Doctor Who Children in Need Special 2023.

TV  Hello and here we are, the first four minutes and fifty seconds of proper television Doctor Who in over a year, a tiny hors d'oeuvre before the three-course meal soon to be delivered later in the month.  As such it comes with a weight of expectation that anyone would find difficult to carry no matter how many manual handling courses they've used as an excuse to get out of a day's work and still be paid.  Like its predecessor the Pudsey Cutaway, it's the first chance (ish) (we'll get to that) to see this new incarnation of the Doctor in action and how different he is from his predecessors, both the"really brilliant woman" and "the old face he's got back again".  Not to mention whether he'll be wandering about in a post-regenerative torpor mumbling about P'Tings and wondering how Nardol is doing.

When the Pudsey Cutaway was broadcast back in (Christ!) 2005 (yes, that's right, Pudsey Cutaway, don't come round here with your Born Again), it was preceded by then-husband and wife team Peter Andre and Katie Price singing an excruciating cover of A Whole New World, or the thing I had to keep fast-forwarding through when watching my off-air copy (something which we still had to do even after the commercial release in region 2, when they accidentally included the rough cut with its lack of cloister bell and temp music).  This was not apparently corrected for subsequent Blu-ray releases in the UK.  Hopefully, they will have gotten around to it with the new-new-release with the newest attempt at upscaling the 00s SD.  I'll report back. 

My point is, that Russell T Davies the Second wasn't going to make this appetiser too filling and given that this is a Children in Need "sketch" create something which has to fit within the comedy-tragedy-appeal- comedy-tragedy-appeal-music-tragedy-appeal structure.  No one wants a downer.  In the event, the TARDIS landed in the studio with Jason Manford and Mel Giedroyc departing dressed as Tooth and Curls and Sheffield Steel.  Mercifully they didn't sing, the former dropping a bunch of placeholder jokes about 2063 instead.  Could have been worse.  Even Time Crash had Myleene ‘full of’ Klass and John ‘full of’ Barrowman with a cover of Your Song (which has also been archived on YouTube).  Mercifully, the commercial release of the one with the decorative vegetable didn't have any problems.

Doctor Who Children in Need Special 2023 as the iPlayer has titled it (so mote it be) fulfils its anniversary promise and takes us back to a crucial moment in Doctor Who history, the Genesis of the Daleks or rather, the Genesis of the Plunger, which is just the sort of cheekiness we've not really seen since Moffat left.  Davros, played superbly straight by a returning Julian Beech wearing an authentic Kaleds' Military Elite uniform surveying his new creation and chatting with a Mr Nominative Determanism, sorry, Mr Castervillian about what to call the thing (but let us not fetishise the space Nazis too much, we'll leave that to Star Wars fans, who curiously haven't adopted a collective name like Warsian or whatever).

As the flunky, Mawaan Rizwan catches the tone just right and we'll probably appreciate his role a lot more on the hundredth viewing but many viewers on first seeing this will have spent his opening two and a half minutes wondering where the Doctor is.  Then the TARDIS crashes into the back of the set, the door bursts open and who should blunder out, David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor with a minute or so's hijinks backed by a curious musak jazz soundtrack which sounds like something from an 80s sketch show joke montage.  So far there's not much to say on the personality front.  From what we see here, and much like the "degenerative" process in Big Finish's anniversary festival Once and Future, the sense of self comes with the face and so we have the Tenth Doctor looking a couple of decades older.

Fourteenth says on realising he's giving the pepperpots both their name and catchphrase, "the timelines of canon are rupturing" and they certainly are.  As the boss explains in Confidential's replacement Unleashed, Davros, as he's been depicted over the past fifty years, is immensely problematic in 2023 and he couldn't in all conscience show a wheelchair user as a villain, especially on Children In Need and so this is how Davros will appear going forward.  Which honestly is quite right, especially if you're a child who is a wheelchair user and might have to deal with the discriminatory fallout and I'm embarrassed myself that I'd never considered that before.  But in keeping Beech as the character, continuity is maintained.

How does this square with previous fictional depictions?  Well, because everyone has wanted to have a crack at writing the creator of the Daleks, Davros's origin story on the TARDIS Wiki page is a mess anyway and it's entirely possible that due to Amy's Crack, the Faction Paradox or the Time War in general, the creation myth of the Daleks is in constant flux and the Doctor's just stumbled into yet another iteration of however it's supposed to have happened.  History's changed so that Davros never had the accident and in this iteration of the timeline it's this space Gru and his army of murderous minions, part of the military rather than science elite (hence the uniform) with whom the Fourth Doctor did battle.  In Dr Who, everything and nothing is canonical really.  No Lucasfilm Story Group for us.

Casuals might wonder why, unlike the Pudsey Cutaway, we're not seeing the moments directly after the regeneration on the cliff.  Apart from not wanting to attract the ire of the Durdle Door people again (the location of the cliff in Dorset was photographed without Cardiff telling the owners it was for the regeneration scene which led to fears that Whovians might fall off the edge like lemmings), RTD2's also left room for the adventure which has played out in the parish circular's comic strip for the past fourteenth months.  I won't completely spoil the immensely fun Liberation of the Daleks in case you're waiting for the graphic novel but it ends with the Doctor fearing that the malfunctioning TARDIS might return him to Skaro.  And here he is, looking a bit knackered after all of those shenanigans. 

As a bonus, the iPlayer also contains a preview of Confidential's replacement, Unleashed, presented by the effervescent Steffan Powell meandering around the set, nabbing people for a chat and giving proceedings a bit more personality than the old B-roll with Simon Pegg voiceover.  But these are still intercut with old school producer interviews during which it's revealed by Vicki Delow that this was all shot a whole year after the specials, with David Tennant (presumably unexpectedly) playing the Fourteenth Doctor again and the interview with Russell in which he explains the change to Davros's character mentioned above.  After the relative BTS drought of the past few years, it's fun seeing Barnaby Edwards crouched inside the Dalek casing again explaining how he wiggles the weapons.

Where does this leave us?  With five minutes of fun, something to entice kids to watch Genesis of the Daleks on the iPlayer and keep us going for another week and a day.  With due respect to Mr Chibnall for keeping all of this on-air even during the pandemic, ever since Mr Davies has returned, there's been a general feeling of "we're back", of there being excitement around the series again, from the revitalised Doctor Who Magazine, to most of Doctor Who turning up on the iPlayer (which feels like would have happened even if this wasn't an anniversary year) to this Doctor Who Children in Need Special 2023 which exists purely because Russell T Davies decided that they traditionally make something for Children in Need and so here we are.  Roll on the 25th of November.