Back on News Page Reviews duty...

Edited to add..A couple of things I did notice, but forgot to include in the review:

( For those still waiting to see it who don't want to be spoiled, a cut )

This is as far as I got with a review of last week's episode...

If the Doctor Who of the mid-1980s gluttonously consumed set menus of its history without really understanding what it devoured, its fifty-year-old self has a more delicate palate. Hide selected from a carefully-prepared buffet of vintage images and words which had been matured in the oak barrels of professional reflection rather than the plastic tumblers of nostalgic adolescents. Hide owed much to the broad Doctor Who gothic of the mid-1970s and advertised this, but despite an initial heady bouquet resulting from the careful grafting of time-honoured vines, its roots were firmly planted in the bed of contemporary television.

Though usually associated most with the first three Tom Baker seasons and the influence of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, the trappings of gothic horror had been borrowed by earlier stories in the 1970s including The Daemons and more relevantly for Hide, Day of the Daleks. The country house setting and the ghost who is not a ghost, together with the military associations of Professor Palmer, suggest that this is more of a third Doctor gothic story than a fourth Doctor one. The use of the Metebelis crystal in a lash-up reminiscent of that which helped finish off poor Professor - Mister Clegg in Planet of the Spiders only confirms it.

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Other points would have been the rainstorms - Universal horror films via The Brain of Morbius; acknowledgements to Nigel Kneale and The Stone Tape (although Hide has a happier ending); remote kinship with Primeval and its anomalies and monsters, perhaps, in the shape of the Crooked Man; the continued sense that the Doctor is journeying through a projection of his own past and memories, with Clara as a kind of lodestone. Jessica Raine and Dougray Scott play their love story well, though Matt Smith in particular seems rather at odds with them, though this is also true of the Doctor. After being apparently neglected in Cold War the mystery of Clara returns - and Clara has a different perception of the Doctor's relationship to mortals to the one the series seems to have embraced up until now. It's not that everyone to the Doctor is alive at once, it's that they are dead... but is it not that all time travellers are ghosts?

Still no new icon...

...but my review of The Rings of Akhaten should be up at the reviews section of the Doctor Who News Page soon.

edited to add: It's now up, and here's the direct link.

I was led to this story about the discovery of a cache of scripts belonging to the late Anthony Coburn by the estimable miss_s_b at gallifrey_times. While I'm not doubting the find, the interpretation Jason Onion places on elements of the scripts must be treated with caution, particularly his assumption that Coburn's scripts include embryonic versions of the sonic screwdriver - though presumably he might be referring to the Doctor's pen torch, at its most powerful in the pilot episode, in season three and in David Whitaker's novelization Doctor Who [in an Exciting Adventure with/and] the Daleks - and regeneration.

Then again, C.E. Webber's notes for the series format suggested that the Doctor should have a wife who chased him through time, and she eventually turned up forty-five years later without any evidence of there being a causal link between Webber's concept and the character created by Steven Moffat; there is nothing to say that Coburn couldn't have suggested these ideas only for them to fall foul, like Webber's, of the attitude summed up in Sydney Newman's red-pencilled "Nuts!"

( Between political thriller and family adventure )

( The Master, Chin Lee and Major Cosworth )

( Restoration of sound and vision )

( On the panel with Katy )

( Fan sensitivities )

Next month, The Robots of Death, in the presence of the great Tom Baker himself.

Today's Doctor Who DVD catch-up exercise was Death to the Daleks. I realise that I had never recognised John Abineri as Railton until now, perhaps because of his wig and also that he is unceremoniously dispatched by an Exxilon arrow early in part two. The casting of Duncan Lamont, the original Victor Caroon in The Quatermass Experiment, is appropriate as well as occasioning some frisson from the juxtaposition of a symbol of early British television science fiction with the Daleks. (ETA: my own historical perspective is of someone who has always viewed Quatermass as 'past' and the Daleks as 'current', but this was not the case for those who were making Death to the Daleks just a little over twenty years after The Quatermass Experiment.)

The production subtitles benefit from our knowing more about the development of Sarah Jane Smith and the subsitution of the (excellent and deservedly legendary) Elisabeth Sladen for the (taller, more 'womanly') April Walker. For all he says in interviews nowadays about the place of women in adventure stories, ropes and railway tracks, the Terrance Dicks of 1973 emerges as someone keen to enhance the role of women in Doctor Who, unsuccessfully urging Terry Nation to make Jill Tarrant second-in-command of the expedition, and emphasising Sarah's resourcefulness.

Lesser-known personalities are given coverage too - Arnold Yarrow, one of the acting profession's sprightly nonagenarians, is a cogent presence on the DVD's making-of documentary and the subtitles emphasise the breadth of his career. While Yarrow was glued into grey latex as the subterranean Exxilon Bellal, another studio in Television Centre was recording an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force quite possibly commissioned by Yarrow in his just-former capacity as that programme's script editor.

