Day 3448: The Return of the Great Awkward Bustard

Thursday:


Isn't great that Britain's biggest booby is back!

What with their awkward flapping not to mention dangerously flamboyant mating habits making them all too tempting a target, it was once thought to be all over for Britain's answer to Big Bird. His habit of crashing and burning, a consequence of flying blind into electrical cables, didn't help either.

But now, thanks to a programme of careful conservation, the bustard has been given a SECOND CHANCE!

And for those of you NOT interested in BIRDS, Mr Simon Hugs has been chosen as the new Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats.



Everyone loves Mr Hugs. Even if everyone also has their "Oh Simon!" moments.

He could be described as one of those MARMITE politicians – if only MARMITE had a habit of changing its flavor every five minutes so that at one bite you love it and the next makes you want to spit.

Just recently, the speech that he gave at the Special Conference to endorse the Coalition deal was widely judged a CROWNING MOMENT OF AWESOME™ and was deservedly given the biggest standing ovation of the day.

But just a couple of days earlier he had appeared on radio show Any Questions with Jonathan Dimbledonkey and totally fumbled the defense of the Coalition's fixed term parliament proposal by not being properly up on the brief – not just leaving an open goal, but actually moving the goal closer to the opposition and then tipping the ball over the goal line himself by suggesting that the 55% rule was to help the GOVERNMENT.

(As any fule kno: the 55% rule is to protect PARLIAMENT from GOVERNMENT; NOT the other way around. Parliament can get rid of the Government on a vote of 50%+1; Government can only get rid of Parliament on a vote of 55%+1. That's why it's actually TOO LOW, not TOO HIGH; Scotland has a more reasonable 66% protection. And if no one can form a government, then you get an election after 28 days ANYWAY. But you know all this.)

DOUBLE but, the day before THAT Mr Hugs had appeared on TV's Questionable Time with David Dimbledonkey, and speaking to an audience that started off apparently largely hostile to the Coalition won them over by calmly and sensibly explaining that grown up politics was what they had voted for and was what they were getting.


I think that I can understand WHY the Liberal Democrats in Parliament chose him to be their new Deputy. I think he is the biggest woolliest security blanket in the whole of toytown, and with when you want to feel BETTER about yourselves for getting into bed with the big bad wolf, what could be better than hugs from Mr Hugs.

Of course what the Parliamentary Party NEEDS is not the same thing as what it WANTS. If you're getting into bed with the big bad wolf you need the BRAVE WOODSMAN and not GRANDMA!

Being deputy leader should not be a CONSOLATION PRIZE or a merit badge for LONG SPEECHES SERVICE. Yes, you CAN use is as a handy soap box for a non-Government Liberal voice, but the irony is that Mr Hugs is so popular and well-known already that he doesn't really NEED another soap box to stand on.

With a lot of the best of Liberal talent is now IN government, we need to be developing our next generation. I think Mr Tim would have been an excellent and exciting choice, though my personal choice would have been Ms Jo Winsome, though she chose not to stand.

Because what the Deputy Leader should REALLY be doing is preparing the Party, in Parliament and out, for what happens AFTER the Coalition: they should be leading the independent policy development and developing the campaigns. That means it's a job for someone with drive and energy and organisation and new ideas. And Mr Hugs has lots of drive and energy.

So many congratulations to Mr Hugs and do try not to fly into any electric power lines!

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Day 3447: Five Go Mad for the Labour Leadership

Wednesday:

I say chaps and chaps-of-the-alternative-gender, it's time for fun and lashings of ginger beer – steady on! – as all the old gang get back together again: Ed, Ed, Anne(dy), tomboy George (short for Dave) and Token the Dog, off on a spiffing adventure to recover the lost election plans, find out where Uncle Quentin (Mr Frown) buried the secret of being popular, and unmask the nasty people-smugglers so no more of those icky immigrants can get in. Hurrah!

The ASTUTE READER may have noticed a small touch of SATIRE there, and I should like to apologise if anyone was OFFENDED by the suggestion that Ms Enid Blyton's much loved famous five characters were as frighteningly-right-wing as the nonimees for next Hard Labour Loser Leader.


