Almost Doctor Who: Boots Christmas Advert 2021.

 

TV As it says in the title, find above the new Boots Christmas Advert 2021, in which Jenna Coleman, the actress who played a companion for nearly three seasons in the popular British science fiction programme Doctor Who, bounces in as a completely different character who is gifted a handbag for Christmas by her Nan, which is bigger on the inside.

Hopefully Andrew Pixley will rock up at some point with the making of this thing because the behind-the-scenes on this could be a riot, either because they're all Doctor Who fans having a laugh or everyone including Jenna were completely oblivious to the implications which would somehow make it all the more hilarious.  I'm not sure either way.

For one thing, they make it absolutely clear throughout that Jenna is playing a character called Joy presumably because it ties in with the hashtag #bagsofjoy which appears in the YouTube title and other socials.  Which is either a way of distancing themselves from Doctor Who, or again just makes it look as though their distancing themselves from Doctor Who which again is even funny.

Just to be silly, how would this fit within Doctor Who?  Since the character is named Joy and has a completely different family, we have to assume this isn't sadly, Clara Oswald herself at some time after she's travelled with me, sorry Me.  In which case we have to assume Joy's one of the splinters of Clara, created when she stepped into the Doctor's timeline in The Name of the Doctor.

How did she end up with this magical bag?  The advert opens with Joy in her bedroom approaching the bag and the message from her Nan as though she hasn't seen either before, much less picked up the bag and investigated its secrets.  Mores to the point at the end of the episode, her Nan seems just as bewildered by this dimensionally transcendental gifting machine as anyone.

How did it get in there?  The party at the end of the film seems to happening in a much larger house than the one in the establishing shot at the start, the bay windows being the real give away, so we know that Nan doesn't live with Joy.  She could be a different Nan, the mother of another of the parents, in which case the bookended messages would make no sense.

The most obvious explanation is the bag's a gift from the Doctor.  We know that such bags do exist.  For years the Doctor's sometimes accessorised with a Gladstone bag which had the ability to gift him just the random object that might be needed to get out of a given problem (originally designed by the TV Comic writers so they could get out of a corner they'd written themselves into).

Perhaps after this Clara splinter stepped into to save the Doctor, unaware even of the help she was giving, the adoptive Time Lord decided to leave the gift.  But not wanting to disrupt her existence too much by revealing Joy's true origin, decided to attribute the present to her Nan, hoping that the old dear would be so full of Christmas cheer that she'd forget that she didn't gift the bag in the first place.

But why does the bag have the Boots logo on the side?  Because unlike the TARDIS it has a working chameleon circuit which transforms it to fit its setting and this seemed the least conspicuous.  Perhaps the Doctor's own bag turned into a Gladstone during an adventure in the mid-19th century or when he visited the Titanic (where they were used by the pursers) and got stuck that way.  

Either way, this has made me feel immensely Christmassy even though it's only the 4th November, which is precisely what they're meant to do.  Before you ask, I haven't quite managed to work out how the John Lewis advert is a secret episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, unless Luke's sister was hiding some things about her anatomy.  And a vowel.

Almost Doctor Who: Eat Pray Love

Film  As we’ve discussed before if you’re a Doctor Who fan, or at least the kind of Doctor Who fan who’s bought every dvd in the range including re-releases and re-re-release (Resurrection of the Daleks), you can’t turn it off.  “It” in this context being a habitual awareness of the franchise in other contexts, like not being able to watch the recent series of Law & Order UK without wondering why Martha Jones is knocking around with the Fifth Doctor or noticing that it’s quite some way into Chalet Girl before someone who hasn’t been in Doctor Who appears, the KFC knock-off at the beginning employing both The Unicorn and the wasp.

