stories Kinda and Snakedance, but that’s exactly what they were: exceptions).

But even with all of this going on, showing how much the author has really thought about how he could get the most out of the novel format (and the publisher’s restrictions) to the benefit of the story, the story really whips along at great pace and with an easy, flowing style. The novelisation is, as it should be, something similar but different to, and complimentary to, the televised version and it’s quite surprising at times that aspects of the story lend themselves more easily to prose narrative than TV. I found it a short but highly enjoyable read, definitely one I’d pick up again.

 

Terminus, by John Lydecker (pen name for Stephen Gallagher) is a different kettle of leprosy-infested fish altogether. Gallagher is a ‘real’ sci-fi writer, bringing to Doctor Who the kind of legitimacy that Tanith Lee brought to Blake’s 7 and effectively merging TV drama and high-concept sci-fi prose. Unlike Douglas Adams a couple of years before, Stephen Gallagher was willing to adapt his TV work for the page on Target’s conditions, but as he was established by this point he assumes a pseudonym - presumably to help protect his main ‘brand’. Fair enough. He’d used it before with Warrior’s Gate. But there seems to have been some compromise agreed – for the first time in a long while we have a book that isn’t bound by the usual maximum 127-odd pages, so Lydecker is able to expand on what was shown on screen, and write around the story and the action a bit more. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation with a few additional story elements that were presumably cut from the TV scripts for timing or practicality – the sort of thing he was prevented from doing when novelising Warrior’s Gate, alas. Whereas Grimwade selected a few aspects to develop in his Mawdryn Undead, Lydecker gives us more of everything in Terminus (even down to the ‘Terminus’ installation being referred to as The Terminus instead of just plain Terminus!) so you’d almost think that the novel came before the TV version. Lydecker wrote Terminus as one long unbroken narrative, as he did with Warrior’s Gate, rather than breaking it down into the more usual Target house style of bite-size chapters. Aside from being frustrating for reading on my commute (first world problems!) it gives the book a cohesive sense of wholeness, a kind of organic, natural flow from start through to finish. For a story that’s all about people being trapped and enclosed this is a very apposite stylistic decision; chapter breaks give the reader a chance to break free of the narrative if they choose, to come up for air. Taking that comfort blanket away gives the reader a whole new relationship with the text, where the text is in control of the relationship instead. It’s disconcerting trying to work out what the best place is to stop reading as you near your train stop or your lunch break is over, and one finds oneself having to back-track at times to find your way back in to the narrative. This sounds like a negative, like the text is not reader-friendly; I don’t look it at as a negative, I look at it as a timely reminder to readers not to take narratives for granted.

Terminus is a much maligned TV story. Pretty much all of its failings, though, can be attributed to those factors I listed at the beginning of this piece: it’s very flatly directed, over lit with little sense of claustrophobia or jeopardy, the space raiders Kari and Olvir look like backing dancers for Spandau Ballet and the Garm might as well have a pink tutu and wings for all the subtlety with which he is used and directed. Of course on the page we lose all these drawbacks. The Garm in particular is written how Gallagher had hoped he’d be realised and directed – like a huge shadowy presence, not a garish, oversized RAF mascot. Nyssa doesn’t lose her clothes at an alarmingly quick rate in some sort of confused pseudo-sexual diseased miasma. You lose the distracting plastic ‘clack clack’ of the Vanir armour in the background the whole story feels more trapped and enclosed on the page – giving synergy with the reader experience. It’s a great book written by an accomplished sci-fi author. It never feels like an adaptation of anything, even though it’s the middle helping of a wider story arc and it has to manage a changing team dynamic by losing one of the key players in the TARDIS crew; it feels like it was written to be a book in its own right, to exist on its own terms. I came away from it thinking what a shame it was that Stephen Gallagher didn’t contribute any further stories to the TV series or that John Lydecker didn’t contribute to Virgin’s New Adventures of Missing Adventures series in the 1990s when this kind of hard sci-fi was much more the norm. 

