How many stories can you tell about yourself? It’s something we seemingly never tire of doing. What’s interesting are the patterns within the stories we choose to share with the world, and how they define us and shape the way we behave. Are we victims or heroes, tricksters or passive, the voice of reason or the spurned lover? Listen out for the stories you tell, and the stories you hear. Listen and learn, and then think about how they apply to the fictions you write.

Once you’ve worked out the kind of stories a character tells about themselves, you’re a long way to working out what kind of person they are in practice. I’ve never been a big fan of the whole detailed biography approach to character creation where you know what they had for breakfast and what colour socks they wear. Too much information. But if you get a feel for the way they talk about themselves, the stories they share and roles they play in them, other stuff starts to fall into place.

Someone who plays martyr in their tales, and likes to be different without having the smarts to figure out an original way of doing so…it’s kind of easy to see them wearing a big old leather trenchcoat. Contrarily, a character who never realises the joke is on him…well, there’s something about putting them in a ‘comedy’ tie, and having their clothes chosen by their mother into their twenties and beyond. These things have a logic of their own: you might not agree with my choices, and that’s fine as long as you’ve got your own radar for such nuances.

Nuances are what it’s all about. The distinctions a character makes inform their place in the world, and what they are capable of doing to change it. Norris Cole of Coronation Street meticulously places everyone on a social scale that’s of utmost importance to him, while Phil Mitchell of Eastenders pays heed to social convention only when it doesn’t interfere with his personal goals.

When different worldviews meet, sparks can fly. Drama often reaches its climax points when characters who have been close are polarised by their attitudes and actions in a new situation. The trick then, is to know your characters well enough to find situations that will force them apart. Will they accept the new reality, or will it cause them to redefine their relationship?

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is full of fine stuff emerging from a profound understanding of the distinctions between his characters, ably illustrated by Dave Gibbons. All are superheroes, each has their unique take on what can and should be done about humanity, the distinctions between them leading to a monstrous plot hatched by one of their number in the name of the greater good. Other, more grounded characters, have their more human response to the grand scheme, but are so ‘normal’ in their perspectives that they are easily outfoxed by the mastermind. It’s brilliantly realised, and for all the structural excellence on display that takes it several cuts above any other work in the comics form from a technical viewpoint, the character work is what makes Watchmen tick. And it all starts with the stories they tell themselves, about the world and their place in it…

The premise of Bonekickers - that archaeologists discover evidence that seriously unsettles the accepted version of the past - is one I was perfectly happy to accept. And that fact that it was brought to us by the people who devised Life on Mars was potentially promising. I was never as ardent a fan of the latter as many: I thoroughly enjoyed the Gene Hunt bits, but frankly they could have come out of Viz.

Anyway, what really annoyed me about the Bonekickers pilot episode was being told what to think about the characters. One expert introduced another as ‘Google with a beerbelly’ and that was supposed to pass for characterisation. Only, in my book at least, characterisation is based on behaviour that leaves a conclusion in the viewer’s head, not a summation of that person delivered by another character. So that annoyed me. Then it happened again, and I realised this was no accident, but an intentional attempt to give ersatz characterisation that was unearned by what I was actually seeing. And that bugged me.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any characterisation going on. There were a few stereotypes in evidence, mostly in the form of a media academic who wrote books about sex in history that were adapted for Channel 5, and that clearly made the author an enemy. The heroes were our boys and girls in the trenches, with trowels and, err, spectrographic analysis machines. And if they weren’t larger than life enough, there are also some descendants of the Knights Templar running around, and I have a horrible idea that the whole thing is going to develop into some kind of Da Vinci Code scenario. Which is fine: once I sussed that, and had tired of wincing at the sub-CSIisms and clunky dialogue, I stopped watching and instead put on a DVD of some sublime live music and had a fantastic evening.

So, what to make of all that? Well, I’m pleased that the BBC is spending money on something that isn’t an emergency service drama. That’s definitely a good thing. I’m less pleased that they went to the purveyors of one left field hit to find another, when there are any number of writers and production companies out there who could have come up with something else. Or maybe they did go that route, and weren’t happy with what they came up with. I’d be fascinated to read the brief for what became Bonekickers anyway, and see if anyone else came up with anything for it.

Overall then, 10/10 for trying, 3/10 for execution. I seriously doubt that I will be watching future episodes of Bonekickers. And I do hope that someone, somewhere, hits the bullseye in terms of delivering a post-watershed hit for a large audience: I appreciate it’s not an easy task.

