Doctor Who 3.9: The Family of Blood

Some disconnected observations about The Family of Blood, which was very, very good indeed, and with last week's Human Nature showed that the promise the revived Doctor Who had in 2005 had not been lost as I was beginning to fear.

( Part two of two )

Forgotten Voices

The reason that my post about last night's Doctor Who was later than it might have been was that I was at Forgotten Voices at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, last night. It's a small-scale play assembled from the testimony of soldiers and a woman munitions worker from the First World War, as published in Max Arthur's book, and set in a room at the Imperial War Museum in 1956, where interviewees swap stories as they drink their tea after being interviewed. It's reasonably successful but not outstanding, despite the efforts of its cast. The best performances are probably those of Matthew Kelly, as former East Lancashire regiment private 'Kidder' Harris, and Tim Woodward as ex-sergeant Todd. I didn't feel I'd learned anything new about the Great War, except added to the stories I'd already heard about conditions during the conflict; bar, perhaps, the experience related by the officer character, played by Rupert Frazer, of being unable to persuade family and friends that the war was not the series of heroic cavalry charges the press liked to depict. The two characters the play fumbled were Frazer's officer - the transition from his appearing as the representative of a remote class with no conception of what the trenches were like, to the recollections of his own experiences of the front, was too sudden and didn't seem part of the same story - and Belinda Lang's munitions worker, Kitty Procter. Kitty was conceived as an awkward character anyway, interrupting with apparent irrelevances, and I'd like to have known whether there was any material in the Imperial War Museum archives which could have allowed her to relate the story of her husband's death with the male characters present.