Barbara Clegg’s Enlightenment book stands out for several reasons. Firstly this was the first Target novelisation by a female writer (with Rona Munro’s Survival being the only other sole effort aside from Alison Bingeman and Jane Baker’s co-writing credits), and secondly this is the only one of the three books in this article to have anything like an interesting front cover! Mawdryn Undead and Terminus both suffer appallingly from DPCS: Dull Photo Cover Syndrome. Here we get a smashing illustration of the racing yachts and the shining harbour, with the Doctor’s photograph artfully entwined within the logo instead. Great idea!  I know we take photo editing and image enhancement for granted these days, but it’s really a shame that more thought and effort wasn’t put into getting round the refusal by Peter Davison or his Agent to have his likeness represented by the usual cover artists. For many of us back in the day it was the cover that initially engaged us into wanting to purchase and read these books, after all.

I wondered early on why the appearance of the Black Guardian was removed towards the beginning of the story, when the White Guardian is asking for power from the TARDIS and scares the bejesus out of the Doctor. I must assume that Clegg thought it dramatically more powerful to only have him appear to the Doctor at the very end of the story arc. We also don’t get Jackson’s sober reactions to being sent aloft. We know he’s taken the pledge against alcohol so he won’t take his grog, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem with being aloft in space here, unlike on TV where it’s a major character point for him and the cornerstone of his relationship with Turlough. In fact the human sailors tend to be underwritten here in favour of the Eternals and their race. That may have been a decision Clegg took to streamline the narrative, make it less cluttered in order to meet the publisher’s page and length restrictions.

It’s a loss, I’ll admit. The major strength of Enlightenment is in its characters which are all drawn with such care and brilliance. But does it spoil the book? Does the story lack a vital aspect by not having Jackson think that the officers are drugging the crew? I think not, in all honesty. It’s still a joy to read because the story is so engaging and the empty, despairing Eternals and the TARDIS crew are so endearingly written (for empty Eternals that’s quite an achievement!) Again I feel it was a shame that Barbara Clegg didn’t write more stories for the series – thought-provoking narratives and characters of this calibre were rare within the show at the time.

These three books weren’t written with any level of unity or continuity between themselves to unfold a broader narrative and story arc. This was true of the TV stories they are based on, with the only tenuous link being Turlough under the thrall of The Black Guardian. However despite this they tell an engaging, on-going story each in their own highly individual way, expressing many of the strengths of the Target range of books, least of all its massive variety.

Oops - hello world again!

Right, so it seems that not much has happened around here since June 2013 - which is strange because plenty has been happening in my life, that's for sure.

I've started mentioning this blog in a few places though so I suddenly thought 'Erk! Must update, must appear to be current!'

So this is a tenative return post from me in the hope that I will have the time between being a husband, father, facilities manager and other things (including trying to sell my home and buy a new one!) to get back into the habit of commenting on media and maybe even finishing reviewing the Matt Smith Doctor Who episodes before tackling the wonderful Peter Capaldi series before his next series starts...

Go Gambrell Go!

The Tate Modern and the curse of artistic sensibilities...

I realise I've let my blog slip of late - that's the hectic lifestyle of a relatively new father I guess. Anyway, here's some ramblings on a recent outing to remind you all I'm still here...


The Tate Modern and the curse of artistic sensibilities.

I visited the Tate Modern last Saturday, with some friends who’d come to London for the weekend. We felt that, having little ones with us, vivid colours and shapes might keep them entertained. 

As my little one is only about five months old it was difficult to tell how much he was actually taking in strapped to my front. Unfortunately I fared little better. I walked around this strange collection of installations, objects and creations feeling generally very cold and detached. I couldn’t relate to any of it. Why didn’t it move me? I passed through crowds of foreign tourists and art lovers all seemingly eagerly engaged with textures, shapes, colours and impressions. I was in another world though, slightly removed, held back by an impenetrable barrier. Maybe I should have worn a neck scarf, open shirt and corduroy trousers? Many of the men there had done so, and they seemed to be enjoying what they were looking at.