Tonight’s episode of Dr Who, the season finale, was a joyous confirmation of Russell T Davies’s status as the show’s reinventor. The key is in his regeneration of an old franchise that had gone to seed in the hands of people embarrassed to be charged with running a science fiction show for all the family, and the way it’s now positioned front and centre at the heart of BBC1’s role as a national and international broadcaster.

Make no mistake, in these days of shows tailored to demographics, and a BBC determined to establish a foothold in every conceivable social grouping, Dr Who is a hugely important series. While everyone else is talking narrowcasting, Russell has managed to reaffirm the importance of television as an experience shared across generations and subcultures.

Not only is Dr Who a show with a mission, it’s one with a message. It’s a series about the future of our species, and at a time when we’re bombarded with bulletins about global warming, economic downturn, intolerance and the rest, Dr Who is pointing to a multi-ethnic polysexual future in which difference is accepted and every individual can make a difference. A bit Pollyanna-ish perhaps, but I’d rather the next generation were growing up with that as a vision than whatever they’re gleaning from a diet of Resident Evil and Happy Meals.

OK, so every episode has not been one of unalloyed success, and some of Russell’s scripts have been among the clunkiest since the show has reappeared. But when he does well, he does better than well, and this evening’s barnstormer was an example of why Russell T Davies deserves whatever accolades can be sent his way.

In 65 fabulous minutes, the series finale managed to combine a thwarting of a(nother) Dalek plan to defeat the Doctor and destroy the universe with a whole bunch of subplots relating to the extended family of companions and chums that he has accumulated since coming back to our screens. Everyone got their moment, from swashbuckling bisexual Captain Jack to Bernard Cribbins, in his role as Donna Noble’s grandfather. And Donna got the biggest moment of all, which fully justified her surname: Everywoman became Wonder Woman, if only for a short while, before the cosmic clock was reset and all returned to normal. There’s nothing more noble than a sacrifice like that, and sacrifice is what Dr Who runs on.

Oh, and Rose came back, had to return to her parallel world, and did so in the company of the Doctor, or at least a half-human iteration of The Doctor, who’ll be able to settle down and live and love and die with her as a mortal. What more could you ask for? You can’t accuse Davies of skimping on emotional scenes, and he relished every opportunity to shoehorn them in: anyone who watched the show without a tear coming to their eyes at some point is a Cyberman, for sure.

Juggling those emotional pay-offs with the structural demands of the plot was a hell of a feat, and demonstrated Davies’s abundant skill as a writer at the same time as getting across his underlying belief that quality drama can be life-affirming…too many people mistake misery for seriousness, and if Davies demonstrates anything it’s the power of truly popular drama to touch the lives of its audience.

Writer Robert Anton Wilson once posed an interesting question along these lines: what does it say about our society that we have so much drama about the police on television, and so little about landlords? Given the plethora of crime drama on our screens, it’s a valid question to raise, and much of it is anodyne stuff indeed, holding out the promise that the boys and girls in blue will keep us safe from harm, and giving vicarious immersion in supposedly dangerous subcultures.

All well and good for what it’s worth…but then something different crops up and forces you to look at crime drama anew. American shows The Wire and The Shield have done a fine job at exploring crime and punishment in more complex ways, and now BBC1’s all-week special Criminal Justice is performing a similar function.

Interesting that the series is written by a former barrister, Peter Moffat: his immersion in the actual legal world, rather than genre television, was very apparent. The wealth of compelling detail, about how people conduct themselves in and around a criminal case, had a feel of absolute authenticity that’s lacking in shows like The Bill, keen as it is to put a rosy smile on the face of police operations. Here, instead, we saw cynical cops and can’t-be-bothered-cops, and the script felt that much more alive and credible for them.

At the heart of the story is a young man, Ben, who may or may not have killed a young woman, Melanie, who waltzes into the cab that he’s borrowed from his dad to go and see a mate, and which they then travel to the seaside in. Melanie is very much the dominant figure, and it’s her house they end up at, and specifically her bed, after an evening of ecstasy, tequila shots, and knifeplay. It simply shows the effect one charismatic person can have on another less sure of themselves, and on this occasion it ends in tragedy.

