Eurovision 2024

As always, we cats were really looking forward to this year's Eurovision Singing Competition. Despite the attempts of some mannys to spoil it for the rest of us by getting all of their rivals disqualified before the singing even began, it still went ahead in Sweden.

They last hosted it in 2016, and they really know how to put on a show, with a great performance by Swedish disco group Alcazar at the interval. Though sadly no involvement from Måns Zelmerlöw (purr) this year.

If Luxembourg had really wanted to win, they could just have gotten their giant CGI cats to nom all the other competitors. Maybe the cats were just there to guard their singing manny from her rivals?

The first really exciting performance came from Spain, who had Katy Manning singing, scantily clad mannys dancing, and a keytar - now that's Eurovision!

Estonia also had a great entry, with the first komedy song of the night. I have no idea what it was about.

But good as Spain and Estonia were, they were just the warm up for Ireland's entry. It looks like they're finally ready to properly try and win again. They even included a Bucks Fizz style costume rip, it must be literally minutes since we last saw one of those. But the strangest thing about their performance was the 4:3 aspect ratio - was this coming to us from somewhere in the last century?

Greece started off ordinary, but soon became a typically incomprehensible Greek entry with several changes in style across the course of the song.

Finland's silly entry quickly became my favourite, being sung by "Windows95man," a rude manny with no pants on. And then when he was made to put pants on, fireworks came out of them, lol. So stupid but brilliant. Pure Eurovision craziness.

Armenia combined traditional folk costume on the singer with modern crazy dancing and interacting with the swooping camera. In a typical year they might have stood out more, but the standard this year was high - though not for all songs.

Croatia had a cat in their introductory video, but sadly the cat was not the singer of the song, it was the manny in the middle. Mew.

It is a Eurovision tradition that at least one entry has costumes that look like they were provided by the Federation, and this year it was Austria's turn, the very last song to be performed.

Switzerland won. I don't know why. But then we never do. The reasons why mannys vote the way they do is an impenetrable mystery to us cats.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Twelve

It's not often we get the goodys doing a classic slow-cutting through a door, I haven't seen one of those since Ambassadors OF DEATH. By the time they get the door to the bridge opened, the Vervoids have already gassed Bruchner with their "marsh gas" powers that they happen to have. This prevents the Doctor or any of the mannys from going in, but not the aliens.

The aliens get the ship back under control, and then turn out to be baddys in league with Mr Rudge. This twist shows the difference between this section of The Trial of a Time Lord and the earlier two sections, in that while they suffered from being squeezed into their four episodes along with the courtroom scenes, this needed to be padded out with an extra subplot to fill four parts.

An unseen attacker throws something wet in the faces of the aliens on the bridge, and naturally enough this causes them to go

Mel, Doland and Janet find their bodies and then convince Mr Rudge that their hijack has failed (except as a means of making the episode a bit longer). Doland disarms Rudge, who runs away to get killed by the Vervoids. The Doctor takes the pewpewpew gun, which seems out of character for him. Even Mel, who hasn't even met the Doctor yet, is surprised by how out of character this is and she asks him:

Mel: "A phaser? You?"

Doctor: "Exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures."

He hints to her that he is setting a trap for the murderer, and needs the pewpewpew gun for that.

Doland tries to trick the Doctor to get his paws on the pewpewpew gun, but when he does the Doctor has already borked it. The Doctor explains how he knew it was Doland:

Doctor: "It wasn't difficult to pinpoint you. The first murder could only have been carried out by someone with access to this unit. The second needed poison. Even the abortive attempt on Mel's life could only have been committed by someone who could go unchallenged into the isolation room and get the anaesthetic."

Doland: "All this could have applied to Lasky."

Doctor: "No. Not the Mogarians. She was a hostage when they were slaughtered."

Doland reveals his motive to be "avarice." He wants to use the Vervoids as slave labour on Earth instead of robots. Good news for the robots I suppose. Doland gets captured by Tonker Travers when he tries to run away, but he then gets rescued by the Vervoids who kill his guard.

This 'rescue' lasts only a few seconds, because then the Vervoids surround and kill Doland.

The Doctor has deduced why the Vervoids want to kill them all, because they are made from plants while the Doctor, the mannys and the aliens are all "animal-kind." Mel says

"Doctor, if you're right, then coexistence with the Vervoids is an impossibility."

Tonker Travers asks the Doctor for his "undivided commitment" in helping them fight the Vervoids, which causes the Doctor in the courtroom to stop the Matrix to say

"And there you have it: the direct request. I did not meddle; I was presented with an appeal. And not just from anybody, but from the man in whom authority was vested."

This seems a very late stage in the story for the Doctor to make this point in his defence. Why didn't he say something like this when the TARDIS first received the mayday call, or even when Tonker Travers first asked for his help when the mystery started happening?

It doesn't really matter, because the whole basis of the Doctor's defence doesn't make any sense - how can even a Time Lord defend himself against accusations of meddling in the past by saying he won't meddle in the future? Terror of the Vervoids would have made for a perfectly serviceable story (if hardly a classic) outside the confines of the trial story, but these episodes would have been better spent on the Doctor attempting to unravel the mysteries inherent to the trial itself: Why prosecute him in this way, and why now? Who is the Valeyard, and what is his motivation? How was the supposedly infallible Matrix made to lie, and by whom? The Doctor's defence does nothing to answer these questions, nor even make any progress towards answering them. As part of the trial, the whole four episodes are nothing but padding.

Professor Lasky tries to reason with the Vervoids without using the line 'No, stop, I created you,' but they kill her anyway. The Doctor and Mel find the big pile of ded bodies, a perfect visual metaphor for the unnecessarily high body count of this story.

It turns out that exactly the thing the Doctor needs to defeat the Vervoids is on board the ship: "vionesium," which is "a substance similar to magnesium." Tonker Travers lets the Doctor have all the vionesium he wants, which for some reason come in small globes that makes them look suspiciously like grenades.

The Doctor and Mel throw their vionesium bombs at the Vervoids, which go all brown and turn into a big pile of leaves. To be fair to this story, some of the effects in this bit are quite good, with one of the Vervoids changing colour in real time under a lighting effect. Then in the next scene the Doctor and Mel are getting into the TARDIS, after saying goodbye to Tonker Travers and Janet.