We were through and staggering, exhausted, to the café before I really realised what was happening. At least the café price list was something I could comprehend, if not appreciate!

As I left the building I was wondering what was wrong with me? And then I realised, I’ve conditioned myself to expect some sort of epiphany in these circumstances, a click in my head that suddenly brings the world to light and life in a whole new way. It wasn’t the artwork that was at fault – it was me. As a literature student, writer, actor, whatever, I’ve set my own expectations that all forms of creative art will appeal and have secrets and meanings that one can unlock which will set fire to the world, to my world.

But then surely it’s also the artwork that’s at fault because it doesn’t speak to me in a way that I can understand? Should I need to read an essay to understand what Mirror on Canvas ‘means’ or represents, for example? Not if it’s in an open gallery, no. Shouldn’t a piece of art, like a piece of literature or a film, have a clear purpose or meaning that is apparent to most, and then possibly some hidden depths for those who choose or are able to study deeper and contextualise the work from various viewpoints? Or is this just arty nonsense?

Maybe because I don’t understand this kind of art or how I’m supposed to relate to it, I should just stick to the National Gallery, which always fills me with joy and inspiration when I visit it. But I can’t help the niggling feeling that I’m missing out on something somehow...

Doctor Who series 7 reviews: Cold War

Week three of the second half of Series 7 brought us Cold War, by the very talented Mr Mark Gatiss.

 

The BBC as an organisation and ‘Doctor Who’ as a commercial brand needed to hype the return of the Ice Warriors after 39 years – they’re a major recurring monster from back in them days, after all, and they need to attract attention and pull in the viewers. I appreciate that. But it’s still a shame that I already knew what was in the melting block of ice when the fist burst out and throttled the Russian submariner. A great pre-titles sequence and what would have been the episode one cliff hanger in days gone by – as indeed something similar was in their original 1967 story The Ice Warriors. We can only imagine how much more thrilling it would have been not knowing – or having to guess what it might be.

But we live in a world of spoilers these days. The soaps started it – hinting at juicy plots and storylines to come, to ensure that people stayed faithful and carried on watching. At some point, then, programme executives must have decided that they could no longer rely on viewers returning week after week or show after show to find out what might happen to the characters they love or hate, they had to tell the viewers / fans in advance what was going to happen and the fun then comes in finding out how what you know is going to happen happens. It’s a shift in emphasis only, but it allows programme makers to ‘manage customer expectation’. TV is, after all, just another service industry.

That aside, the new Ice Warrior (that we all knew was coming) looked pretty awesome; sensitively faithful to the original design, yet without the clumsy child-bearing hips and horn-squeezer mittens, giving them a more defined, dextrous and powerful cyborg-style finish. One of the unanswered questions with the original Ice Warriors was what was Martian and what was armour? Now we know. Also during their 1960s & 70s appearances we were told how honourable they were as a race, with their sense of aristocracy and nobility. But then the Sontarans came along and filched the ‘honour in battle’ side of their character trait and stole their position. Gatiss has effected a skilful dual continuation and re-boot of the Martian creatures, answering some of those old questions and building them into a more clearly defined race for future use. They now have an individuality borne out of their history which the series can use without feeling like it’s re-hashing ideas used elsewhere.

What I liked less was seeing the naked Martian head at the end - not the concept, but the realisation. For something so ‘solid’ and real as the Ice Warrior suit it then disappointed me that the head was CGI. This was a time that an actor in a rubber mask would have been perfect. It took me out of the moment and that’s a shame.