It was a joy to watch a piece of intelligent drama that drew from reality and presented it simply and honestly. Agendas were apparent, and everyone’s perspective was valid and comprehensible: no cardboard baddies here. The nearest the script got to clunkiness was when the superintendent in charge of the case had a row with his boss about resources. I don’t doubt the facts and tenor of what was said, but it stood out as potted argument for the audience’s benefit in a script that was otherwise free of exposition.

This wasn’t crime drama that relied on forensic detail and esoterically motivated killers: no need for such attention-grabbing tactics. Instead, it was a story about human beings getting caught up in something messy and ugly, and trying to sort it out as best they can. It all made for a refreshing and fascinating hour of television, and I’ll be doing my best to catch the forthcoming installments.

I’m half way through watching Clocking Off, and it’s interesting seeing what Paul Abbott is doing here that not enough writers are doing elsewhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it ran on BBC1 in 2000, and consists of six self-contained dramas, Abbott’s sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television. Each story is set in and around the world created by Mackintosh Textiles and its employees, and features a stellar cast of names you’ll recognise from Dr Who to Life on Mars, stopping by at Coronation Street and Queer as Folk.

What’s immediately clear is that Abbott has a knack for coming up with stories that get to the heart of his characters’ lives. The stories they’re caught up in are without a doubt the biggest things that are happening to them, then and maybe ever. A man who’s been missing for more than a year comes home to his family with amnesia to discover he spent the missing time with another wife and child. A woman sets her house on fire to ensure her partner sees none of the money from it, and finds unexpected love with her next door neighbour. A teenager with learning difficulties has an affair with his boss’s wife.

There’s an epic scale to the emotions underpinning the stories, which ensures the stories are much more than soap opera. You come to know and care about these characters pretty quickly, partly through what’s at stake for them, also because there’s a lightness of touch brought to the dialogue which stops the scripts being Heavy With Significance. It feels like actual people talking, and they’re just as tongue-tied as the rest of us when it comes to grappling with the huge stories they’re caught up in.

What with Paul Abbott being the man who brought us Shameless, you can expect recognisable social worlds and people who behave like human beings, not as pawns representative of their class or theories based on some or other psychological text. And, like Frank Gallagher, some of these characters have their say at length, which feels fine and natural when most of the script features short exchanges of dialogue. One lesson from that is don’t be afraid to let your characters talk about what matters to them sometimes: why let Alan Bennett have the monopoly on monologues?

Another lesson is harder to quantify. In the third story, teenage K.T. is besotted with his lover, the factory boss’s wife. And the factory boss knocks K.T. over with his car, hospitalising him. Only, the boss doesn’t at this point realise that it’s K.T. having the affair. So, Abbott has got him to do what’s expected in a situation like this - put his wife’s lover in hospital…but without realising that he is her lover. There’s karma there, which is dramatically satisfying, but ignorance of the truth makes the situation far more interesting than had the situation been done by the book, with the boss punching the lad’s lights out for messing with his missus. There are other neat twists and turns that have similar effect: the boss loses it with his foreman, who he suspects of being his wife’s lover…which he was on a previous occasion, but is no longer, meaning that he’s both innocent and guilty at the same time. Good stuff, dramatically.

Those kind of nuances are typical of the scenarios that Abbott contrives. A man falls for his neighbour and her kids, and wants them to be part of his life - only she doesn’t want to be responsible to any man, even one she does love. They reach a happy compromise by a circuitous path, which makes their credible ending that much more satisfying.

That quality of reaching a conclusion only though trials and misfortunes, some of them age-old, others relevant to the society we live in now, is characteristic of Paul Abbott’s work. And helps explain why he’s a key figure in modern British television drama, and I’m sure will remain so for years to come.

There’s a kind of writing which I find grates, and that I can best describe as too neat. And the kind of neatness I’m thinking about sits at odds with my experience of life itself, which doesn’t conform to regular patterns and easy conclusions. As an example, ‘Brotherhood’, episode 7 of the first series of Six Feet Under, a generally excellent series that I’ve been catching on DVD after, as ever, failing to see it when it was broadcast on tv.

The brotherhood referred to captures the relationship of brothers Nate and David, and in particular Nate’s declaration that he loves David, an instance of ‘hugs ‘n’ learning’ that sits at odds with the generally distanced emotions of the Fisher family. And in this specific episode it also refers to the brotherhood experienced by a young soldier whose funeral the Fishers are arranging. For good measure, it serves triple duty when it comes to exploring the politics of the church that Dave is a deacon of.