I'd come across a newspaper cutting from 1974 publicizing the London Saxophone Quartet's involvement with Death to the Daleks, and here they are on the soundtrack, performing the music of Carey Blyton. Blyton was in the process of leaving his long tenure as music editor at Faber, where he had been Benjamin Britten's editor, seeing his compositions through the press. Production subtitler Martin Wiggins draws attention to the quotations from music hall and nursery rhyme which pepper this score. His contributions to this period are understandably overshadowed by those of Dudley Simpson, but his determination to avoid electronic music (on the grounds that synthesizers were depriving musicians of income) was rewarded in a memorable score which arguably set a precedent for the rest of the 1970s as Dudley Simpson was steered away from close collaboration with the Radiophonic Workshop and back towards conventional music.

Visually Death to the Daleks supports my argument that it is in this, the last Pertwee/Letts/Dicks season, that the programme begins its Gothic phase, with Sarah finding her way through a temple set lit with flickering candles before being trussed up by priests ready to sacrifice her for bringing the latent past of the intelligent living city into the present of fear and ignorance. The execution of the scene is far more steeped in threat than the near-sacrifice of Jo at the end of The Daemons.

A review of Big Finish's first 'new eighth Doctor' box set, Dark Eyes, by someone not a stranger to this account, can be found at the Doctor Who News Page.

Tom Hooper and company's version of Boublil, Schoenberg and Kretzmer's Les Miserables is rather good. I wouldn't say it is an outstanding film; there's something rather close and claustrophobic about it, which I didn't find was the case when I saw the stage version a long time ago, and which doesn't always work to its advantage. A tremendous performance from Anne Hathaway, though, and also from Hugh Jackman and from Russell Crowe. I was sorry to hear several of the songs abbreviated, and the new song sung by Valjean to Cosette as they flee the Thenardiers and seek to evade Javert isn't really as good a replacement as it could be. There are one or two well-known British television actors in blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles, and the unit production manager, maintaining his reputation for finding and managing locations, is Patrick Schweitzer, briefly producer for part of the 2010 series of Doctor Who.

Comparing The Six Wives of Henry VIII, made in late 1969/early 1970, with the contemporary seventh season of Doctor Who raises questions about value judgements. The Six Wives walked off with BAFTAs, no doubt deservedly so, though I haven't made any evaluation of the competition. The scripts of The Six Wives (on my acquaintance with two) are concerned with the themes of adult life, of gender relations and politics, of a society where women of high social status are diplomatic chattels or likely to be treated as political inconveniences whose lives are forfeit when their fertility challenges the king's masculine and regal potency. Doctor Who is concerned with soldiers shooting at non-human life forms, and though the forces of UNIT have their moral ambiguities they retain the fallback position of white hats. In The Six Wives, there is no operational bias towards a power-wielding side; the "word of a Henry" is good for nothing without an ability to rig the context in which it is shaped and reshaped.

In terms of design The Six Wives of Henry VIII can be surprisingly simplistic. The first episode, directed by John Glenister, has some location (or perhaps Ealing) filming, including scenes in the billowing tent complex of the Aragonese special embassy where Henry VII and his heir Arthur first greet Catherine of Aragon (a bright-eyed, auburn-locked Annette Crosbie, lovely but considerably less of a dolly-bird than Caroline John's similarly-coloured Liz Shaw). In contrast the second episode, directed by Naomi Capon, places its exteriors in the electronic television studio, with short scenes of hawking performed behind tufts of foliage against a plain cyclorama. Doctor Who placed a far greater emphasis on naturalism, perhaps because it was much less concerned with the inner lives of its characters. It's difficult not to be distracted, during Anne Boleyn, by the speckled grey wall flats which are fastened together to represent Anne's cell in the Tower of London, impassioned and cogent though Dorothy Tutin's performance is. The reliance on the vaseline-smeared lens to suggest an altered state of consciousness, whether the erotic bliss of Catherine's early marriage or Anne's visualised imagining of the executions of her supposed lovers, is a reminder that if a director found available electronic effects inappropriate for the subject, there were few other options to take up.

Doctor Who in 1970 is fast and involving by comparison with The Six Wives, where the audience is expected to commit to the actors and dialogue over long periods with little in the way of scene or shot changes. The script editing is more consistent too, though in a prestige-hungry series of individual plays the roles of the two script editors may have been devoted to different objectives than the consistency of development of continuing characters across the narrative. Nevertheless it's not clear from the writing that the Henry VIII seen crushing Catherine's last letter to him is the same man single-mindedly compressing his one-time love for Anne into cold-hearted assessment of her as a brood-mare of state. Doctor Who was wholeheartedly a series of serials rather than a sequence of plays with continuing cast and characters, and a case can be made that it does better by its regulars than its distant Tudor stablemate.

I could go on, but the compare-and-contrast exercise is an unjust one given the qualifications one has to make regarding the different programmes' expectations of their audiences. Nevertheless, when members of the irony mob start celebrating Doctor Who as 'bad television', I think of examples like those above to remind me, and them, that it isn't and wasn't, but most of the time quite adventurous, and good at it.