“It” can creep up on you when you least expect it and believe me, I didn’t expect to be half way through the languorous post-hippie travelogue Eat Pray Love, blurting out “This is just like Doctor Who!” into my empty room especially since there don’t appear to be any casting connections whatsoever.  Unlike the previous entries in this series too, this isn’t some desperate attempt to absorb some much loved (or at least liked) material into a franchise which isn’t, let’s face it, desperate for new material.  I hate Eat Pray Love, with its grizzly orientalism, leisurely pace and pre-packed la-de-da.  Only a few of the performances make it in any way watchable.

That and once I’d noticed it, trying to spot the many ways it is similar to Who, a rabbit hole which opens with the protagonist.  Over the years, the reasons the Doctor originally stole the Type 40 and left Gallifrey have been hinted at, most recently in The Doctor’s Wife.  The general impression is that he was bored, sick of the stuffy arrogance of Time Lord society and seeking “a great spirit of adventure” and he’s continued wanting taking his companions out to see the wonders of the universe in a desperate attempt to fight a very personal, very fundamental numbness, the kind of enuii which can only develop in someone whose over a thousand years old.

In Eat Pray Love, we find Liz (Julia Roberts) a modern real world career woman who has everything a woman of her ilk dreams about (a house, a man) but like the Doctor is just bored with the whole effort.  Once divorced, she decides that the thing to do is leave everything behind and go for some adventures, or as the official synopsis has it “Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery.”  So their motives aren’t that dissimilar and neither is their transport.  The Doctor has his TARDIS.  Liz’s bank account is also dimensionally transcendental.

Liz’s journey is broken into four sections, the prologue which sets up the story, then three other episodes, the eat, the pray and the love, so it’s following the archetypical episode structure of Doctor Who (and given the varying lengths of those episodes not unlike a Big Finish audio).  Each of those stories pretty much offers a discrete chapter, so it’s most like the caravan or quest genre of Who adventure in which a TARDIS team find themselves in a new location with new challenges each episode exemplified by 60s stories like The Keys of Marinus or The Chase and latterly the Eighth Doctor audio Seasons of Fear with an overall story tied up at the conclusion.

In order to create some element of pace and cut down on endless shots of planes landing in airports, the transitions between section are rather haphazardly edited with Liz almost popping into existence in each location, thrown into some ensuing chaos and, like the TARDIS team, trying to cope with what each new culture is throwing at her.  One of the few great moments in the film is when Liz is tossed around the back seat of a car, sheepishly looking out of the windows as though the walls of the city are going to fall on top of her.  It's not too dissimilar those scenes in the modern series, with the TARDIS interior’s erratic enough to throw its inhabitants to the floor.

It’s only really (really!) when we reach the content of the adventures that the analogy admittedly runs into trouble.  In each of the different locations, like the Doctor, Liz befriends a couple of the locals.  In Italy it’s a Scandinavian and a language coach, in India an alcoholic Texan (played by Richard Jenkins in yet another of his sad man roles) and a young girl in an arranged marriage, in Bali a couple of healers and Javier Bardem.  But unlike the Doctor she’s not there to fix their lives, she's there to learn from them: to be spontaneous, be in touch with your spiritual side and um, if you keep the right side of Santa’s list you can snag a Bardem.

The way Liz goes about this isn't un-Doctorish, always open to new experiences, unafraid to ask the difficult questions but similarly willing to learn, a trait that's especially evident in the newer series.  It's not unusual too for the Doctor to become the passive observer in some adventures, dragged along by events, his intervention not always instrumental to the outcome especially in some of the historicals.  He doesn't effect much change in the final few episodes of An Unearthly Child, other than running away from a cave of skulls and threatening to brick a man in the head to escape.

Plus, in the spin-off material there have been short stories or even whole novels that have hinged on the Doctor learning from some spiritual journey especially in the case of the Sixth and Eighth Doctors who spend an inordinate amount of time moping around, building train sets, attending retreats and in the case of the former rocking with The Beatles.  The television series is also thick with unseen stories which amount to little more than an encounter with someone famous because the Time Lord can or showing off some planet like Women Wept to his latest companion, assuming he’s not inspecting a nebula himself.