The dead soldier’s funeral is arranged by his brusque older brother, who wants it to be a military-free zone. Only, Nate believes that the deceased really would have wanted his army buddies present, and arranges for that to happen. He does so, and the service is conducted against the brother’s wishes - only for him to turn up and concede that it really is what he’d have wanted after all. I found it unconvincing that he changed his mind in the short time devoted to the storyline: in other words, the dramatic reversal was unearned, and felt false because of it. In tandem with the story being about Gulf war veterans, it felt tokenistic to me, and what could have been a powerful story was diluted by an unearned payoff: confronted by uniforms, the brother just changed his mind.

The other overly neat aspect to this story was Dave’s rejection of a new senior figure in the church, whose crusading style would likely have brought up uncomfortable issues to do with his closeted homosexuality. It may be that the storyline develops new wrinkles in future episodes, but for now at least it felt like the dead serviceman story: just too neat to really convince.

So, if those are examples of neat writing, what’s the contrary to that? Messiness, I guess. The kind of messiness that feels more like life than it does the geometrically precise laying down of story beats that rise and fall and are mirrored over time. It’s also something I have an issue about when I see tv shows that have clearly delineated A, B, C storylines where the people involved in one never get involved in the others, and to all intents and purposes are involved in their own 12 minute hermetically sealed story rather than one that’s a living breathing part of an organic script.

That kind of messiness is harder to write, I know from my own experience. And it’s also much more rewarding, and effective when it’s achieved. The Shield features writing along the lines I’m talking about, and is achieved by a table of writers hammering out stories as a team. I believe I’ve achieved it in a pilot episode for a series I’ve devised, and one of the technical elements I learned from that which leads to quality messiness on the page works like this:

Get characters involved in each other’s storylines, for instance by having scenes in which a character’s actions create beats for two or more stories. In doing so, see if you can also get those actions to highlight different, even contrary, aspects of character to those established earlier.

Sound tricky? Well, it can be. But it’s a lot of fun getting it right, and feels a lot more like life than the A, B, C way of doing things…

Paying attention to commissioners can drive you crazy. A friend of mine who’s written a forthcoming feature film and done a few tv scripts was telling me about the things he’d heard from people in the market for sitcoms. Some years ago, received wisdom from the success of The Office was that edgy dark material was what the public wanted, which led to the excellent Nighty Night being commissioned. Now, the same people are all about touching upbeat comedy in the wake of Gavin and Stacey. Similarly, in mainstream drama, everyone’s looking for a family success that will emulate the Dr Who demographic. Like, who wouldn’t want a hugely popular franchise that spawns spin-offs and wins awards?

Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? Probably that it’s best to stick to your guns and write what you’re passionate about. If you’re following a trend, odds are it’ll be over by the time it comes round to commissioning whatever you’re working on, especially if the people who claimed they wanted it are so timid and fickle that they were only ever after a knockoff in the first place. Besides, write something that’s strong and unique, and it’ll never fall out of fashion, and will at least hopefully serve as a good calling card script even if nobody wants to commission the damn thing.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t learn something from what’s already out there. Let’s look at Big Brother. Why look at a reality show at all? Well, it’s come back for yet another series, it helps to define what Channel 4 is about, and it pulls in a substantial audience for a long time, many of them willing to watch spin-offs too.

Viewed as a drama, Big Brother just shouldn’t work. Take fifteen strangers, bring them together in a closed environment, and leave them to interact. Ensure that they’re not exposed to outside influences, and give them arbitrary things to do. Get rid of one person a week by the results of a poll, until there’s just one left: the winner. That’s pretty much it.

What’s interesting from this dramatically speaking is that Big Brother’s makers have confidence in our ability to get to know so many people so quickly. And they don’t expect us to like all of them - they know that audiences prefer to dislike at least some of the people parading for our entertainment. Yet where drama is concerned, writers are often told to create likeable protagonists with big character arcs and a small cast - Big Brother proves that audiences have the capacity to enjoy the tiny details of people interacting, without a plot, and instead relish the infinite gradations between loving and hating someone.

To some extent then, Big Brother is a soap opera. But what other lessons could writers and programme makers learn from its success and incorporate into fictional shows? Emulating reality tv is one direction, and The Office did that to perfection. But take a look at another show, Saxondale, to see the influence taken in a more interesting direction. There’s no pretence that Tommy Saxondale is the subject of a reality show, but the naturalism of Steve Coogan’s performance and the ebb and flow of the storylines are very influenced by the genre.