This is an incredibly contrived ending which comes out of nowhere, with everything that happens after Lasky was killed coming across as having been written in a hurry, or as an afterthought, as though the writers lost interest after the (quite clever) exposing of the murderer. Or maybe we could put the blame on the laziness of the director, who couldn't give a shit about pacing the story properly if it kept him away from the BBC bar? More likely it's some combination of both, but I fear this is one crime that will remain unsolved.

Anyway, speaking of contrived...

Back in the courtroom, the Inquisitor and Valeyard decide that the Doctor must be charged with killing the Vervoids under "article seven of Gallifreyan law." As established all the way back in part one, they are allowed to do this because article one of Gallifreyan law states that the charges being brought against the accused can be whatever the plot needs them to be at any given moment, especially when a cliffhanger is coming up. The Valeyard puts it this way:

"Article seven permits no exceptions. The Doctor has destroyed a complete species. The charge must now be genocide!"

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 8

Oh, and I've remembered what the Vervoids remind me of:

Campion (1989)

Peter "Davo" Davison stars as Albert Campion in this BBC detective series. Made around the same time as the BBC's Miss Marple series (which Davo made a guest appearance in) and the start of ITV's long-running Poirot, this has a similar feel and production style - helped a lot by this having a similar 1920s-30s period setting. Eight novels were adapated, with each being split across two 50-minute episodes.

Campion as a character is a posho with a shady past, able to pass among the aristocracy and the criminal classes just as easily. He also has a sense of humour, which involves cracking lame jokes at inopportune times, such as when a body has just been discovered. Davo fits the part well, able to give Campion a lightness of touch that sets him apart from other TV detectives of this subgenre, although his voice and mannerisms do occasionally remind me of his time as the Doctor. He also puts me in mind of a similar detective character, Mr Laxworthy, memorably played by Bernard Hepton in the 1970s Rivals of Sherlock Holmes series, with his superior intelligence and habit of using criminals (or ex-criminals) to do his dirty W-word for him.

Foremost of these ex-criminal servants is Campion's mannyservant Magersfontein Lugg, played by Brian "Gaffer" Glover. The third regular character is the ubiquitous friendly rival police Inspector (what private detective would be without one?) Stanislaus Oates, played by Andrew "Jarvik" Burt. Purr. Not as dim as some, Burt has the unenviable task of carving out his own niche in an overcrowded field full of Lestrades, Japps, and Slacks.

If names like "Magersfontein" and "Stanislaus" seem a bit too pointedly unlikely, I am quite sure this is deliberate. The series is played straight (save for Campion's in-character humour), but the events it depicts are at times so OTT that they must come across to viewers as parodies of the genre. That is because they are - something which I think is important to keep in mind as, paradoxically, this makes it easier to take them seriously.

1. Look to the Lady

The first story is a perfect example of what I mean, with an absurd plot about a noble family who keep an ancient chalice in their country house, which they must keep safe or else forfeit all of their wealth and estate. Fake chalices abound, as well as supernatural elements that Campion and Lugg reveal have mundane explanations... or do they? And then at the end it is implied that the chalice is your actual Holy Grail.

On first hearing the theme music you could be forgiven for thinking it was too twee to be real, but the important thing to remember is that it is Peter "Button Moon" Davison that is singing the "Da-da-da-da-de-da-dum" bits himself, and that knowledge suddenly makes it pawesome.

2. Police at the Funeral

A more conventional murder-mystery than the first story, much more approachable for any fan of the genre, though the downside of this is that Campion comes across as more of a conventional, Agatha Christie-style detective in this one than in the first, where he got to make use of a broader selection of his skills.

The guest cast in this is pretty impressive, with Mary "Dance of the Dead" Morris as the stern matriarch of the upper-class family Campion is staying with, and Timothy West as Inspector Oates's prime suspect. West had a run of appearances alongside Davo in the late '80s, this being the third after they were in the same Miss Marple together, and then West made a memorable one-off appearance in Davo's A Very Peculiar Practice.

3. The Case of the Late Pig

Davo is reunited with Michael "Hedin" Gough in the most convoluted case yet. With mysterious cryptic letters, a dead manny turning up only to have been killed again, and bodysnatching, not to mention a substantial cast of suspects to be introduced, there's little time for Campion and Lugg's own eccentricities so it resembles a more generic murder mystery. Since this also happened in Police at the Funeral, it seems the promise of the first story for Campion to be a manny of many skills beyond just being an amateur detective seems to have fallen by the wayside, now he's just an amateur detective with an ex-criminal for a mannyservant sidekick.

That said, the actual murder mystery plot is a good one. The audience is kept guessing throughout part one, and it isn't until after a second murder takes place that things begin to fall into place. John Fortune also appears, and the police presence is provided by Moray "George Frobisher in Rumpole" Watson.

4. Death of a Ghost

This is the first time we hear "Albert" Campion addressed as "Bertie," which made me think that surely somebody somewhere has done a crossover with Jeeves and Wooster? Once again this has little room for Campion to show any of his skills other than his detecting, though there is a larger role for Chief Inspector Oates this time, with Lugg somewhat sidelined and mostly reduced to sniping quips and making impertinent comments about Campion's lack of progress with the case.

A strong first part sets up a nice mystery, and the second part looks to be confounding the typical tropes of the genre when Campion explains who did it and how well before the end of the episode. But Oates needs proof before he will arrest the suspect, which Campion lacks, so the final act is him trying to get the murderer to incriminate themselves.

There are shades of Columbo in this, perhaps (though we viewers don't actually know Campion is right, having not seen them do it like we would have in a Columbo), but few Columbos have a resolution that's as poorly handled as this, with Campion coming out on top only through luck, not through using his brains or skills. This ending lets the story down badly, making this the weakest of the series so far. Davo does get to do some nice "drunk as a lord" acting, though, so it's not terrible.

Milton Johns and Rosalie Crutchley are the main guest actors of note. I daresay there were a few other faces we cats recognised from other TV programmes of the era.

