If this is the best Doctor Who writers can do – exterminate! CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last weekend's TV

By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:19 EST, 22 November 2015 | Updated: 21:06 EST, 22 November 2015

Doctor Who

Rating:

(no stars) 

Doctor Who has become Doctor What’s-The-Point? Once the Beeb’s best adventure series, it started to run low on energy five years ago, and for the past 18 months the whole franchise has been, despite its massive budget, practically bereft of ideas.

Under producer Steven Moffat, it has become needlessly complex and tortuously contrived. Stories make no sense, characters have no continuity and, instead of scaring and exciting us, the writers appear to be interested only in showing off how much arcane trivia they know from episodes 50 years ago.

Doctor Who has become a prime-time programme aimed solely at ‘Whovian’ geeks, the kind of people who don’t watch any other television but this — and who don’t seem to realise that the ancient episodes they revere, the ones starring Patrick Troughton or Tom Baker as the Timelord, were written to thrill children.

Farewell: Jenna Coleman's character Clara Oswald was killed off in what was an ill-judged demise by writers 

End of the line: Because Coleman wanted to quit in real life, she chose to die. Capaldi gaped and sighed for about ten minutes, Clara got struck down by a raven, and that was that

It’s a very long time since the Doctor entertained many viewers under ten. For a start, it’s on far too late — Saturday’s episode didn’t finish till 9pm.

Actor and writer Mark Gatiss has complained furiously about this, arguing that the Doctor’s rightful 6pm timeslot is currently occupied by Pointless Celebrities.

But there’s an excellent reason for this. Ordinary people like Pointless. And they are bored to distraction by Doctor Who.

Viewing figures have spiralled down to new lows this year, slumping below four million. Much of the blame lies with the dull, self-indulgent stories that are frequently impenetrable — such as last week’s tosh written by Gatiss himself, something tedious to do with sleep.

But the latest offering was the worst of the lot. It was static, it was a mass of childish contradictions, and it wasn’t so much unoriginal as a blatant rip-off of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, a magical, invisible Victorian street in London.

Goodbye: The Doctor was powerless to protect Clara from her deadly foe in the episode's closing scene

The scenes were a series of debates, characters standing in clusters and gabbing on about aliens and ethics. It was as dynamic as a parliamentary committee meeting.

Maisie Williams returned as the immortal Viking, Ashildr, though since we last saw her she had acquired supernatural powers, such as tattoos that turned to smoke, and the ability to kill by pointing ravens at people.

Why not? The Doctor has been reinvented as a guitar-wielding rocker, who can no longer open locks without a key — he’s chucked away his sonic screwdriver. The whole show feels as though uninterested TV executives are making it up as they go along.

But worst of all was the death of the Doctor’s companion, Clara Oswald, who suffered the most ill-judged demise since Cousin Matthew skidded into a ditch in the 2012 Christmas special of Downton Abbey. We’ve known for months that actress Jenna Coleman wanted to quit, and yet this was the best departure that Moffat could devise: Clara volunteering to suffer the death sentence imposed on a fellow character.

That doesn’t add up — why not just transfer the sentence to Ashildr or the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) — both are unkillable, after all, so no harm there?

Instead, because Coleman wanted to quit in real life, she chose to die. Capaldi gaped and sighed for about ten minutes, Clara got struck down by a raven, and that was that.

What an abject anticlimax. The series should be rebranded as Pointless Doctor Who, because that’s exactly what it is.

Building Hitler’s Supergun 

Rating:

The tragic death in 1944 of pilot Joe Kennedy, future President JFK’s big brother, was uncovered in Hugh Hunt’s fascinating investigation into a deranged Nazi masterplan to win the war with sci-fi technology. 

Building Hitler’s Supergun: The Plot To Destroy London (C4) told how German engineers attempted to construct a cannon that could lob 300 shells an hour across the Channel, an assault potentially even more devastating than the Blitz.

Kennedy’s mission was to pilot a plane crammed with explosives targeting the supergun: he was to bail out before the aircraft was guided by radio control to destroy the weapon in its bunker. Instead, it blew up in mid-air.

Hunt’s eagerness to set off explosions sometimes sent him veering into Top Gear territory: he got supergung-ho, like Richard Hammond playing with a howitzer kit.

But the history was well told, without too many statistics. This was bang on target.

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