What would happen if that approach was taken to a drama rather than a comedy? I’d be interested in seeing what would happen if that surface ease was adopted by a show which had the social concerns of say, The Street. Perhaps that verite style of drama has been realised to some extent in a show like The Shield, but there the influence is on the surface: underneath it’s a much more conventional (albeit superbly scripted) drama with high stakes and evolving characters.

Lost is arguably another show influenced by reality television, allowing viewers to get immersed in the lives of strangers interacting in an arbitrary situation where weirdness intrudes. Only, the flashbacks create backgrounds and arcs to make it more of a conventional drama than it first appears.

A lot of writers are sniffy about reality tv, seeing it merely as cheap and nasty programming. But that misses an important point. Big Brother isn’t the enemy: it’s proven that there’s an appetite for a different form of narrative television in audiences worldwide. Canny dramatists and programme makers would do well to learn from that.

Less than an hour ago I received an email from people associated with A Popular Evening Drama confirming that the sample script I’d written at their request was not going to be commissioned. Sigh. There were some positive noises made about the script I wrote, but bottom line is that’s the end of that particular adventure, at least for the foreseeable future.

So, what do I learn from that experience? Well, it confirms the difficulty of getting onto Britain’s top television dramas, which is no great surprise. I learned a lot planning and writing that script, and thoroughly enjoyed the process of doing so. The lessons I’ve learned about writing in a more linear fashion than I’m used to will be of real value in the future: having to stay with a story because that’s the way the show works, rather than cutting away to another plot as I’d often be inclined to do, stretched me in useful ways.

I’m also confident that I did a creditable job at writing some established characters, staying faithful to their personalities as previously portrayed and hopefully playing with them a little to show some of their less familiar aspects. And I can honestly say that I did the best possible job I could on the script, which is the most important thing. Of course, that raises an awkward question: if my best possible job wasn’t good enough, can I actually write to the standard required of shows such as A Popular Evening Drama?

Hmm. Yes, that really is an awkward question. And my gut answer is ‘Of course I can write for those shows, and more importantly write ones better still when I’m writing what I want instead of being constrained by someone else’s characters and format‘. Which then begs the question of how I get the opportunity to get those shows seen by anyone if I don’t first go through the hoops required to script existing programmes.

See how easy it is to get sidetracked into notions that can undermine your confidence? Fortunately I’ve been here before, and am robust enough to take it on the chin, drawing on feedback I’ve got from people who’ve read various scripts and commented favourably on them. Plus, damnit, I’ve been commissioned before and I’ll be commissioned again. Right now, a small and cool production company are asking me to write a feature, and another interesting outfit are waiting for a treatment for a tv drama from me…so all is not lost. And beyond those immediate prospects, there are two people wanting me to write features with them, and some animators asking me to develop a multi-platform concept.

So: the non-appearance of A Popular Evening Drama commission is a setback, but it doesn’t stop me in my tracks. At this point, I seriously doubt anything could: I’ve been in much much worse situations before now and come up smelling of roses, and that notion of rebound is hardwired now. I bounce back.

Plus, if I look at the statistics concerning this situation, I’m reassured. I know how many people were asked at the same time as I was to write sample scripts, and I know how many people are being brought onboard. Sorry to be vague there, but I don’t want to risk compromising confidentiality for anyone involved in the project.

So it goes. I’ve enjoyed and learned from watching A Popular Evening Drama these last few months, and will continue to do so. And, as ever, I’m waiting to hear back regarding another application which could do my career the world of good…or, maybe you’ll be reading another post like this one in a couple of months.

Whatever became of the big politically-charged drama? There was a whole agitprop tradition in eighties theatre, and you can look at Boys from the Blackstuff as the humanist continuation of that spirit on television. But where did that current go next?

Bleasdale’s anger, channeled through the searing Blackstuff scripts, was directly provoked by the actions of Margaret Hilda Thatcher. With her out of the way, a lot of that ire went - but where to? The sad truth is that subsequent Labour governments have been an embarrassment to many voters on the left, as the party that created the welfare state has embraced market values and become in many ways indistinguishable from its old opponents. In the process, the Labour party has learned a lot about the media, and as it’s become more savvy about spin, the notion of sincere committed drama seems as old hat and irrelevant as standing up for free school milk.

It’s in that growth of a sophisticated media culture that answers to the question of where political writing has gone can be found. Politics and media have become ever more intertwined, and it’s impossible to treat media with the straight-faced sincerity that led to shows such as When The Boat Comes In, say. A drama about people struggling to get by in the depression as traditional industry declines…can you imagine that on tv now? And on what channel?