The favourite to win is still creepy wearer of bum-fluff beards, Mr David Millipede, formerly Secretary of State for Denying that Britain had Anything to do with Torture, and Minister for Making Sure the Man in the Orange Jumpsuit was On that Unmarked Plane at Midnight. His campaign slogan: "Will you shut the badword up about badwordy Iraq already, bro!"

Mr Millipede has of course done his best to engineer the best possible contest for himself the Labour Party. He has learned from the mistakes made by Lord Blairimort – no, don't get excited, not THOSE mistakes, only the ones about crushing internal party dissent. Unlike Lord B, Mr Millipede wants to make sure that he doesn't just win the leadership, but also that he is seen to OBLITERATE all possible sources of opposition.

The main PURPOSE of this leadership election… yes, I know you think it's to pick the poor sap who will be getting slapped around by Mr Balloon at the despatch box for the next five years, but it's not really, but like ALL Hard Labour Elections it's about settling some scores internally and who gives a fluff about the outside world… so the main PURPOSE of this leadership election is to stage the "fight that never was" between Lord Blairimort (in the Millipede Corner) and Mr Frown (as represented on Earth by Mr Bully Balls).

Mr Balls, formerly Secretary of State for Signing off on Millions and Millions of Pounds worth of School Building Programmes that could Never have been Paid For just so that he could Point the Finger when the Coalition Cancel Them, is a total political animal. Close friends speak of him as a kind and generous young man… who then met Mr Frown in the nineteen-nineties and turned to the DARK SIDE. Or at least they WOULD speak of him thus if he HAD any close friends. And if anyone could find their bodies. He was badly damaged by the close squeak of nearly losing his safe seat in the election, but he still remains a strong candidate because of his Sith Powers Union backing. Actually that IS like Sith Powers.

What Mr Millipede knows is that the great secret of Mr Frown's powers in the Labour Government was that Lord Blairimort made a DEAL with him rather than standing against him and proving who had the real support of the Party. Which is why he sees this leadership election as the one and only chance for the Blairite and Brownite factions finally to bury the hatchet. Preferably right between Mr Bully Balls' SHOULDERBLADES EYES.

But it is ALSO why he went to so much trouble to make sure Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo was bumped over the starting line by people who are never going to vote for her. Namely himself. Never mind all this touchy-feely now Hard Labour can tell itself that it's the real Party of Diversity™ guff. THAT'S just a BONUS. His real aim is to make sure that the left of the Party have a candidate in the fight so that when he wins they can't sit on the backbenches griping about a stitch-up. I mean they WILL gripe about it, but he can slap them down, and the membership will have to buy it.

Unless, of course, she wins. Which would be hilarious. And it's not actually impossible. As a TV personality and loud-mouthed opponent of some of the NASTIER aspects of Labour policy, not to mention the only one not TAINTED as a former Government minister, she could attract a lot of support from the ordinary members who feel betrayed by thirteen years of THATCHERITE Government that they're pretty sure they never voted for. But they only count for a third of the vote. Obviously she'll never win the MPs. So it does depend on how many of the unions ballot their members.

On the down side, she doesn't really stand FOR anything. Not that that ever did Mr Balloon any harm! Her voting record is a bit of a mixed bag: for and against climate change laws, for and against I.D.iot cards, for and against transparency in Parliament, for and against powers for ministers to intervene in inquests… she seems to have voted strongly against the Iraq war, but then against an INQUIRY into the war too. It makes her look like a bit of a POPULIST, even an OPPORTUNIST. Still, supporting an elected House of Lords Club, gay rights and Europe and opposition to terrorist laws, student fees and anti-asylum seeker legislation all make her much more appealing to a Liberal voter than the boys with their draconian Government records.


I am in two minds as to whether all the gerrymandering will HELP or HINDER Mr Andy Crash-and-Burnham. On the one fluffy foot, the presence of Ms Diane seriously undermines his Unique Selling Point of being ever-so-slightly not-exactly-the-same-as the other three posh white boys; on the other fluffy foot, perhaps it gives him the chance to "come thought the middle" by playing the "I'm different but I'm not THAT different" card.

Which just leaves us with the "compromise candidate": Mr Ed Millipede, product of a TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT between Mr Ed Bully Balls and Mr Dave Millipede. Because his Cabinet experience extended only to being Secretary of State for Fluffity Bunnykins people are saying that he has the EXPERIENCE to lead without any of the getting-your-hands-dirty RESPONSIBILITY that goes with the sort of jobs like the one his brother had.

