About time! Dr Who monsters to make you dive behind the settee
As puns go, it doesn’t work. ‘Arachnids in the uK’ . . . the title of Jodie Whittaker’s latest adventure in Doctor Who (BBC1) was a play on ‘Anarchy’ and the sex pistols’s first single.
It’s a bit clever, but not quite funny. It could have been ingenious, if those mutant spiders gobbling up guests at a Yorkshire hotel had sported rainbow mohicans and had punk nicknames such as Johnny Rottarantula.
But like the entire series so far, that opening joke went nowhere. It needed to be developed.
Four episodes in, the rebooted family favourite with its new sunday evening slot and female star has spent a lot of time going round in circles, like a spider that’s in danger of disappearing down the plughole.
This show thrives on full-tilt action, but under new writer Chris Chibnall it lacks all pace and urgency. After the Doctor landed back on Earth with her companions, she spent the first five minutes waiting to be invited in for tea.
Another five slow, dull minutes elapsed before the Mistress of Time and space, boggle- eyed with boredom, offered to pop round to the next-door flat and collect a parcel.
When the story eventually got going, there were shocks and surprises. Those slavering spiders, big as st Bernards and chattering in a blood-chilling twitter, belonged to the great Doctor Who tradition of monsters that send children diving for shelter behind the threepiece suite.
The series returned to its roots too with some educational asides. We learned that peppermint and tea tree oil are natural spider repellents, and that their silk is stronger than steel.
Doctor Who, when it first aired in 1963, was conceived as a means of making science entertaining. It’s good that hasn’t been forgotten.
Chris noth, the slippery politician from The Good Wife, made a splendidly Trumpish villain, as a hotel magnate with one eye on the White House.
He had the best line too — as he waved a pistol, he berated the Doctor: ‘What is wrong with this country? Why don’t you get a gun, shoot things like a civilised person?’ Of course, the Doctor famously never uses guns.
But please stop the dreary scenes of bickering and glum regrets. We don’t watch Doctor Who to see grumpy parents nagging their children or grieving pensioners sitting in darkened rooms. We’ve got EastEnders for that.
The outstanding show of the weekend was Chris Tarrant’s grim account of how nazi Germany exploited its train network to commit genocide, in Hitler’s Holocaust Railways (C5).
The former quiz show host is forging a new career as a roving rail enthusiast. This one- off, 90-minute documentary began in nuremberg, where rollingstock ferried millions of Germans to the Fuhrer’s rallies with clockwork efficiency, and travelled east — ending at the entrance to Birkenau death camp, the 20th century’s own gates of hell.
We met Jewish survivors like Arek Hersh, 89, who found refuge in Britain after the war. What he endured defies imagination, and Chris stood speechless, unable to respond to this brave man’s matter-of-fact descriptions.
Aged 11, Arek was put to work on the railways, as a gravedigger. Out of a slave workforce of 2,500, fewer than a dozen were alive one year later.
Arek was eventually sent to Auschwitz with a trainload of children: he escaped the gas chamber by lying about his age and claiming to be a locksmith. All his companions were killed.
The show ended with Chris’s fervent plea that the Holocaust must never be forgotten. It made sometimes unbearable viewing, but this was an important, compelling programme.