5. Sweet Danger

The second season sees a change to the titles, with Davo no longer being allowed to sing along with the theme tune. To make up for it, we get what is definitely the best story yet, largely thanks to the presence of Iain Cuthbertson as a master criminal. In a welcome change from yet another murder mystery, this is a plot with a treasure hunt and a race against the baddys to get to it first.

Campion even has more allies (or Companions, might we call them?) than just Lugg in this one, with David "Pangol" Haig as an old friend, and Lysette "Krull" Anthony as a love-interest-of-the-week helping him out, while Cuthbertson has on his side reliable old character actors Paul Brooke and Richard Pearson, the latter playing a random satanist.

The twists and turns of the plot get increasingly outlandish, but at least this is the first time since the first episode where the series has fulfilled its promise of being more than just a knock-off Agatha Christie, and Campion more than a generic period detective. The presence of Cuthbertson tips it over into being the best story of the whole series by a comfortable margin.

6. Dancers in Mourning

We return to murder mysteries with a bang. A murder is followed by the killer having to do more murders and murder attempts to try and keep their identity from the first murder covered up, including one done using a bomb that explodes in public, killing several innocent bystanders. This is a spectacular event to end the first episode on, but the spirit of JNT lives on when that's not the cliffhanger - instead there's an additonal scene where Campion is told about the bombing, and then Davo looks into camera while making a sort of "well whaddaya know?" type face as the credits start to roll.

The convoluted tale takes screen time away from the regulars, though Campion still has time to fall for a married woman, the second episode in a row to feature an unsuitable love-interest-of-the-week for him. On the plus side, we see more of Chief Inspector Oates, and while he can't quite keep up with Campion, he is shown to be no fool. The biggest problem with this story is that too many of the characters are ahead of the viewers - knowing things we've not been made privy to, that sort of thing - that we are left playing catchup in a pretty unsatisfactory manner.

The main guest star is Ian "Drusus" Ogilvy, who plays a stage musical actor. Despite the packed plot, the first part takes time to show us a significant amount of his musical number, which I suspect was more fun for the actors than the viewers. And pity the poor choreographer who must have been asked to recreate a deliberatly hideous, cheesy 1930s dance routine.

Oh yes, the series is now confirmed as being set in the mid-1930s. I'm no great expert on the inter-war period, but it feels to me like it could have been set any time in the '20s or '30s due to the lack of any topical events pinning it to a particular year, save that they have started being more specific in the dates they give on screen.

7. Flowers for the Judge

Probably the best of the straight murder-mystery plots, largely thanks to a satisfying twist ending. Part of the story looks as though it may have been shot around the same London docklands environment where Davo would have made Resurrection of the Daleks a few years earlier, needing little changed to make it plausibly the 1930s.

Christopher "Any politics?" Benjamin has a guest appearance as a magistrate, though the main guest characters are played by Robert Lang (most familiar to me as the titular "fascist beast" from the Rumpole episode of the same name) and Barrie Ingham (who I would like to say is best known for playing Sejanus in ITV's The Caesars, but obviously he is really best known for playing the worst Irish stereotype of all time in an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation) as two of the murder suspects.

8. Mystery Mile

The final story has parallels with the earlier Sweet Danger, since in both Campion goes up against a mysterious master criminal and his organisation. While this is undoubtedly one of the better stories of the series, with Campion using his criminal skills and contacts, and assembling his own gang to combat the villain's gang - and to rescue the damsel-in-distress-of-the-week - it is clearly inferior to Sweet Danger, lacking an adversary of Cuthbertson's stature. This time the criminal's identity is unknown, though anyone familiar with the genre may be able to deduce who it is by applying the law of conservation of narrative details to the shortlist of possible suspects.

Spoilers for the identity of the main villain follow: There are really only two possible candidates, and since Miles "House of Cards" Anderson is too obviously playing a wrongun, it can only really be Robert Robinson (not that one, tush and fipsy) and his wandering foreign accent. Was Paul Freeman not available?

Other guest actors of note include Geoffrey Bayldon - who might have been a suspect/red herring if only he had been in it for long enough - and Gary Parker, who was a familiar rentayank on British TV screens in the late '80s and early '90s.

Andrew Burt is missing and much missed from the final two stories, as a result of which neither end up having much involvement from the police. They are both quite packed stories, so it might be that he was cut for time, I am - alas - not at all familiar with the original Campion novels in order to say how much was omitted, added, or changed in adapting them for TV.

Oh, and just as Jon Pertwee got the gratuitous chase sequence included in his swansong, here Davo gets the opportunity to sing.

In many ways this series is worth checking out for Davo alone. Made only five years after he left Doctor Who, he is a leading manny again and playing a heroic character with some traits in common with the Doctor, yet he has matured considerably as an actor. When he is allowed to (some scripts just didn't seem to have the room) he gives Campion an edge which we really only saw him give the Doctor in Caves of Androzani. Perhaps it helped having Brian Glover as his sidekick instead of Janet Fielding?

The three stories in which Campion is allowed to be more than just a generic period TV detective, easily taken for a ripoff of an Agatha Christie, show what could have been done with the series, but even these are - with one exception - hampered by the style of the production. Even when trying to convey to us that people's lives are in danger or other high stakes situations, the feeling you mostly get as a viewer is that this is a comfy pair of slippers; a sleepy Sunday evening drama. Campion's sense of humour, where he cracks barely-witty jokes in the face of adversity, doesn't help, but the tone is set from the outset, with an incredibly lightweight title sequence and theme music.

So it was probably destined to never be considered a classic of the genre - especially with David Suchet's definitive Poirot starting around that same time - but it has a number of positives that make it worthwhile, not least the strong regular cast and interesting guest cast, which I have tried to highlight here.

I have to wonder how easy it would be to edit the series, possibly using clips taken from Black Orchid, to give the impression that Campion was the Doctor all the time? After all, in the first episode it was stated that "Albert Campion" was not his real name, and that he was a minor member of the aristocracy... in other words he is related to lords, or Time Lords..?