Ironically, I think he would actually be the WORST leader for Hard Labour, for precisely the reason that he would always be seeking to establish his credentials, to define himself as something OTHER than "the one who's neither Ed nor Millipede".

You can see it happening already with his nakedly "I'm to the left of big brother" promise to keep the 50% tax rate forever. He's trying to appeal to a constituency within the Hard Labour, regardless of the longer-term consequences – in a way it's like Mr Balloon courting the RIGHT of the Conservatories with his silly promise to pull out of the SENSIBLE Centre-Right Group in Europe… and look how THAT promise came back to bite him on the bum! Remember how Lord Blairimort and Mr Frown RULED OUT income tax rises – not because they expected people on higher incomes to vote for them, but because they wanted the (many more) people who ASPIRED to higher incomes to vote for them.

Ultimately, Hard Labour's problem is that all the leading candidates are basically the SAME: a bunch of Mini-Me's of either Lord Blairimort or Mr Frown or both, all equally responsible for the ghastly state that their Party left the economy and the country in.

Ms Abbott-and-Portillo may be a vacuous, opinionated, populist, tribalist, self-publicist and narcissist… but at least she's proved to be an EVIL vacuous, opinionated, populist, tribalist, self-publicist and narcissist.

And if the Coalition's Cuts make Liberals and Tories as popular as a Greek Prime Minister promising to sell the rest of the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum, she might even get to be Prime Monster!

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Day 3445: Inlaws and Outlaws

Monday:


There's an excellent opinion-piece by Mr Ed Fordham, on Liberal Democrat Voice, about the Chief of Stonewall and the case of Mr David Laws.

Back in 1997, when former Prime Monster Lord Blairimort received a million pounds from Mr Bernie Ecclestone – in return using his influence to get Formula One racing exempted from the ban on advertising tobacco in sport – he got away it, appearing on television with the excuse:

"I'm a pretty straight kind of a guy"

Clearly, that's not an excuse that Mr David was going to be allowed to use.

Okay, that's a terrible, terrible gag.

But there's also a big, big point there: a one million quid bribe that clearly was for the benefit of Hard Labour with obvious corrupt benefit to the man giving the bung – no repercussions; forty thousand quid questionable claim for an expense that all other MPs are allowed to claim – job gone and career over.

Oh yes, times have changed.


People responding to the David Laws case seem to fall into two quite distinct categories:

Category A: he "fiddled" his expenses and "ripped off" the taxpayer to the tune of forty thousand quid – burn the witch!

Category B: he was entitled to claim for a second home but (deliberately) misdeclared the allowance claim (which was both wrong and stupid) because he wanted to conceal his private life – come back David, all is forgiven!

Let me be quite clear: I am firmly and PROUDLY in Category B.

Yes, I'm biased: this is a great big WIN for the forces of EVIL who want to damage the coalition, regardless of how good or bad it is for the country, because they are scared of the new politics and what it might mean for their vested interests, and I hate that.

But I'm really getting quite BORED not to mention CROSS with people in Category A who think that "he fiddled forty thousand quid" trumps all arguments. Your moral fervour to crucify a man who told a foolish lie puts you on the side of seriously bad people who want to totally scr– bad-word you over, and that's just INCREDIBLY STUPID!


To you people in Category A, I have to ask: do you think that an MP should have to foot the bill for two homes at once, one in London and one in their constituency? If YOUR job required that you work away from home for long periods, would you mind if they expected you to buy another house?

You might think that MPs should not get an allowance AT ALL for having to run two homes. But that would be saying that only RICH people who can afford to be MPs can be elected; that would DISENFRANCHISE a whole lot of the population. It would not be good for democracy and it would not be fair. Ah ha! people then say, but Mr David Laws IS rich already, he COULD afford to be an MP – that's not the point; the point is that the allowance is to make a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD so that people who are rich OR poor can stand for Parliament equally easily.

So, if you don't accept that, you're not really a democrat and our conversation has to be over.

Perhaps you think that POOR people should get the allowances but not rich people, that there should be some sort of Parliamentary MEANS TESTING. Which would be novel. And certainly not something I've ever heard anyone saying BEFORE this case came up. Though of course you woldn't be trying to fit an argument to the case after you've already made your mind up. And for that matter, where are the protests that Mr Balloon and Mr Oboe get these allowances? Or Hard Labour's Shaun Woodwood or Ms Barbara Folly? They're all millionaires, too. And for that matter, why stop at allowances: why not say MPs who are already wealthy shouldn't get PAID any more.