I was ticking off a mental list in my head as I was watching this episode. Yep, that’s very much 2005’s Dalek, that’s Alien, that’s the 1953 War of The Worlds film as the spindly alien hand reaches out to Stepashin’s shoulder… That’s not in any way a criticism of Mark Gatiss’ writing or Douglas Mackinnon’s direction – some of the best Doctor Who over the years has borrowed from the best, and even from itself. There are probably more homages in the episode as well that my limited experience failed to spot.

For someone who has enjoyed and admired so much of what Mark Gatiss has achieved as a writer and performer so far, I’m always a tad apprehensive going into one of his Doctor Who episodes. The Unquiet Dead in 2005 was pure brilliance, but since then most of his episodes have left me slightly disappointed at best. I think his episodes always sound wonderful on paper and promise much – perhaps too much, which leaves me wanting that bit more. The problem with Cold War is that I really enjoyed the episode, and have continued to enjoy it on re-watching it since, but it ought to be brilliant and somehow it isn’t - and I’m not sure why.

It could be the aftertaste of the CGI Skaldak, or the convenience of re-introducing the HADS to get rid of the TARDIS, or the minor frustration that yet again the very capable Nicholas Briggs has been wheeled out to do a classic monster voice. I’m not critical of Nick, and there’s sense in making the Ice Warrior more verbose and less hissy than his predecessorsssssssssss, but I also feel that the voiceovers should be spread around a bit – give other actors a bit of work!

I appreciate that these are matters of personal opinion and not necessarily justified criticisms of the episode as such.

So, what else was good? The model work was excellent. Clara almost drowning and then reviving to discover that the action has moved on for her and us the viewer was a nice touch and stylishly done. Sometimes we don’t need to see the companion being fussed over and revived. The claustrophobic sets and atmospheric lighting worked exceptionally well – particularly in contrast with the garishness of Akhaten the previous week. The guest cast did a sterling job, with David Warner being given the space to shine as the rather eccentric professor. I was never a fan of Ultravox or Duran Duran myself, but I’m not going to hold that against his character!

Clara got to tick off some more items on her list of things a companion must do. I’m glad the episode picked up on the fact that, up until she saw the dismembered corpses, she’d not yet experienced the kind of violent death that comes with the territory. As she said, it really brought home to her how serious the situations are that they get into. There was a comfortable mix of light comedy and edgy drama in the scene where she enters Skaldak’s detention area and speaks with him on behalf of the Doctor and the crew. It was also cleverly lit and shot in that you don’t realise until afterwards that Skaldak’s no longer in the suit at that point.

The sonic screwdriver. Hmmm... One unfortunate side-effect of it being such an all-eventualities tool these days is that as a viewer I now expect the Doctor to be able to wave it around and do pretty much whatever he wants with it – unless he’s opening a door made of wood. The dénouement to Cold War should have been a lot more powerful than it was, with nuclear war balancing on a knife edge over the press of a button, and only a philosophical argument on the flip of a coin to decide either way. The Doctor’s gesture was noble, offering to blow them all up rather than risk starting a war, but if activating the sonic screwdriver could do that you’d also expect it to be able to re-set the countdown and I found myself very conscious of this, which undermined the drama. Thankfully it didn’t come to that, but it’s not good that as a viewer I’m already expecting it.

I think this was a solid, intelligent and occasionally scary addition to the series as a whole. The Ice Warriors now have a firm platform from which to return, potentially, and I’m rather looking forward to them doing so.

Doctor Who series 7 reviews: The Rings Of Akhaten

So, second up this time around we have The Rings of Akhaten, written by Who newcomer Neil Cross. OK...

I very much enjoyed this episode on the first viewing, and having watched it again a couple more times since I’m still enjoying it. I understand that this isn’t a view shared by many though, and when I think about it more deeply myself I can see that my appreciation is purely on a superficial level.

It didn’t set my imagination aflame, quicken my pace with excitement or send me on a rollercoaster emotional ride, but it was good, honest, visually stimulating and entertaining Doctor Who. I don’t ask for much more – just maybe the occasional draw-droppingly brilliant episode! 