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eleven

Within the confines of the show the Doctor was on trial. At the BBC the show itself was on trial. But on the evening that part eleven of The Trial of a Time Lord was first broadcast on the BBC, the BBC itself was also on trial.

That week a manny had been killed while practising a stunt to perform for The Late, Late Breakfast Show, a programme that shared in the same Saturday-night line-up as Doctor Who. It was immediately cancelled, and in its intended timeslot the BBC showed the film One of Our Dinosuars is Missing - proving that even nine years after The Talons of Weng-Chiang the BBC was still happy for mannys in yellowface to take starring roles in their Saturday night family entertainments.

The manny in the isolation room is another one of Professor Lasky's assistants, who is turning into a plant-based monster by mistaik. Speaking of mistaiks, did the Doctor mean to show the court The Seeds of Doom and put this story on instead?

Mel delivers the first of a number of stagy, even pantomime-level line-readings when she says

"Never mind the Just So stories, that guard looks triggerhappy to me."

There'll be more of this sort of delivery later on in the story and it did Bonnie Langford's reputation no favours with Doctor Who fans.

We get out first proper look at the Vervoids in a scene where we see that they are keeping all the ded mannys in a big pile where they can keep an eye on them. Or whatever the Vervoids have instead of eyes. The design of their costumes remind me of something, but I can't quite think what it is at the moment... never mind, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Mel hears them whispering exposition to each other and, thinking fast, even manages to get a tape recording of their voices - lucky for her the retro technology of the Hyperion Three is exactly like the technology of her home time period. There's just time for Mel to hear

"We must not make animalkind aware of our existence. They still outnumber us. If we are to kill them all, we must hunt them down secretly."

before she gets captured by an unseen manny. The Doctor comes in to find Mel gone, but the tape is still recording so he rewinds it and plays it back.

So for those keeping score that's me watching a recording of the trial where the Doctor is watching a recording of himself listening to a recording of Mel.

From the recording the Doctor deduces where Mel must be, and runs off to "the pulveriser" because it makes perfect sense that the ship would pulverise its dirty towels into fragments and send them floating into space instead of cleaning them in some kind of futuristic washing machine.

A brief scene showing that the Dcotor has smashed up the ship's communications room with an axe is the most unambiguous distortion of the Matrix so far, all attempts at subtlety - both within and without the programme - abandoned at this moment. In the cortroom the Doctor shouts out

"I didn't do that!"

which leads into a reiteration of the points made in part nine that the Doctor must use the Matrix for his defence even though he cannot rely on it to show the truth, and neither the Inquisitor nor (supposedly) the Valeyard believe that the Matrix has been or even can be tampered with. We do at least get a funny line from the Valeyard in response to the Doctor:

"Ridiculous, we all saw you! You're hardly mistakable in that... outfit."

Lol - guilty as charged on that count, Doctor!

Bruchner has decided that to kill the Vervoids and to stop Professor Lasky and Doland making more of them he will have to blow them all up, so he stages a one-manny hijack of the Hyperion Three, going so far as to pew Tonker Travers in the paw to show he means business. He aims the ship at a black hole.

The Doctor tries to come up with plans to recapture the bridge from Bruchner, but Travers says they won't W-word because "it's designed to be hijack proof." I think this is the writers putting in a little joke based on the ironic way certain supposedly "unsinkable" ships inevitably ended up getting sunk.

The ship starts to shake, resulting in the breakage of several coffee cups. I think this is the writers putting in a little reference to the missile attack on the Heart of Gold in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

Professor Lasky doesn't understand what's going on, so the Doctor spells it out to her:

"Your colleague is aiming the Hyperion Three into the eye of the black hole of Tartarus."

Close-up* on the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

* Lazy director can't even be bothered with a crash-zoom.

The Dog Report

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Ten

Mel has woken up a super-grumpy POV monster, and the first thing it does is POV-attack a manny.

When Professor Lasky's assistants, Bruchner and Doland, go to the hydroponic centre they find all of their secret pods are empty. They obviously know more about what is going on from the way they say

Doland: "Some fool must have introduced high intensity light into the centre."

Bruchner: "We're confronted with a catastrophe and that's your reaction? Don't you realise what's been unleashed?"

A catastrophe? That sounds great! Meanwhile, the security officer Mr Rudge is more concerned about who in the "isolation room" and has been breaking all their plates.

Some aliens chat to the Doctor about their concerns over mannys mining on their planet, with one describing mannys as "going through the universe like a plague of interplanetary locusts." The Valeyard interrupts this conversation to claim it is irrelevant, but the Doctor counters that something important just happened if the Valeyard had been paying attention. The Inquisitor asks

"Gentlemen, is this case to be resolved with a battle of words or to be conducted via the Matrix?"

I mean... surely it's both? Arguments by the prosecution and defendant have to be required in order to contextualise why and how the Matrix evidence supports their case, right? Otherwise none of these interruptions should be permitted... oh. Maybe she has a point after all?

One of the aliens gets poisoned and goes

except when the Doctor removes his helmet it turns out he is really a manny.

The Valeyard demands to know how the Doctor knew he wasn't an alien, and accuses the Doctor of "editing the Matrix" (something he is supposed to believe is impossible, so this is actually a big clue to him being the baddy behind everything). The Doctor demonstrates how he knew by replaying an earlier scene where the real aliens had to use a translator to be understood by mannys, while the fake alien didn't need one.

This is a rare use of the trial setting to do something that an ordinary story couldn't do by having a detective replay the discovery of a clue to show off his own cleverness (though the same effect could have been achieved for the viewers at home by making use of a flashback), which only goes to show that Pip and Jane Baker, writers of this section of The Trial of a Time Lord, understood their brief and made best use of the format out of any of the season's writers.

Professor Lasky, Bruchner and Doland argue about what they should do next, with Bruchner saying:

"Can't you accept we're on the brink of disaster?"

Cla... no, wait, that's a completely different Doctor Who episode he's just dropped the title of. We see a bit more of their differing personalities in this scene, with Bruchner seemingly being the only one with a conscience. (Maybe that's because he used to be a policemanny, in Softly Softly: Task Force?)