But it’s just not the archetypical adventure, not that the classic series wouldn’t have benefited from trying something this experimental now and then.  Who knows, Colin Baker might have survived the 80s bump if the Doctor had visited Tranquil Repose on Necros and simply been allowed to pay his last respects to Stengos whilst having long nostalgic chats with Natasha and Grigory about their mutual friend and sitting in for Alexi Sayle’s DJ and offering some comfort to the corpses underhindered by yet another repetitious appearance from Davros and the Daleks with Peri finally being taken to Blackpool afterwards.

Except it’s not terribly dramatic which is Eat Pray Love’s curse.  As Liz drifts through the film, the only tension is whether we’ll be treated to a flash of Julia Roberts’s smile, the supporting characters rarely on-screen long enough to present much in the way of jeopardy.  But nevertheless, the thrust of the piece, her “great spirit of adventures” feels very fundamentally Who-like which is presumably why I had that revelation, for all its insanity.  But as the title of this series suggests, I didn’t think it was Doctor Who, I thought it was almost Doctor Who.  If only Bardem’s character was revealed to be a Zygon.

Almost Doctor Who: The Tudors

TV Oh, The Tudors.  Having managed to miss the first two seasons, I finally cottoned on to The Tudors after visited the British Library’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch exhibition in 2009. I’d been enthralled by seeing the original documents and costumes, as I said at the time, “the notes scribbled between Henry and Anne Boleyn during services, the divorce papers from Katherine of Aragon, the material which led to the dissolution of the English church from Rome, innumerable peace treaties and, by the way, the chain Henry is seen wearing in the famous Holbein painting”. As often happens, I quickly watched all the documentaries I had stored, listened to a radio adaptation of Shakespeare’s All Is True and ultimately making a purchase at Amazon.

I was horrified. I knew that creator Michael Hurst had taken some liberties with the historical record, but having become an instant expect (I’d also read the exhibition catalogue), I couldn’t understand why Henry sister’s Margaret had been merged with Mary, why she was married off to some Portuguese monarch who hadn't existed who she subsequently murdered, why they’d bothered to mess about with the circumstances of Cardinal Wolsey’s death and why that happens at much the same time as the death of Henry’s fictional sister. For all the work which had apparently gone into creating the sumptuous costumes and settings, other “errors” big and small distracted from the achievement.

Eventually, I had to rationalise some kind of coping mechanism and as you might have gathered, it was, like Outcasts, to assume that I was watching the version of Henry VIII’s life as it appears in the Doctor Who universe. The franchise has always had a very loose approach to historical accuracy right from Marco Polo referring to Peking instead of Khan-balik, which means a series that actually shows Tudor composing Greensleeves should fit right in, even if some of his sexual antics would be enough to make Captain Jack blush (assuming he isn't already engrossed). After that realisation it was entirely possible to swallow even the most basic of changes, especially in later years when Hirst seemed to stop trying and even resorted to including ghosts.

Of course most period dramas with a dodgy grip on history could fit in the Whoniverse.  But there's something rather unique about The Tudors, its production design, direction and writing as close an analogue to nuWho as similar shows were to classic Who which would regularly re-utilise the costumes.  Certainly to look at a piece like The Nine Days' Queen section of SJA's Lost in Time, is to watch Who attempting to live up to the sumptuousness of The Tudors on a tiny budget.  Perhaps the connection is more even more tenuous than Outcasts, but if nuWho ever does manage to produce a pure historical, The Tudors is something to aspire to.  With slightly less lechery.

As you might expect, the Doctor’s met Henry VIII on a few occasions. In The Sensorites its mentioned that he and Susan being sent to the tower on purpose because that was were the TARDIS was located. In a Short Trip, the Doctor and Nyssa stopped Henry marrying the daughter of Lord Cromwell as time went out of wack then later in his timestream but earlier for the King, in the Big Finish audio Recorded Time, Henry takes a shine to Peri and decides to make her his wife instead of Anne Bolyn. I wonder what he would have thought about the Doctor later effectively becoming his son in law after marrying Liz I.  Not that she would have been born if he's had his way with King Ycarnos's future wife.

