scoffed at the gameshows when Bad Wolf was broadcast

Oh how some of us scoffed at the gameshows when Bad Wolf was broadcast in 2005. There’s no way Big Brother and The Weakest Link would exist in the year 20,100 let alone next year! In five years isn’t all going to look horrendously twee and anachronistic? Well, we were wrong. Despite having offered what looked like a definitive full stop last year, Big Brother’s been signed by Channel Five for another spirit crushing few rounds of celebs and norms and the daily ritual of the AnnDroid insulting peroxides continues unabated every evening at 5:15. Only Trinny and Suzanna have been relegated to the satirising themselves on the web, though the thrust of their work has arguably migrated the Gok Wan, which probably wouldn’t matter one jot to Captain Jack. How did this happen? Perhaps it’s a reverse of the Blade Runner curse and having appeared on Doctor Who, the shows will now just run and run, the affectionate observations about each, still funny now, looking increasingly as hollow as the joke about Daleks not being able to go upstairs. Eventually one of Anne Robinson’s grandchildren will take over and within fifty years a rudimentary AnnDroid. On Big Brother channels will proliferate filled with live streams of rival households. Make over shows won’t just create a new look, they’ll create very new look, new face, new body, new gender, new surrealism. As a small group of academics huddle together on a desert island somewhere desperately maintaining storage of their collection of classical music, paintings and literature as the resource crisis hits, the rest of humanity will roughly split between those making television and those appearing on television, all fed intravenously lest the need to mingle some spices for a curry or source some produce to create the perfect pastry ignites their intellectual curiosity. And so it continues for millennia until the literal island of culture has fallen into the sea and the works of Shakespeare, Gormley and Dylan are lost to the oily waves which doesn’t matter because by then humanity has lost the capacity to properly construct anything leaving all of that complicated stuff to the machines, wondering instead if Brandon 45k will floup off with Marla 3 in Big Brother 234,000 and so the real world will reach parity with the dystopian horror presented in Bad Wolf. About the only thing we’d find worth watching will be Doctor Who itself, but even that’s gone off with a new incarnation who professes to be half clone on his uncle’s side and wears a toupee to cover up his bald patch, the stories themselves reaching their formulaic zenith as the Doctor once again travelling into a past when there were only a couple of hundred simultaneous Big Brothers to fight the Master who once again has a plan to disrupt the gameplay. So watchable in the very loosest of senses. If you think this is a very long paragraph, what you’re really seeing is my paranoia writ large, partly developing from the fact Doctor Who’s next opening episode has been shunting back once again to make way for a dancing programme but mostly from the recently announced arts cuts. About the only scintilla of hope we have is that Doctor Who’s still on at all and we’re able to look back affectionate nu-Who’s early beginnings. Russell’s ability to create sympathetic characters from just a few lines is illustrated throughout. Lynda with a Y might well be a walking contrast for how far Rose has developed, but she’s also a loveable character in her own right (Jo Joyner's sweet indeed), and it’s simply heartbreaking when she flat out asks the Doctor if he’ll take her with him and he promises to get her out alive because we know from experience that neither of those will be allowed to happen. But Martha Cope as the controller offers one of my favourite performance of the first year, communicating the desperation of having spent her whole life covered in USB plugs, her sense of self relegated to the infrequent sun spots and a rare occasion when extermination offers a blessed relief from life. That’s closely followed by the best cliffhanger of the series, simply because it’s not really a cliffhanger, it’s an ultimatum and a moment when the audience for once takes the Dalek’s POV as we watch Eccleston give the line that makes all of the Big Brother references worthwhile. How giddy must Davina McCall have been to see the Doctor says “Rose, I’m coming to get you …”

Updated 23/4/2011 Anne Robinson becomes the saviour of humanity and quits The Weakest Link. Kroll be praised.