They are unaware that they are being observed by the POV monster, although we get our first sight of it - in accordance with tradition, this isn't a full view but rather one where it is in shadow and partially concealed.

The POV monster next goes after the old manny, who is about to have some sleeps. It must still be really grumpy from having been woken up, and sees this as a form of poetic justice.

The Doctor and Mel finally decide to investigate the mysterious isolation room after they see Lasky come out of it. It has been too conspicuously featured during this episode - with multiple (seemingly unrelated) scenes taking place just outside it - for them to ignore it forever. Or, to put it another way, it must have something to do with the plot under the law of conservation of narrative details.

Inside is a secret pod-like chamber in which a manny is having some sleeps. The Doctor and Mel wake her up - oh noes! Have they learned nothing from the end of part nine cliffhanger?

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 7

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Nine

So... Peri is dead and the Matrix has been tampered with to incriminate the Doctor. Doubtless, now that we are more than halfway through the story, the Doctor will be looking for a way to exonerate himself and at the same time bring the true culprits to justice. To do this he will need to investigate the Matrix and find out who had the means and opportunity to set all of this up, and the motive to frame the Doctor for the crimes he is accused of.

Not really, what he'll actually do is attempt to clear his name by using the Matrix (despite knowing full well by now that it cannot be relied upon to show the truth) to show the Inquisitor a Doctor Who story from "the future."

Valeyard: "The future? Is it going to be the Doctor's defence that he improves?"

Doctor: "Precisely."

When the production team came up with the idea of using the basic plot structure from A Christmas Carol as the structure for The Trial of a Time Lord* I'm not sure they entirely thought through all of the implications for how the 'Christmas future' bit would work - not just being set in the future (which Doctor Who does all the time) but in the Doctor's own future, which hasn't happened to him yet, which therefore means he'll be seeing things he hasn't even done yet. Does this then mean that when he does do them he has to do what he did when he saw what he would do, or can he do things differently and thus change the future that he saw back when he was seeing it?

I somehow doubt that the writers even thought about this enough to become as confused about it as I am now.

The Doctor's story is set in the year 2986, a suspiciously exact 1,000 years in the future of when Trial of a Time Lord was made, on the spaceship Hyperion Three - named after the Investigator's spaceship in The Mutants perhaps? The first scene we see on board the Hyperion Three is before the TARDIS has even arrived, although the question of how this footage could have been captured for the Matrix is of secondary importance to all the questions that arise over the fact that, being set in the Doctor's own personal future, none of this has happened to him yet. Chief among these questions being: if the Doctor can use the Matrix to see his own personal future, why didn't he just use it to find out what will happen at the end of Trial of a Time Lord?

The first character we meet is Professor Lasky, played by Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman. We also meet some other characters but who cares about them; they're nothing to do with cats.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor is with a new Companion, Mel (Bonnie "Mel" Langford), who he has picked up at some point in between the end of Trial of a Time Lord and this bit of Trial of a Time Lord. Confused cat is confused. Mel is making the Doctor do exercise, because the production team is having a go at Colin Baker er, no, that would actually seem to be the only justification for this bit:

Mel: "It's your waistline I'm concerned about."

She also gives him "carrot juice" to nom, which he does not like. I am forced to conclude that the only reason he let her in the TARDIS in the first place is because he looked into the future and saw that he had to.

They receive a mayday message from the Hyperion Three and the TARDIS materialises there. While it is not yet as blatantly obvious as it will later become that this story is a pastiche of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, we get an early hint from the Doctor's line

"Let's exercise the grey cells for once, shall we, rather than the muscles."

The Doctor also says that he can "sense" that "there's evil in this place." While this is not a wholly new Time Lord ability being displayed by the Doctor, it is rarely seen - he says something similar upon first arriving in The War Machines. The Doctor and Mel go out and get captured by some security mannys.

They are taken to the bridge where the Doctor recognises the manny in charge as being "Captain Tonker Travers," although he insists he has been promoted to "Commodore." This is a bit like when the Doctor met Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in The Invasion only to find he had been promoted to Brigadier since the Doctor last met him, except that we have never actually seen Tonker Travers before. He must have met him before in a story that hasn't been made yet. Mew. Travers says

"Of all the places in this infinite universe, you have to turn up on my ship."

which is an amateur-hour misquoting of Casablanca... unless, of course, he's quoting accurately from one of the many remakes of that film made between now and 2986? We get some hints about the Doctor's previous meeting with Travers from their dialogue:

Travers: "On the previous occasion that the Doctor's path crossed mine, I found myself involved in a web of mayhem and intrigue."

Doctor: "I saved your ship though, Commodore."

Travers: "Yes, you did. Though whether it would have been at risk without your intervention is another matter."

So we can see why the Doctor didn't choose that story to show the court, then.

Mel goes to the ship's incredibly futuristic space gymnasium, where the technology is so advanced that it looks like gym apparatus from the 1980s. After Mel ignores Professor Lasky and her assistant acting suspiciously right next to her, an unseen character gives her a clue (Lionel Blair?) and then disappears mysteriously. If Mel was a PC in a tabletop RPG, this would be a clear example of the GM having had enough of her player's bullshit.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is on the pull... or possibly just trying to get some clues from Janet (dammit!) the stewardess. Mr Rudge, the ship's chief of security, tells the Doctor that he's "due to retire after this voyage," which is as good a way of indicating that he won't be surviving to the end of the story as if he had kiffed Avon... though not nearly as much fun, lol.

There's an emergency in the waste disposal room, which Travers summarises for us:

"Whoever's been dumped in there has been pulverised into fragments and sent floating into space, and in my book that's murder."

I didn't think anything had a chance of matching BRIAN BLESSED'S "I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!" for best line of the story, but that is certainly a contender.

As Mel goes off alone to investigate the ship's "hydroponics centre" for clues, the Doctor in the courtroom interrupts the story - which was otherwise at risk of setting a record for the longest uninterrupted section of trial evidence - to claim that it has been changed:

"I can't explain, but I have a feeling I am being manipulated, that the evidence is being distorted."

