FINDING JOY? NO, NOT MUCH
Doctor Who BBC One, Sunday Finding Joy RTÉ One, Wednesday Blood Virgin Media One, Monday Strictly: It Takes Two BBC Two,
After quite a bit of RTÉ hoopla, Amy Huberman’s new show aired this week. We’re underwhelmed
Wednesday
WHEN Jodie Whittaker was announced as the new Doctor Who late last year, there was a predictable outcry from longtime fanboys who couldn’t seem to get their heads around the fact the Doctor could actually regenerate as, you know, a woman. Never mind the fact that for years they have believed the Doctor could witness the Big Bang and travel multi-millennia into the future, or that Daleks somehow could negotiate stairs, it seems a Doctor with chest bumps stretched credibility too far. Writer Chris Chibnall, who also gave us
Broadchurch, addressed it head on in the cracking first episode of the new series, by having Whittaker address her new companions with the line: ‘All of this is new to you, and new can be scary.’
And, for the first 10 minutes of the opening episode, it was (almost enough to send me back to my favourite childhood viewing spot and change the name of this column, for one week only, to From Behind The Couch). A giant pod that looked like a Hershey Kiss landed in a forest near Sheffield, where it was found by a young black dyspraxia sufferer, Ryan, who reported it to the police. Enter Yasmin, a British Asian trainee officer, and Ryan’s black granny, Grace, and her middle-aged white husband, Graham. If you were playing diversity bingo, that was a full house, and a very entertaining one it was too. There were a few jokes about the fact the Doctor regenerated as a woman, but the person least perplexed was the Doctor herself.
The mere fact of looking at someone so fresh and different concealed the fact that the story itself was a little sub-par – a battle between a giant alien whose face was studded with single teeth taken from his victims, and a coiled octopus type thing that looked like a mass of hair pulled from a bath plughole – but that’s what often happens in a scene setter.
If Whittaker brought any previous Doctor’s attributes to the role, then David Tennant was the one she most reminded me of, with frantic staccato delivery of the lines and lots of talking to herself by way of exposition (and, since both also are veterans of Broadchurch, she definitely has had the chance to study him up close). Keeping her natural Yorkshire accent, she was a delight from start to finish, and a limping franchise itself has regenerated into something vital and new. There’s nothing scary about that.
Less successful was Amy Huberman’s new comedy vehicle, Finding Joy, about a recently single thirtysomething coming to terms with life on her own. Her story is narrated by her dog, who began the first episode by leaving a little gift on the bed that Joy, Huberman’s character, promptly accidentally smeared on herself before opening the door to the postman. Later jokes concentrated on flatulence in a lift and at a job interview, and another that led viewers up the garden path to think of a sex act I can’t really describe in a family newspaper. Who knew Amy, who co-wrote it, was so scatalogical?
In one scene, where Joy was about to abseil from a gantry onto the turf in the Aviva Stadium (Amy’s husband’s entrances there were a little more traditional – he just emerged from the tunnel), the camera filmed her sliding down a pole flashing her knickers. It all was a bit Brigid Ní Sheóin for my liking, but many younger women I know loved it and thought it was hilarious. Maybe I have more in common with the middle-aged men fretting over a female Doctor Who than I thought.
TV3 never was renowned for its drama output outside of the admittedly rather good Red Rock, so it’s nice to see Virgin Media invest in a series – just maybe not this series.
Blood opened very slowly indeed, as a young woman called Cat arrived home after the suspicious death of her mother in a fall. Cat suspects her father, Dr Jim Hogan (the ever reliable Adrian Dunbar) might have killed his wife, especially when she finds out he’s been having an affair with his secretary. Instead, it transpires he was doing so with the full blessing of his wife, so why would he need to kill her, if he did at all?
That’s the question we hope to see answered over the six episodes, but I hope they speed it all up a little, because the opener was a little like watching blood dry and, for a central character, Cat was just too histrionic and hippy-dippy for my taste.
Talking of affairs, the Curse of Strictly never has been more pronounced than it was this week, when photos of celebrity contestant and comedian Seann Walsh kissing his professional dance partner Katya Jones hit the headlines. The pair were on the couch with Zoe Ball on Wednesday night’s
Strictly: It Takes Two (does it ever!) to apologise for the hurt they caused to his long-term partner, actress Rebecca Humphries, who had promptly dumped him but kept their cat, and to Katya’s husband Neil, also a pro on the show.
It was the most excruciating three minutes of television I’ve seen this year as they mumbled their way through like two children accused of finishing a party tube of Smarties. Instead of being rhumbaed, they were rumbled, and all I could hear in my head was judge Craig Revel-Horwood shouting ‘disaaaster, darlings’.
There’s hardly a celebrity’s partner or spouse in the UK who’ll let anyone near that show next year.