I think it's fairly IMPORTANT that equal pay for equal work is the proper way to treat people, no matter what they are doing, and that creating different classes of MP depending on your level of contempt and envy is probably a quite BAD IDEA.

So if you DO accept that it is fair enough for MPs to get an allowance for another home, and for all MPs to get the same treatment of their allowance, then you really have to say what your problem IS.

Why might it be WRONG to pay your rent to your PARTNER? Well, I can answer that one: you might be using the payment of rent to disguise the fact that there isn't really a cost at all. If your partner OWNS the property outright, you could be fixing it up for them to make some money for nothing by pretending to rent.

But that ISN'T what was happening here: there was a GENUINE cost of mortgage and bills to pay and Mr David was contributing his SHARE. In fact, as has been pointed out a LOT, if he'd only owned up to being one of a COUPLE Mr David could have claimed for the WHOLE LOT and got a lot MORE money, quite legitimately.

So how can it be a "rip off" to pay forty thousand pounds (over a number of years, remember) for a GENUINE cost that we agree that it's fair enough the taxpayer should pay for?

Essentially, it MUST have been legitimate to make the claim, but the WAY that he made it was wrong.

Now, I know that Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo is one among several who have said: "well if a benefit claimant made a false claim – even if they really deserved the money – then THEY'D have to pay it back and might end up in PRISON".

To which I have to say: well that's because the BENEFIT SYSTEM is really, really BAD-WORD-Y. And that is just plain WRONG too.

People should get what they are OWED, not "as little as we can get away with paying them because they filled in box 137b on form Q wrong"!

And if people are going to start flinging accusations of HYPOCRISY about, "one rule for MPs and one rule for benefit claimants", can I just say that as a member of the Party that has been IN GOVERNMENT for the last thirteen years, Ms Abbott-and-Portillo bears rather more responsibility for the benefit system being really, really BAD-WORD-Y than Mr David does!


So, if you're going to put yourself in Category A then either you must think that it would be better for the system to exclude the less well off from standing; or you think that rich people should get different treatment based on envy; or you think that using technicalities to make a profit is legitimate if it's the taxpayer on the receiving end.

Because the only OTHER possibility is that you think it's something to do with SEXUALITY.


Personally, I think it's pretty darn OBVIOUS that it's something to do with sexuality, that this was a case of QUEER-BASHING by a National Newspaper.

And frankly I'm pretty OUTRAGED that some people are now saying that mentioning Mr David's sexuality at all is some kind of EXCUSE.

Without sexuality, this just isn't a story. If Mr David had fallen in love with a women, he'd have declared it with no problems and no one would have batted an eyelid.

Maybe if he hadn't been brought up in a strongly Catholic family; if he hadn't started out life in the screamingly homophobic Eighties (when Mr Michael Cashman got regular bricks though his window for being "the gay" on EastEnders); if he hadn't worked in the ultra-macho environment of the City; if that hadn't been the decade when the viciously hateful Murdock-led press were out to "out" any vicar or teacher or MP they could… maybe, MAYBE then he wouldn't have been so wound up by this as to have gotten himself into this situation in the first place.

But you know what: it would STILL have been a GROSS INTRUSION into an intensely PERSONAL and PRIVATE matter to blab Mr David's sexuality all over the front pages.

NOBODY should be FORCED to stand up and talk about their SEX LIVES. I hate to have to mention it, but that's what the NAZIS did with those PINK TRIANGLES.

If you don't want to "come out" then you shouldn't have to. It's a simple case of FREEDOM FROM CONFORMITY. What you tell and who you tell is YOUR CHOICE and NOBODY ELSE'S.

That is why someone like Mr Bean Bradshaw is so VERY, VERY WRONG in what he tweeted on twitter:

clegg statement re laws nonsense. why should anyone in Britain today feel ashamed to acknowledge they're gay

Why should anyone HAVE to "acknowledge they're gay"? Typical New Labour assumption that the State has a "right" to know anything it wants and that people have a "duty" to be fine with that because OBVIOUSLY new Labour have made all prejudice and hate crimes vanish. Sigh.