So, instead of drama wearing its heart on its sleeve, we have scripts that are inevitably satirical in nature since it’s impossible to do media about media without becoming aware of the ironies involved. The most striking example has got to be The Thick Of It, a dissection of the mechanics of spin and the personalities who practice it that is second to none.

Two names stand out as being able to hold a mirror to the nose of the establishment: Chris Morris and Armando Ianniuci. And it’s the fact that the mirror is held to the nose, for snorting purposes, that creates a problem: this is satire so accurate that it’s indistinguishable from the real thing, and is praised by those it parodies. It also excludes a big chunk of the audience who are not as media-literate as its creators: so how can we get a modern audience to sit through a drama with a political element that isn’t some kind of meta-response to the circus it examines?

The best answer to that comes in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott. Both have a knack for writing drama with a strong social element that is emotionally engaging, clever without being up its arse. McGovern’s been at it longer, and back in his run on Cracker there are some excellent episodes examining the state of the nation while still providing a compelling protagonist and crime hooks. Abbott’s politics started to show through in Clocking Off, a means of exploring the different social worlds orbiting a factory in the north. It was also a sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television, and McGovern has done much the same with the more recent The Street. Scratch Abbott’s Shameless, and you’ll find rich social themes underpinning the comedy-drama, and ones that don’t pay simplistic allegiance to the left: the Gallaghers look after themselves and those around them, and if that means milking the state because it’s systems are so slow and cumbersome, then so be it. You can be feckless, and give a feck.

All of this interests me because I’m about to develop a treatment for a tv drama set around a bit of fairly recent British social history that I find fascinating, and believe has a lot of relevance and resonance for the way we live now. And I’m searching for a way to write it that will allow me to include a whole bunch of necessary research and bring it alive for a modern audience, one that probably didn’t watch Our Friends In The North, but likes Spooks, that’s sort of concerned about CCTV but even more about hoodies, and is just as likely to read The Mail as The Mirror. I know it can be done: the task is to find my way through it to reach that audience and share with them my concerns about the time the story will be set, and how that relates to the world we now inhabit.

So, Peep Show is back, which means there’s a watchable British sitcom on the air again for the first time in a while. It’s glorious stuff, and just when you think it can’t go any further in exploring the intersection of personal selfishness and public life, it takes one more clodhopping step into the awkward, the repellent, the unsayable.

Writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are immersed in the characters and world they’ve created, and combine flawless plotting with deep insight into motivation, and - where Jez is concerned - lack of motivation. But for all the failings of Jez and Mark, they’re still recognisably human characters: this isn’t fullblown misanthropy, more an accurate dissection of yer actual human condition.

The show makes full use of its post-watershed status, the latest episode featuring episodes of oral sex, frottage, homosexuality and drug abuse. It’s all in the tradition of Joe Orton, who if he was alive now might lose some of his reputation for scandalousness, but would at least hopefully be employed by Channel 4 or BBC3 to write scabrous sitcoms, a fate he could never have imagined in his lifetime.

The fact that Jez and Mark are played by the inherently likeable Mitchell and Webb (who I’m not much fussed about in their own shows) helps defuse the danger of the scripts: there’s something about their cleancut common room look that mellows out the sheer obscenity of what goes on in Peep Show.

Earlier in the evening, a leading character in British tv had a daughter, and so concerned are the custodians of his reputation that no hint of sexuality sullied this turn of events. The character was Dr Who, and daughter Jenny’s conception, gestation, and birth took all of 2 minutes, after which she sprang into life as a fully-formed adult, with all the vitality and eagerness of a childrens’ tv presenter. And don’t be surprised if that’s where Jenny ends up: this whole episode seemed to be geared up to providing a franchise-spinning opportunity out of an otherwise lacklustre story.

The problem was that what happened was all too familiar to longer term fans of the show: the Doctor arrives on a planet to encounter warring factions and unites them through discovering something they have in common. Perfectly good format as it goes, but there was no sign that the team responsible for this episode had done their groundwork in terms of checking out old episodes or reading good science fiction novels. So instead of an exciting new take on an old theme that would give younger viewers a thrill, we got a fairly tired tale that wouldn’t satisfy any of the children I know or the adults either. A pity: Dr Who can be a remarkable show when everything’s working, as I’m sure it’ll be again later in the series.