Almost Doctor Who: Outcasts

TV Well of course Outcasts. Outcasts goes without saying. You remember Outcasts, Party Animals creator Ben Richards’s sci-fi opus about a colony in space in 2060, scraping an existence on a dirt-ball whilst dealing with attacks from the mutant remnants of the failed experiments which led to them being healthy enough to survive (or something). Richards said he wasn’t a fan of the genre, that he was really interested in the human story. And it showed, as he managed to replicate many of the genre’s old clichés (see above), without any sign of a modern twist. The show’s self-defeating agenda was sci-fi for people who don’t like sci-fi and such divisiveness wasn't well received and it was quickly shunted from its prestige Monday night at nine to the graveyard 10:30pm Sunday night shift (and reruns on BBC HD where it presently is).

What didn’t help it, at least for Doctor Who fans, is that we really have seen it all before. Apart from the dozens of novels and audios on the same theme, there have been countless television stories in which colonists have faced comparable dangers in similar environments. The clearest analogues are Colony in Space from the Pertwee years and later Frontios, both of which saw similar colonies ransacked by the Doctor for their dark secrets and although Outcasts didn’t have the opportunity to reveal its alien hand, that’s obviously where the Solaris-lite supernatural forces were heading to. Of course, Star Trek fans can make much the same accusation. But note that Forthaven isn’t just a human colony. It’s a British colony of the kind which only Doctor Who, especially in the 70s and 80s, seems to produce.

In fact, there’s nothing in these episodes which disavows it from occurring the Whoniverse, really, especially if you glance at Lance Parkin’s Ahistory, that bonkers attempt to consolidate the entire chronology of the franchise with all its contradictions. Lance at one point ruminates that even Blake’s 7 fits if you squint enough and Outcasts doesn’t even require that level of ocular contortion. According to Ahistory by 2060, the Whoniverse’s Earth is conveniently experiencing nuclear wars with colonisation missions launched to other solar systems of the kind Outcasts might as well be dramatising thanks to some interpolation from spin-off novels mainly by Lawrence Miles (which are as about as canonical to me at least as anything else since they were the proper continuation of Who for many of us until its return to television).

And like Torchwood, (which is also canon sadly), Outcasts demonstrates what Doctor Who is like when the Time Lord doesn’t materialise. Many Who stories begin with a scene which sets up the world and the mystery before the blue box arrives and the entire duration of every episode of Outcasts feels like one of those set up scenes. As an ensemble show, it’s desperate for a more vital protagonist and if this had been Doctor Who, all of the revelations in episode eight would have been portioned out carefully across six episodes in classic Who or about half an hour in nuWho. At times it is frustrating to watch because the Doctor isn’t gadding about asking all the vital questions, putting two and two together, even though we know the writer would have used the usual narrative delaying tactic of locking him in Cass's (Daniel Mays) cell for the duration.

Equally frustratingly, all of the characters are precisely the kinds of archetypes Doctor Who writers include to become friends and enemies of the Doctor. Who is President Richard Tate (Liam Cunningham) but the kind of figure the Time Lord would have to butt up against until he worked out what his secret was?  Isn’t Stella (Hermione Norris) the grudging ally in the mould of Adelaide Brooke from Waters of Mars or Fleur (Amy Manson) the fast if cynical friend who turns out be not all she seems ala Cleaves in The Rebel Flesh? That leaves Cass or Lily (Jeanne Kietzmann) or both to make friends with the companion and presumably die horribly and we’re left with the creeping suspicion that Richards was stretching the truth on how much he likes the genre and he had in fact got every story in broadcast order on a shelf in his bedroom, ready to whip out when he’s desperate for inspiration.