We have a HUMAN RIGHT TO PRIVACY, don't we; why can't that actually mean that our privacy is kept PRIVATE?


But what is much, much worse is when someone like Mr Ben Summerschool, chief executive of gay rights* organisation Stonewall, plays along with the QUEER BASHERS.

(*terms and conditions apply, may not include bi-, trans-, poly- or any other rights)

Just a day after Mr David's outing, in a piece for the Independent on Sunday, Mr Summerschool wrote:

Mr Laws seems to have been using his sexual orientation as a bit of a smokescreen to explain away a controversial expenses claim

But that begs the question why was the claim "controversial"? Oh yes, because he didn't declare that the rent was paid to his partner. And why didn't he declare who his partner was? Oh yes, it was to do with sexual orientation.

In other words, what Mr Summerschool writes is: Mr Laws seems to have been using his sexual orientation as a bit of a smokescreen to explain away an expenses claim to do with his sexual orientation.

When you put it like that, when you can see that this makes NO SENSE in logic or language, you realise that it can only be POLITICALLY-MOTIVATED ATTACK.

But this is the clincher:

If he had made no claim, then none of this would be in the public domain now

In other words, a gay man who does not want to come out has to accept worse treatment than other people doing the same work. That is discrimination, pure and simple.

And that is why Mr Ben Summerschool is NOT FIT to be chief executive of Stonewall, an organisation that is SUPPOSED to campaign for the PROTECTION of gay daddies and NOT the discriminatory treatment of them.

Daddy Richard was – we have to admit – in a state of some FURY already about this whole business, but when he read Mr Summerschool's diatribe in the Sunday Independent he totally blew an upper head gasket, terminating his monthly donation to Stonewall with, as they say, extreme prejudice, and dashing off the following e-mail to the organisation:

Dear Sirs,

Your Chief Executive, Mr Ben Summerskill writes about the Outing of Liberal Democrat minister, Mr David Laws in today's Independent.

Mr Summerskill asserts that David Laws' resignation was about money and not about the hounding of a gay man from office.

Mr Laws could clearly have claimed the same money (in fact possibly even more money) if he had been a married heterosexual man or if his landlord had been a woman, so this is clearly not about the money. But because the other person was a man Mr Laws would have been required to be treated differently. If you do not see that that is about unequal treatment, then I no longer know what your organisation is for.

Mr Summerskill also makes a number of snide remarks and innuendoes about Mr Laws and the Liberal Democrats in general that one would not expect outside the writing of some of the so-called right-wing commentators. If that is his view, then I do not see how Mr Summerskill can be considered to be a campaigner for equal treatment for gay and lesbian men and women, and frankly I find that he is, and therefore you are, supporting a homophobic attack by the Telegraph. I will have nothing further to do with any organisation that employs him.

I am therefore cancelling my direct debit to Stonewall immediately.

Yours in extreme anger with you and your whole team

Richard Flowers.

We have not yet received any reply.

But that was all a bit OVER THE TOP, so let me finish by once again endorsing the rather more TEMPERATE response from the MUCH CALMER Mr Ed.

An excellent piece, well written, sir!



Declaration of Interest: Daddy Alex knows Mr David slightly; Daddy Richard knows Mr Jamie slightly. No of us knew there was anything between them. And you know what, it was none of our business then and it's none of our business now.
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Day 3443: DOCTOR WHO: Vincent and the Doctor

Saturday:


Normally, when you put the words AWESOME and DOCTOR and VINCENT together, a Liberal Democrat will jump to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT conclusion than that you're talking about the week's Dr Woo.

Last week Daddy Richard was a bit DOWN on visiting HISTORY; does he still think that?

Well, that'll teach me to be cynical about the "celebrity historical" as an overused sub-genre of Doctor Who. This was a wonderful, emotional exploration of a very creative yet very troubled life, not afraid to show us glimpses of that life's dark side while keeping it appropriate to a Saturday teatime audience.

You've got to give Moffat credit for bringing talent to the table, because surprisingly it's the "celebrity guest" authors – Nye and now Curtis – who've turned in the better stories this year, more interesting, thoughtful, original, yet making good use of the format; while the more "traditional" Who-writers – Gatiss and Chibnall – who, while we can't hold them entirely responsible for poor choices by the design department, have given us the stories that, er, underperformed. I can't say that bodes well for next week's episode by TV's Gareth Roberts.

