Bossy and a bit of a show off, Jodie’s just what the Doctor ordered!
As Broadchurch creator turns show into Doctor Whodunnit ...
DOCTOR WHO BBC1 ★★★★✩
JuST what the Doctor ordered – a female Time Lord to save the world. Even if she has mislaid her Tardis. Jodie Whittaker delivered a desperately needed reboot for Doctor Who, which after 55 years had become bogged down in a morass of politicallycorrect dross about sexuality, with plots built on impenetrable lesbian love triangles and parables about inter-species romances.
No wonder viewer ratings nose- dived, plummeting to below five million … bad enough to threaten cancellation.
Instead, the BBC has demonstrated its commitment to reviving the show by moving it to Sunday nights, between its megahits Countryfile and the Strictly Come Dancing results. That’s as close as dammit to buying a guaranteed audience.
But it all depended on Jodie. My great worry, when she was announced as the new Doctor (the 13th, 14th, or 15th to play the part, depending on how you count it), was that she’d be stuck as a woman playing a camp, flamboyant male role – all make-up and wild gestures, , like Jon Pertwee with boobs.
She has easily avoided that pitfall. Crucially, her Doctor is likeable. Her predecessor never was – Peter Capaldi tried so hard to be cool in his sonic sunglasses, waving his electric guitar, but he always looked like a pretentious wazzock. By the end of his spell in the Tardis, he couldn’t hide what a disappointment it had all been.
Jodie looks as though she’s excited by the role, and bursting with ideas about how to play it. She’ll need a few episodes to get into her stride but already I believe in her Doctor. From the moment she plunged into the story, falling into a train carriage while a marauding alien was on the loose, she had the role by the scruff.
Don’t imagine she is an actress shoehorned into the part by a BBC hierarchy obsessed with gender awareness. This show needed a major change, and that’s what she brings.
Less comfortable is the new writing style, which combines the old-fashioned scifi adventure with a heavy dose of crime drama. Chris Chibnall, the man who has taken over as chief writer and producer of Doctor Who, created ITV’s murder mystery Broadchurch – in which Jodie Whittaker herself provided the emotional weight as the mother of a dead child. Any overlap between the shows is hardly coincidental.
Many early scenes in her debut episode, The Woman Who Fell To Earth, seemed to have tumbled out of the wrong genre. A policewoman confronted two women whose row over a parking space had turned violent. A stroppy teenager flung his bicycle off a cliff before turning an ugly tirade on his grandparents.
And when Jodie dashed into a garage, seconds too late to catch a killer, and knelt over the corpse, she seemed about to pull out a pair of blue latex gloves before setting up a perimeter of yellow striped police tape.
Perhaps Chibnall is trying to invent a whole new telly genre, the Doctor Whodunnit. The Tardis looks like a police box, after all, and a Dalek screaming ‘ Ex-TerMin-Ate’ will always make a convincing prime suspect. The diffi- culty is that good crime television is deliberately slow, full of long, wordless reaction shots and fraught victims lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling. Family adventure should be the opposite – pell-mell action sequences and lots of running. Chibnall’s version of Doctor Who features too many drawn-out sequences of distant police cars driving through the night-time cityscape.
Bythe end of the hour, when a character slipped and fell to her death, the tone had become dangerously depressing.
Bradley Walsh, playing a retired bus driver, made a tearful speech at the funeral that could have come from every cop drama you’ve ever watched.
Thank heavens for Jodie. Our new Doctor came galloping to the rescue, rounding everyone up to build a teleporter out of a car battery and a microwave oven.
She had already donned welding goggles to make herself a replacement sonic screwdriver, which she described as ‘a Swiss Army knife, without the knife – only idiots carry knives!’
She’s even duelling with oldfashioned scary monsters – including an intergalactic assassin who killed his victims by deep-freezing them, before pulling out their teeth to wear as face jewellery.
That’s gruesome enough to send the whole family, including the cat, scurrying to hide behind the sofa.
This Doctor is, as ever, bossy, eccentric, ridiculously clever and a bit of a show-off – but she’s quite different from all the men who preceded her. Getting to know her promises to be great fun.