Pop Vultures is happy to welcome Anna Carey to the fold. Among other things, she will be handling Doctor Who throughout its upcoming 4th season run on this side of the Atlantic. She kicks things off with a look at this year’s Christmas special, a heart-warming tale of a woman who can’t move her face and the man who pretends not to notice.
Look, over there! Who is that tiny curly-headed blonde sprite? Can it be….no, surely not….yes! It’s Kylie! Kylie, Kylie, Kylie! Oh, like you didn’t know. Ever since Russell T Davies and the rest of the Doctor Who team announced that the Doctor’s temporary companion for Christmas special ‘The Voyage of the Damned’ was going to be Ms Minogue, every publication from broadsheet colour supplements to Heat magazine have run features on the diminutive (and, of course, heroic) pop princess’s return to acting for the first time since those glorious films Street Fighter and The Delinquents (a film to which my best friend at school optimistically organized an outing for her 14th birthday. That was a mistake).
Sadly, Kylie seems to have become even more wooden since then. Was she always such a bad actress? I mean, I’m 32, old enough to have watched Neighbours back in the days when it was only on in the middle of the afternoon and hence could only be watched in the school holidays. I remember Kylie’s entire career as spunky mechanic Charlene Mitchell. I can still remember the song that was played at her wedding to Scott Robinson (‘Suddenly’, by Angry Anderson). And I don’t remember her being quite so crap. Then again, I was only about 13 when she left for “Brisbane” (aka the black hole for all residents of Ramsay Street), so perhaps she was always a charisma-free clunker. Surely, however, a programme as fun and smart as Doctor Who will bring out the best in her? Well, not really. I hate to say this, but, enjoyable as it was, this special was not up to the programme’s usual standard.
I thought the third series of the all-new Doctor Who was the best yet. Sure, there were a few less than stellar episodes, like the much-maligned ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, which, I have to say, I didn’t totally hate — it was stupid, but kind of fun. Still, the good episodes, particularly ‘Human Nature’, ‘Family of Blood’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Utopia’ were so fantastically, wonderfully brilliant that they would have made up for anything else.
But although I really liked Martha, and was sorry to see her go, I’m getting a little tired of the companions having to fall in love with the Doctor. I mean, I don’t blame them – he’s David Tennant wearing a pinstripe suit and Converse, after all – but it’s a bit much. In fact, perhaps the only good thing about the impending arrival of the dreadful, shouty Catherine Tate as the Doctor’s next companion, Donna, is the fact that when Donna made her debut in last year’s Christmas special she showed absolutely no signs of falling for the Doctor (and they’d better not turn that into some sort of love/hate Moonlighting thing, that’s all I’m saying). Anyway! Even if Kylie had not been more wooden than, well, a block of oak, I would have been annoyed by the inevitable hint of romance between her and the Doctor. Unfortunately, Kylie, who has been rendered unable to express any emotion thanks to all the Botox she’s been pumping into her face for the last decade (seriously, I reviewed the Dublin leg of her Showgirl tour a few years ago, before she got sick, and the upper half of her face DOES NOT MOVE, EVER. It’s really creepy), was indeed more wooden than the average forest. It’s almost impressive how little her face moves. But kind of unhelpful when she’s meant to be the emotional heart of the episode.
Keep reading for a spoilerific recap of the Doctor Who Christmas special.
Continue reading ‘Doctor Who and The Amazing Adventure of the Wooden Sidekick’
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Have I Got News For You has been running for so long that I remember a time when I wasn’t allowed to watch it because it aired after 9pm. Specifically, it’s been going for 17 years now, and in all that time it hasn’t changed much. The two team captains, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, have been there the whole time. Angus Deayton hosted from 1990 to 2002, until he accidentally tripped over and slept with a prostitute while snorting cocaine and made the unforgivable error of letting the tabloid press find out about it. Since then, the show has used guest hosts, with varying degrees of success. But despite the changes, it’s still a laugh-out-loud, deliciously sneery review of the week in news and politics, constantly flirting with scandal and occasionally going too far into libel. There is no other show that can make me find all the dire things that are going on in the world quite so hilarious.
QI wins right from the start by having Stephen Fry present it, because I love Stephen Fry from the bottom of my heart and would happily watch half an hour of him reading the phone book. The fact that he prefers to spend his half an hour presenting a brilliantly funny and engaging panel quiz is just icing, really. As the programme’s name is short for ‘Quite Interesting’, teams are awarded points based on how interesting Fry finds their answers to his questions. It is thanks entirely to QI that I now know that the longest animal in the world is a bootlace worm, and that the language spoken by 