…not sure where Toby Whitehouse fits in: being famous as creator of "Being Human" could make him a "celeb" author, but as writer of season two's "School Reunion" he could be seen as "trad", too. "Vampires of Venice" was pretty good, though…

Two possibly-not-contradictory possible reasons for this come to mind: first, Moffat may have just left the "trad" writers to get on with it, after all, that's how he worked for Russell, while he focussed his efforts on supporting and tweaking-to-fit-the-format the work of the writers less familiar with Doctor Who's current incarnation; second, there the case for a "fresh eye" from writers only peripherally aware of Doctor Who's tropes and clichés coming up with something a bit more outside the (blue) box. A third possibility is that they bring a dose of the "emotional intelligence" that was key to the Russell Davies era to add to Moffat's genius for plots and ideas.

Interestingly, possibly coincidentally, Nye and Curtis's episodes are the only stories to have no "cracks in time" at all so far, although both do move along the emotional story arc, with "Amy's Choice" resolving Amy's feelings towards Rory and now "Vincent and the Doctor" having, as it happens, Vincent and the Doctor able to see the gap where Amy's emotional trauma ought to be.

As an aside, Jonathan Blum is quite right when he points out that although this is very much what the Russell Davies model would expect of new Who (or more crudely what Lawrence Miles would call Moffatt doing his "Fire in the Girly Place" writing), this is quite wrong from a story point of view. It's very touching that the Doctor has been consoling Amy for Rory's death – and weirding her out because it's for something she cannot remember – with trips to Arcadia (presumably pre-Dalek Time War fall), and today the Museé D'Orsay, but in terms of the series story arc, why is he not now urgently investigating the cracks in time that look like they will destroy his TARDIS? Or, alternatively, explicitly avoiding those cracks in time because they will destroy his TARDIS.

Previously in this arc, we've seen the Doctor first believe he's dealt with the crack in Amy's bedroom wall, then return for Amy possibly because he suspects that all is not quite right with her (if his significant glance at the TARDIS scanner at the end of "The Eleventh Hour" is to mean anything); then we see – but importantly, he does not – that there are cracks following his and Amy's progress to Starship UK and the Cabinet War Rooms; and then the Doctor encounters the crack aboard the Starship Byzantium and again thinks that he's dealt with it by dropping an army of angels into it. The crack that he hears about in "The Vampires of Venice" is past tense; his response to the silence at the end is puzzled, not alarmed; and, as I've said, there doesn't appear to be one in "Amy's Choice". So up to that point it's not illegitimate for him to not to be thinking about these as an urgent or pressing threat. He may even feel that he is trying to deal with it by "sorting Amy out".

However, in the aftermath of "The Hungry Earth" that's gone impressively horribly wrong; it is, to coin a well-turned phrase, really extremely very not good. It's possible that he's even caused the cracks in time by making Amy's wedding day not only the most crucial day of her life but also one that isn't supposed to happen at all: the kind of universe-shattering paradox that might happen if she only ran away with the Doctor because it was the eve of her wedding, that the things that the Doctor has put right because she was with him, only happened at all because of something he's now prevented from happening – explaining how the crack appear to be following them: it's trying to swallow up the paradoxical events of Amy's post Wedding-that-never-was timeline.

Storywise, Moffat-wise, he ought to be doing something about this.

However, in the context of this story, the arc is only used as an "in" on the slightly other-worldliness of Vincent Van Gogh – something that he shares with the Doctor, since they both sort of see Rory's place in the timeline – and anything more would have been intrusive and unnecessary.

And, frankly, I'd rather have this story than any number of episodes about the cracks.

Even before we get to the story, it's a beautiful episode to look at. Full marks for getting the most out of the location work this year, with Croatia brilliantly doubling for first Venice in, unsurprisingly, "The Vampires of Venice" and now doing a passable impression of France for a visit to Van Gogh. Or at any rate not-Wales, anyway, at least until the scenes outside the Church at "Auvers" which look crushingly Welsh chapel again. The ingenuity of the producers is to use different aspects of the same location several episodes apart, so you don't notice it. Unlike – Alex points out - using Lanzarote to double for alien planet Sarn are, er, Lanzarote during the same story, which is less likely to get away with it, as you can discover for yourself if you get the DVD due out next week.