As the story plays out, and this is were the spoilers really begin if any of this has led you to Amazon to buy the thing, the planet even has enough environments to lend themselves to a perfect Who structure in which the Doctor hangs about sharing grumpy scenes with Liam Cunningham because his companion, let’s say Charley Pollard, has been kidnapped by ACs and he’s trying to discover why and what’s special about them. Meanwhile such things as the whiteout and AC attacks are available for cliffhangers. If you have seen the show or when you do see it, see if you can decide when would have been the optimal moment for the TARDIS to appear. As things played out, if I’d been the BBC, it would have been seconds in. Then the whole story could have been knocked off in an hour.

[Almost Doctor Who is an occasional series which previously studied the films Happy Accidents and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium just in case you thought this was tenuous.]

Almost Doctor Who:Happy Accidents

Film Barely seen by anyone on initial release a decade ago but recently gifted a dvd release (and good lord is now watchable perfectly leagally on Netflix) Brad Anderson's film Happy Accidents is an urban Starman-like romance. Marisa Tormei’s serial dating failure Ruby meets Vincent D’Onofrio’s hipster Sam in the park and although he’s kind of eccentric, he’s no worse than most of the mouth breathers she’s previously had to deal with and they begin dating.

At which point he decides to dump a mass of exposition on her about his past, that he’s a time traveller, from the future, that he’s been searching for her because of photograph he found in a junk shop and to describe any more would be to spoil the rest of what is an entertaining piece of Sundance indie which is worth seeing even if you're not entirely convinced by anything else I'm about to write. Just don't look at anything else I've seen online. It all gives the game away.

The most immediate similarity is with the tv movie and the moment when the newly regenerated Eighth Doctor is also babbling about Gallifrey and the Master, Tormei’s blasé reaction mirroring Grace’s acceptance that her world is changing so she’d best just go with it. Arguably Rose too, through in the first couple of episodes of nu-Who the Doctor is rather more reticent about his past thanks to Russell T Davies only writing in enough to gain a new audience's attention.

At first this seems like coincidence; these are the kinds of relationship tropes or emotional beats that are typical to this kind of story and the central question of whether Sam’s lying or not reflect’s similar posers in everything from K-Pax, to The Man From Earth to Starman to the surreal Starry Night featuring a man who looks like and thinks he may well be Vincent Van Gogh.

Then about an hour in to Happy Accidents, there’s a line of dialogue which literally made me spill tea on my lap because it was in my mouth when I started laughing. It’s in one of the long expositional scenes when Sam’s attempting to convince Ruby of his sincerity and she’s looking at him as though he’s as nuts as she’s slowly becoming convinced he is.

He’s describing the kinds of time travel which are possible and says that “Blinovitch's Second Law of Temporal Inertia – blah blah blah”. The blahs are were I was looking for a towel to mop up the beverage. On rewinding and listening again, though he doesn’t use “limitation effect”, he’s making up new Blinovitch laws about what is and isn’t possible which someone has helpful jotted down on the (oh yes) wikipedia page:

"Blinovitch's Second Law of Temporal Inertia" apparently states that is impossible to time travel in your own lifetime. One can only time travel to the distant past, and only small changes in history are possible, which will "dampen out" by the time they reach the relative present.

"Blinovitch's Fifth Law of Causal Determination" resolves (in an unspecified manner) all paradoxes involved with time travel.

In the midst of this most American of indie sci-fi adventures, Vincent D’Onofrio uses one of the stone cold canonical names from Doctor Who and in such a way that for a brief moment (well not that brief probably), I wondered if I’d been oblivious to something all these years and it was an actual scientific law. I even headed straight to Google to check, hence knowing that a wikipedia page exists on the subject, which proved very handy come the Christmas special and the malarchy surrounding the finale.