I was impressed with the sound of Neil Cross’ writing. I don’t know much of his work from elsewhere, but if this is anything to go by he writes very ‘sayable’ lines with flare and wit. If he can develop his supporting characters beyond mere ciphers then I’m sure he can give us great things in the future.

Clara’s had three introductions so far, and to a certain extent this episode also introduced her for a fourth time. We get all the family background and, most importantly, she gets her solo five minutes or so, holding her own in an alien environment with strange new people, putting across her companion manifesto for us to judge and coming out – I think – very strongly. JLC is being given some fine material to work with so far and is doing it justice. Her scenes looking after Merry Gejelh and giving her the support she clearly wasn’t getting elsewhere were utterly charming and really serve to stamp her imprint on the show. 

The episode had a surprisingly Tenth Doctor feel, with Matt Smith having some longer, more emotionally driven speeches more in the style of David Tennant. Also the general hubbub feel of the market area evoked the RTD era of the show. I didn’t object to the singing - it’s not like we’ve not had singing before in Doctor Who, and this was hardly the equivalent of the Buffy sing-along-an-episode. 

Are motorbikes becoming a ‘thing’ this series? That’s two episodes on the trot now where a motorbike-type vehicle has been used. Maybe Matt’s swapping hats for mopeds..? Last week’s bike looked cool, but unfortunately this one, supplied by the dog woman, looked like it came from my old CDT class at school. I wasn’t very good at CDT... But if the space bike looked like a blocky plywood disaster, the Mummy in the glass cabinet looked awesome - as did the three Vigil beings (homage to 1978’s Underworld intended..?) 

I wasn’t so keen on Grandfather Sun as a concept, I’ll admit – although there was a precedent set in 2007’s 42 for sentient suns about the universe. Doesn’t Grandfather die at the end though? It’s not really clear. If so then presumably that rings of Akhaten will disperse without a body to orbit, which won’t be great for those living and working there. Hmmm. Either that or it turned into a black hole. Double hmmm.

Also the Mummy and the Vigil looked great but we don’t really know what they were and in the end they were casually cast aside and wasted as red herrings. The sonic screwdriver yet again becomes an annoying shortcut, opening unopenable doors and fending off the Vigil’s attack. I hope the Vigil come back – I’d like to see them used properly.

I was very slightly creeped out at the beginning by the Doctor stalking Clara through her parents meeting and her growing up. It flowed OK from the end of the previous episode, but a casual viewer would be forgiven for wondering what was going on and if episodes are going to flow in this way it may be useful to have a brief reprise. I’m glad that at the end Clara realised the Doctor had been there at her mum’s graveside – it was a sobering reminder to the Doctor that he needs to be careful if he’s playing games like that. But maybe it’s time for a companion whom the Doctor hasn’t met as a child, or whom he doesn’t need to meet as a child, maybe? 

The Rings of Akhaten had a tricky job to do, because of where The Bells of St John left off. There was a lot of preamble to get in at the start, then the usual settling in of the new travelling companion on her first proper TARDIS trip, so we were really nearly half way into the episode before we got much in the way of intrigue or jeopardy. We’re not used to that kind of pedestrian pacing these days, and what it tended to do was draw attention to the lightness of the story and the supporting characters. Would we have given a fig about Merry if she wasn’t a small girl? Probably not.

But then, as I said at the beginning, I’ve watched this several times and enjoyed it on each occasion. I think the difference is that the better episodes really impress, whereas this was just enjoyment of a TV show I love, well made.

Over all this was an attractive episode, with colour and spectacle and monsters and the Doctor baring his soul at the end and needing the help of his companion to win the day – hooray. But for those who like to scrape the surface and nibble the rough edges underneath there were slim pickings. It’s an episode of ideas and concepts but it doesn’t flesh them out properly or develop them, just brushes them aside and moves on to the next item. For that reason this was a disappointing addition to the series.