The Inquisitor doesn't believe him, and says

"Doctor, either you continue with your submission or I must consider the evidence for the defence to be concluded."

which seems a rather arbitrary ruling, but does at least raise the stakes for the Doctor - he must now put himself in the paws of what the Matrix will show, even though he knows that an unknown adversary is capable of changing it. It's contrived, but at least it's dramatic.

Mel meets Mr Edwardes, played by Simon "Inspector Kite in The Bill" Slater. I know he didn't start playing Inspector Kite until a year after this was made, but I think that, since it is set in the future, he must have been in The Bill by then. Colin Baker (1997), Lynda Bellingham (2004) and Michael Jayston (2000 and 2006) all certainly had.

Edwardes offers to accompany Mel into the hydroponics centre. He says

"Now I'll go first. We don't want you breaking your neck. At least, not until..."

We'll never know when he did want Mel to break her neck, because at this point he gets electriced.

Crash-zoom to the Doctor's... wait, the Doctor isn't even in this scene!

It doesn't even crash-zoom to Mel's face. Instead, Mel screams really loudly and shrilly, and her screams wake up something that was having nice sleeps inside one of the hydroponic centre's secret pods.

I bet it'll be really grumpy.

* As Doctor Who Superfan Ian Levine said on the Trials and Tribulations DVD documentary:

"And the idea was the Christmas Carol idea of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas future, and Eric [Saward] was very taken with this."

The Bill, seasons two and three

The Bill returned for a second run of 12 episodes in 1985. Retaining the same hourlong format and post-watershed timeslot, the only clue that gives away that this was a different production block being a change in the regular cast line up.

The most obvious absence was PC Dave Litten (Gary Olsen), one of the main characters in the first season but now relegated to only a single guest appearance. Some new regular characters were introduced, including PCs Pete Muswell, Abe Lyttleton and Nick Shaw, with Muswell seemingly taking Litten's role as the PC who is a little bit dodgy. Actually that's an understatement - Muswell is several steps beyond Litten, being an unapologetic racist whose attitudes go unchallenged by his colleagues simply because they were so prevalent at the time. He also has a (topical, in 1985) backstory about having policed at the 1984 miner's strike, making lots of money from overtime and enjoying himself at the same time. Muswell and Lyttleton would only appear in season two, departing between seasons just as mysteriosuly as they arrived.

Overall the second season isn't as good as the first, with some episodes that struggled to make full use of the runtime, and which had to be padded out with unrelated B-plots that never quite joined up with the main plots in a satisfactory way. It still contains some really good episodes, including one of the best Bill stories evar, Ringer.

This was an episode about a serious car crash and the ensuing investigation that made excellent use of the regulars at all ranks and disciplines of the Sun Hill police force, from the PCs on the scene of the accident, to Mr Brownlow coordinating the response, to the CID team detecting who was responsible. It culminates with the second guest apearance from DS "Tommy" Burnside (Chris Ellison) when he unexpectedly turns up undercover, having been independently investigating the same criminals. This is a wonderfully put together piece of TV drama, and might well be The Bill's finest hour - certainly it's the best single episode of the early years.

After season two there was a gap of almost two years before the third season was shown on ITV in 1987. This season - another 12 programmes in the same format as the first two seasons - is remarkable for being script edited by Chris Boucher, the same role as he played throughout all four seasons of Blakes 7. It's therefore surprising that this season didn't end on a fantastic cliffhanger.

Once again there was turnover amongst the regulars. Perhaps the main new addition to the cast was Inspector Kite, who seemed to be there to be an antagonist for Sgt Cryer - outranking him but lacking his years of practical experience, they had very different approaches to policing that naturally brought them into conflict.

But Kite would last only the one season, so with hindsight it is fair to say that the more significant development was that PC Tony Stamp (Graham Cole) would finally get recognised as a named character with an occasional line all to himself, instead of just being the silent PC in the background he had been up until now.

Another noteworthy change in the series setup that would have long-lasting implications was that this is the point when PC Jim Carver (our original POV character back in the pilot, though now well-established as part of the ensemble cast) moved from the uniform branch to CID, where he would stay for many years to become one of the show's iconic detective constables. It does have to be said that this is quite a change for the character, going by his characterisation as established in his earliest episodes. In his attitude towards the CID he now seems more like Dave Litten was in the first season, so perhaps Carver took on some of his characteristics in the absence of Gary Olsen?

The pacing issues seen in season two seemed to continue through season three, though it did go out on a high with the last two being among its best. The standout episode of the season is Overnight Stay, which sees most of the cast guarding a jury overnight in a hotel, and makes great use of the setting to put our regulars in unfamiliar situations and combinations, and tells a distinctively different type of story as a result.

These episodes were also the last chance for the writers and producers to make use of post-watershed levels of nudity and violence, since after season three came the change of format - arguably the biggest single change in The Bill's 26-year history - when it moved to a half-hour timeslot at 8pm.

Just as significant in its own way as the format change at marking the end of an era, the end of season three also saw the departure of DI Roy Galloway (John Salthouse), a mainstay of the series and easily one of the most memorable and significant characters throughout the first three seasons.

At least we still have many more episodes ahead of us with Ted Roach and Sgt Cryer, my other favourite regulars. And you don't need to be a Detective Inspector to know who the perfect replacement for Roy Galloway would be, to be Frank...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eight

"Is Peri dead?"

"No."

So much for that cliffhanger. The Inquisitor once again stands in for the viewer when she asks

"Then what was the point of showing that last sequence?"

and when she then says

"I thought it was somewhat gratuitous."

The plot starts treading water (something we cats hate) with the Doctor and Crozier spouting more technobabble about Lord Kiv's brain transplant. Crozier wants to put the brain into another body, and is clearly eyeing up the Doctor (naughty Crozier!) which is just putting the plot back to the state it was in a couple of episodes ago.

Imprisoned with King Yrcanos, Peri says 

"I just want to be back in my own time with people I love."

This seems like it has come out of nowhere, and is a somewhat contrived way of starting the ensuing dialogue between them, but I think we can let the writer off in this case because Nicola Bryant and BRIAN BLESSED transcend the script with their performances.

Yrcanos: "WHAT IS THAT? LOVE?"