Originally created by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts to explain why Day of the Daleks doesn’t make any sense it is pure fiction and writer/director Anderson is simply tipping his hat to one of his inspirations, which suggeststhe similarities with the tv movie might not be so coincidental. But by the end of the film, since there’s nothing else in the story that Lance Parkin could pinch his nose over, I pretty much decided I was watching something set in the Doctor Who universe. The dvd now sits on the same shelf as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Almost Doctor Who: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Film This late noughties slice of post-Wonka wimsey wasn’t well received on released, largely by disappointed reviewers clutching their nostalgic memories of director Robert Stevenson’s bursts of Disney confection, the magical fantasy of Mary Poppins and Bednobs and Broomsticks. Despite that, this story of Dustin Hoffman’s titular ancient magician training his composer employee, Molly Mahoney, sparkly played by Natalie Portman, to take over the running of his toy shop is the kind of film that deserves to be rediscovered, not least because the script is one of the most literate and passionate of the noughties.

If you’ve not seen the film, I’d urge you to seek it out now then come back again because necessarily there will be spoilers. It’s best watched as I did without much foreknowledge, the series title for this new run of articles more than enough. Part of the problem some people have had is that writer/director Zach Helm (who also penned Stranger Than Fiction) is so determined not explain the origins of Mr. Magorium or his shop and the need for the unfolding circumstances, the viewer left to imagine whatever the back story might be. For some this was a distraction. But I had an easy answer.

Mr. Magorium is a Time Lord. As he says in the film he’s 243 years old, small fry in comparison to the Doctor perhaps, but not bad longevity. Like the Doctor he’s a kind of magician, absent minded and above all wants to please the children. Unlike the Doctor he doesn’t seem too concerned with getting messed up in the world’s problems, though the Doctor is quite unique in that regard. He adores humanity but doesn’t really understand us or our customs as we discover in the charming sequence when Molly takes him out into the world. His clothes are at once contemporary yet don’t quite fit, which is very nu-Who.

He says some very Doctorish things. Try:

“I fell so completely in love with these shoes, I bought enough pairs to last my whole lifetime. This is my last pair.”

Or:

“We Breathe. We Pulse. We Regenerate. Our hearts beat. Our minds create. Our souls ingest. Thirty-seven seconds, well used, is a lifetime.”

The Wonder Emporium is his TARDIS. Like Professor Chronotis’s TARDIS in the Douglas Adams penned story, Shada, it has transformed itself to mimic part of the architecture of its environment and though initially the external and internal size seem to reflect each other, there are sections, like the ball room, which inexplicably exist outside of normal space. He even talks about it changing location. When Mr. Magorium dies (presumably having reached the end of his regenerative cycle) the toy shop turns grey and fades too, the link between him and it having been broken.

Molly Mahoney is his companion, though more in the manic pixie dream girl realm of Susan or Amy Pond than Jo Grant. Magorium teaches her about the world and she’s the one he’s forever trying to impress. But like many of the Doctor’s companions she’s also the one who’s the public face on whatever madness and baggage he’s carrying around with him and the only one who can tell him off or tell him to stop. Jason Bateman’s accountant Henry Weston (nickname “the Mutant”) is the rarer third wheel figure, the Harry Sullivan, Mickey or Rory standing on the edge of this odd relationship, staying as detached as they can until they become caught up in the lunacy themselves.

Searching for confirmation online, I’ve found little in Zach Helm’s publicity interviews to suggest a direct connection. He mentions his influences in this piece at Movie Maker, saying that Magorium is based on a vaudeville joke though a bit more complex than that. Helm also says that he was fired as the writer on the film and someone else came in to rewrite the script he was directing, so perhaps some of this is from that mystery person. Either way, it’s certainly worth reassessment in this light. It’s impossible for me not to look this speech which might have been transcribed from a 90s Eighth Doctor novel and is one of my favourite comments on this particular play I’ve read anywhere:

"When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He's written "He dies." That's all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is "He dies." It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with "He dies." And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it's only natural to be sad, but not because of the words "He dies." but because of the life we saw prior to the words."