Something Fishy

I blame it on Winston Churchill myself. That may not be true, but it’s a fact. There I was, idling away the late Saturday afternoon watching Richard Attenborough’s Young Winston on BBC2 simply because I hadn’t seen it for years. When it was over, I started flicking channels, thinking it was later than it was.

You know where this is going, don’t you? Yep, I caught the last two-thirds of Doctor Who*. It was utter bilge obviously, but the one interesting thing about The Doctor’s Daughter was that, in terms of story format at least, it was probably the closest of all the new episodes to the original series.

I watched the show from probably the very tail end of the 1960s through to Tom Baker’s last year or so in the late 1970s. This may be a completely false memory, or it only happened once or twice and I’m projecting it onto all the other stories, but adventures set on alien worlds usually found the TARDIS arrive during a dispute between different races.


After an initial encounter the Doctor would find himself falling in with one side while the companions would accidentally end up with the other lot. Either they’d initially be captives or seen as saviours to their cause. Probably by the midpoint of the story, the folks set up for the audience to root for invariably turned out to be the evil bastards. Finally both sides would be brought together, Doctor and companions would be reunited, and everything would be sorted out, usually in a non-violent way.

I don’t want to imply that this was a regularly used story template, but I’m sure more than a few went down this way. Otherwise why would I have had a wave of nostalgia along with the wave of nausea while I was watching Saturday night? Either way, while it was the kind of story that could fit into the old format of four or six half-hour episodes, reduced to forty-five minutes made it seem more like a greatest hits package of a longer story.

Once again, what would have been perfectly acceptable thirty-odd years back as children’s entertainment doesn’t quite cut it nowadays. The reduced running time meant that there wasn’t time to properly set the story up, never mind giving it a chance to breath, so typically nothing made any great sense.


Why were fish-men who have run face first into steampunk soda streams being used as labour? Why, when Martha falls into a rather unappealing black swamp did the fish-man who jumps into save her drown? Since the newly minted human clones pop out the pod as youths/twentysomethings, how come Nigel Terry’s crusty old General doesn’t remember the war has only been going on for a week rather than “generations”? Why did each side only seem to be made up of a dozen or so individuals?

Also, how rubbish is the terraforming equipment when to set it off the big sparkly sphere has to be picked up and smashed on the ground? Still, it did mean that with this kind of Genesis Device in operation they could lift the final weepy death/eventual resurrection from the second and third Star Trek movies.

Maybe it should have been a two-part adventure, allowing the story and characters to be fleshed out more. That would have probably made the most sense. Whereas most dramas establish a set tone, the one thing The Doctor’s Daughter ably did was continue to show just how wildly erratic Doctor Who is in terms of storytelling, especially since it was broadcast on the weekend that Steven Moffat rightly won the Best Writer BAFTA for the beautifully crafted Blink.

* I watched the opening fifteen minutes on iPlayer later in the evening on the off chance that I had missed anything vital.