"It's only a gameshow..."

TV Back in the day, over a hundred years ago, prolific Doctor Who writer Jonathan Morris's first article in the parish journal, and cover story mind you, was a voluminous piece theorising that the franchise has many passing and direct similarities to game shows. He's just posted it to his blog and it's as amazingly bonkers as you might expect:

"Let us take one story at random. The Celestial Toymaker. Our heroes find themselves trapped in a realm where they are presented with a series of sub-vaudeville comedy routines. There is slapstick, there is a lacklustre dance number, there is an unfunny fat comedian. Each routine ends with the presentation of a cryptic rhyming clue – which may or may not lead to success - and the enigmatic host of the realm has a habit of repeatedly counting backwards. It is clearly the template for 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers [which began twelve short years later]. The only difference being that the entertainers in The Celestial Toymaker were reduced to mindless playthings forced to endlessly re-enact the same tired routines, whilst in 3-2-1 Chris Emmett and Louise English would merely return to ‘Puss In Boots’ in Hull."

Later, as Morris notes, in Bad Wolf, Russell T Davies turned Doctor Who into an actual gameshow, indeed many of them in fact. Plus there have been the dozens of special episodes of The Weakest Link and Pointless featuring various cast members.