Peri: "Well, it's when you care for someone or something more than yourself, I guess."

Dorf: "More than yourself?"

Peri: "Well, I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes more than life."

Yrcanos: "I CARE NOTHING FOR MINE."

Peri: "How can you say that, Yrcanos?"

Yrcanos: "WELL, ON MY PLANET OF KRONTEP, WHEN WE DIE, OUR SPIRIT IS RETURNED TO LIFE TO BE BORN IN A MORE NOBLE WARRIOR."

Peri: "Until what? Where do you end after all your brave deaths?"

Yrcanos: "YOU BECOME A KING! ME, AFTER MY NEXT DEATH I JOIN THE OTHER KINGS ON VERDUNA, THE HOME OF THE GODS."

Peri: "To do what?"

Yrcanos: "WHY TO FIGHT! WHAT ELSE?"

Thank Hoff that BRIAN BLESSED is in this, the story would be so much less bearable without him.

Between scenes Crozier has had to rule out the Doctor - magnificent head or no - as a suitable body for Kiv, and wants to consider Peri instead. The Doctor tries to dissuade him with the most unconvincing counterargument:

"Peri? Ah, quite unsuitable. Female. Silly. Oh... flibbertigibbet. Hopeless."

Crozier sees through this and observes "you have strong feelings for the woman." He offers to let Peri off the hook if the Doctor can find a better candidate.

The Doctor is obviously behaving a lot more like his proper character than he was back in part six, considering that he is now showing any concern for Peri whatsoever, but the damage has been done and the question that hangs over all the Doctor's subsequent actions in this story is why he didn't do any of them sooner. Alas it's not a question we're ever going to get a satisfactory answer to.

The Doctor goes to rescue Yrcanos and Dorf. Yrcanos shouts made-up swearwords at the Doctor until he is let out and the guard captain put in the cell in his place.

"HIS NAME IS DORF AND YOU ARE SCUM."

"No, actually I am known as the Doctor, and there's no need to thank me for helping you to escape. Come along."

Kiv and Sil meet with some silly-looking squeaky aliens in a scene that only exists to give them something to so in this episode.

Yrcanos wants to know why the Doctor released him.

Doctor: "I need your help to defeat the Mentors."

Yrcanos: "THAT I UNDERSTAND, BUT YOU ARE MY SWORN ENEMY. I HAVE VOWED TO KILL YOU!"

Doctor: "Yes, yes, well, we can deal with all that later. At the moment, we need each other."

Dorf: "He has a point."

Yrcanos: "EVERYONE HAS A POINT, NOWADAYS. I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!"

LOL! This story has more than its fair share of problems, but it has to be said that that is a great line.

Once again the Doctor stops Yrcanos from running in and pewing all the baddys with his pewpewpew gun, the Doctor saying he doesn't want Yrcanos to cause "a bloodbath." This lends credence to my theory about why he warned the baddys about Yrcanos back in part six, and perhaps the Matrix merely distorted that scene to make it look like the Doctor suddenly decided to side with the baddys for no reason. Again, we'll never know the truth for certain, thanks to a combination of the Doctor's very convenient amnesia in the courtroom and a lack of any later explanations about which scenes the Matrix distorted and how exactly it changed them.

"YOU THINK LIKE A WARRIOR BUT YOU DO NOT ACT LIKE ONE, IT'S MOST PERPLEXING."

Insightful dialogue like this from Yrcanos hints at a much better version of this story that we could maybe have gotten, if only its script flaws had been ironed out before recording. Even as it is, it still shows a much better understanding of the Doctor's character than Steven Moffat would later manage, with rubbish like "To the people of the gamma forests, the word 'Doctor' means 'mighty warrior.'" Mew.

The Doctor and Yrcanos attempt a 'prisoner transfer from cell block 1138' plan to rescue the other prisoners, which leads into a komedy scene with an unnamed Mentor who is obsessed with everyone being quiet, and is therefore the polar opposite to Yrcanos.

Mentor: “Oh, thank you.”

Yrcanos: “FOR YOUR LIFE? IT WAS NOTHING.”

Mentor: “No, for not shouting.”

and then

Yrcanos: “VAROONIK! WE'LL RELEASE THE SLAVES, AND THEN ON TO DEATH! VAROONIK!"

Doctor: “I'm sorry about the noise. He does so enjoy his work."

Mentor: "Just go. Just go!"

There's a sudden, immediate change of tone as this punchline crashes into the following scene, where Crozier has Peri bound and gagged on an operating table.

In the chaos following the releasing of the slaves, the Doctor gets separated from Yrcanos and the other rebels. The TARDIS appears next to him in a white light, and he walks backwards into it as though hypno-eyesed. We then see the TARDIS travelling into the space station from the beginning of part one, a neat way of showing how this fits into the overall story's timeline as well as an excuse to reuse the expensive SFX once more.

In the courtroom the Inquisitor gives the exposition about how the High Council of the Time Lords ordered that the Doctor be taken "out of time" and the prevention of "the consequence of Crozier's experiment." In doing so she comes across as just as much of an antagonist as the Valeyard, not an impartial party, being fully aware of what the Matrix is about to show next. (How the Matrix can have recorded what happened next after both the Doctor and the TARDIS have been removed to the trial is not explained, and a writer who was paying attention to his own writing might have used that as a way of hinting that what we see next is not really real.)

Crozier does a proper mad scientist rant as he explains to Sil that he has copied the "contents" of Kiv's mind into Peri's body, without actually transplanting the brain. The question of why he didn't do this before is not asked, so we can only conclude that he only just thought of doing it since the start of the episode. Except that he then says that

"This is what I wanted to achieve from the very beginning."

Yrcanos is trapped in a time bubble by the Time Lords. In the courtroom, the Doctor challenges the High Council with interfering. Isn't that exactly what they are accusing him of? It's always projection with baddys, isn't it, mew?

Inquisitor: "They're caught in a time bubble. Everything must be perfect before they drive home their final attack."

Doctor: "You're using Yrcanos as an assassin."

Inquisitor: "It was judged by the High Council as the most acceptable way, and Yrcanos will never know that he was used."

Doctor: "And so they took it upon themselves to act like second-rate gods?"

All very dramatic, except... isn't this exactly what Yrcanos would have done anyway? And then the only reason for delaying Yrcanos's attack seems to have been to give Sil time to do the punchline about Kiv being in Peri's body:

"I wish you could have found a more attractive one."

This line comes at the end of an otherwise really dramatic scene that shows us Peri is dead and Kiv is in her body, well acted by Nicola Bryant (as Kiv) and Patrick Ryecart. Tonally the end of this episode is all over the place. Come to think of it, the rest of Mindfuck isn't exactly very tonally consistent either.

Yrcanos charges in and does a Big No. And when BRIAN BLESSED does a Big No, it's a really Big

"NO!"

He pewpewpews everyone in the room, although the screen fades to white before we actually see anyone get pewed, thus leaving it to our imaginations. This is way more restrained than the writer has been at any point in the story up until now.

In the courtroom, the Inquisitor and the Valeyard team up to try and blame the Doctor for forcing the Time Lords to interfere. The Doctor remains defiant:

"No, I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is!"

Despite the camera already showing the Doctor in close up, it crash-zooms to even closer up: cliffhanger!

The Mindfuck section of The Trial of a Time Lord is one of the most confusing of all Doctor Who stories, and the most baffling thing about it is why they decided to make it that way. To purposefully misdirect the audience is one thing, but when you do so you put an expectation in the viewers' minds that everything will be paid off and explained eventually - and this never does so.

Not only is a full explanation still withheld from us by the end of part eight, it won't even be forthcoming by the final end of the season. This is a breach of trust between the makers of the show and their audience, and it means that however many points these episodes might otherwise have in their favour they can never quite make up for this underlying shortfall.

The mind that is being fucked with in the title of this section of Trial of a Time Lord isn't the Doctor's, or Peri's, or even Kiv's... it's the viewer's.

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 6

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Seven

Peri saves the Doctor, who runs away so that Yrcanos is left behind with Peri, whom he picks up... not in that way, naughty reader!

In the courtroom, the Doctor is now claiming to have partial recall of the events instead of either total amnesia or fully remembering them:

"I can recall some of it. Bits of it are beginning to bob back into my mind."

The Valeyard speaks for all of us when he says 

The Doctor once again insists that the Matrix is not showing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or as he puts it:

"The events took place, but not quite as we've seen them."

Yrcanos, Eckerry Dorf and Peri team up and go looking for other resistance fighters to team up with, although Yrcanos is convinced that they will find him and then make him their leader.

"ROM BROM SAVALOONA. YES. YES. THEIR FOOTSTEPS ARE GUIDED TOWARDS ME. THAT IS THEIR DESTINY... AND MINE."

Peri pets Dorf as she discusses with Yrcanos his belief in destiny versus her belief in "blind chance." This is a nice, quiet scene (well, as quiet as any scene can be that has BRIAN BLESSED in it) that adds to our experience of all three characters, unlike the following scene where the Doctor assists Crozier in transplanting Lord Kiv's brain into a new body. This consists of the Doctor and Crozier shouting a lot of technobabble and meaningless numbers at each other, and a pointless fake-out that Kiv has died for a few seconds before it turns out he's alive really.

Crozier says that

"As from today, Doctor, I can put any brain in any body, anywhere."

but the story frames this advancement of medical science as though it were a bad thing, being as it is done by the baddys for the benefit of the baddys, and the Doctor looks sad at the news.

It's not all bad, however, because this scene does in fact include the best moment of the entire season, when Kiv goes into "cardiac arrest" and Crozier insists on finishing his cup of tea before moving to help him. This shows more clearly than any of his dialogue that Crozier is a mad scientist who is only interested in his research and discoveries, he is not the sort of doctor who cares about helping anybody.

Yrcanos, Peri and Dorf get captured by some rebels and soon team up with them. Yrcanos takes charge, just as he said he would, and there is even a pretty good comic moment:

Dorf: "I have seen him inspire disheartened rabble into acts of heroism."

Peri: "But how many of them survived, huh?"

Yrcanos: "AH, THAT'S A MINOR CONSIDERATION WHEN THERE IS GLORY TO BE HAD!"

This is turning out to be an episode with some wit, which is good because it helps disguise the fact that the plot is not really progressing much through these scenes. The rebels' previous leader says

"Alright, King Yrcanos of the Krontep, we'll fight."

to which Yrcanos replies

"VAROONIK!"

We soon get an example of Yrcanos's leadership in the field:

Rebel: "I'll scout ahead."

Yrcanos: "WE'LL ALL SCOUT AHEAD."

As they all charge forward as best they can in the cramped studio tunnels, he provides the template for all subsequent Klingons in the various Star Trek spinoff series:

"THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR BATTLE. A GREAT DAY TO DIE!"

It's not just that one line (though it is the clincher), at other points he also rejects spying and ambush as tactics, and refuses to retreat even when that would be sensible. Yes, Star Trek took a lot from BRIAN BLESSED here. Perhaps they shouldn't have, mew?

Dorf manages to persuade Yrcanos to call off the attack, leading to a great line from the king that is both witty and characterful:

"YOU ARE A GREAT DOG OF WAR... I MEAN, A GREAT WARRIOR, WHOSE ADVICE I TRUST AND VALUE. OH VERY WELL, TODAY PRUDENCE SHALL BE OUR WATCHWORD. TOMORROW, I SHALL SOAK THE LAND IN BLOOD!"

It's too late, though, and the baddys spring an ambush on them.

They try to fight or, in Peri's case, to run away, and they all get pewpewpewed by the baddys.

This seems like a perfect place for the cliffhanger, but instead it goes back to the courtroom for one more short scene. The episode ends on an exchange between the Doctor and the Valeyard:

Doctor: "I am not responsible for that!"

Valeyard: "In your mind, perhaps not. But in reality it is somewhat different, Doctor."

It cuts back to the Doctor after the Valeyard's final word, and he is already in such a close up that there's no more room for a crash-zoom.

I suspect the director may have made a terrible mistaik here. This was probably supposed to be a crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger, but it isn't.