Jonny Campbell, directing, is here even better than in the Vampire story: fluid and funny in the "chase with mirror" sequence and again in the fight in Vincent's back yard; and yet moodily thoughtful when dwelling on the sunflowers as a motif for a troubled life and death; and of course – and let's not shirk the kudos for the art department too – beautifully recreating scenes from Van Gogh's art "as life", in the café, the bedroom (who cares if that's anachronistic) and the sublime "Starry Night" sequence which really is what the episode is about.

It's tremendously good acting too from a very small cast (with a few supporting players). Bill Nighy almost comes as a buy-one-get-one-free with Richard Curtis these days, but here he gives a beautiful understated performance playing, essentially, "John Cleese in the Art Gallery", but with warmth and emotion in a role that could easily have been arch and comedic. The banter about bow-ties could have been played so much for laughs but instead he comes across as genuinely touched, so it's all the more forceful and credible when he eulogises Van Gogh at the climax.

Tony Curran as the man himself, and a startling visual double, shows us a person who – although also leavened by light humour: "sorry about the beard" – can be rude, uncontrolled, off-putting, even frightening and distressing, and yet at all times retains our sympathy for the so-obvious pain that his Van Gogh's genius has to suffer, and will continue to suffer.

So, what we get from these wonderful people is a story about a man and something terrible that happens to him, and a story about a monster and something terrible that happens to it, and how those two stories briefly intersect.

It's easy to say how clever it is to make this a story about a man who sees things differently from other people, sees more than other people and link that to a monster that is invisible to other people. And then to reveal that the monster itself is blind. (The member of the tribe left to die because blinded being strangely reminiscent of Leela and the ways of the Sevateem.)

And it is clever, certainly cleverer than having Shakespeare encounter witches who are really aliens whose power comes from language, and who he defeats with clever wordplay (to a certain value of "clever"). Or for that matter, running into "ghosts" with arch-spiritualist-debunker Charles Dickens. (And never mind how archly metatextual we got by having a story with Agatha Christie that was so like an Agatha Christie story that the characters actually started commenting on how like an Agatha Christie story it was…)

It's also clever that it ties in with a developing theme of eyes and sight throughout this series: perception filters that you only see from the corner of your eye; Atraxi who are all eye; Vampires that fool the eye; the importance of eyes – open, shut and not-looking-them-in-the – to the Weeping Angel story; turning a "blind eye" to what's going on in "The Beast Below"; and so on.

(Alex wonders if the Silurian's missing third eye is a symbol that Mr Chibnell missed that memo.)

But what's really clever here is that Van Gogh doesn't see the monster as an avatar of himself or his condition – this isn't "depression made external": he sees it as like the villagers, blind and lashing out. And yet Vincent retains his compassion for the monster and, by extension, the villagers who abuse him. He has a gift of sight that he wants to share, indeed does share with Amy and the Doctor and the Doctor admits it is more wonderful than anything he's seen.

In that sense the beast, the Krafayis, is Vincent's shadow, his antithesis, a dark reflection – re-emphasised by it appearing only in reflection, its features framed in the Doctor's mirror-gizmo "reflecting" the framing of Van Gogh in the self-portraits of that we see repeatedly through the story.

Obviously it's an enormous coincidence that a monster that can only be seen by someone like Vincent Van Gogh happens to be in the exact time and place to be seen by Vincent Van Gogh – and how long is this berserk creature supposed to have been in France, anyway? And what about all the other berserk beasties that left it behind, when exactly were they supposed to have been here?

But that's really not the point, and you should realise that from the way the Krafayis is offed ten minutes before the show is over.

This story is about the importance of different perspectives: we think one thing about the Krafayis when the Doctor tells us it's evil; we think another when we learn that it is crippled, alone, abandoned.

Vincent shows the Doctor a different way of looking at the stars, literally a different perspective lying back on the ground (which came first, this episode or the season trailer seen in cinemas?); it's commented on comically as the Doctor gains a new perspective of time, living it moment by moment waiting while Vincent paints the church and the Doctor cannot shut up with the spoilers. I particularly enjoyed the moment of him by the fireplace, listening to Van Gogh's synaesthetic rant about listening to the colours, swinging his head about as though trying to do just that, simultaneously baffled by the artists and trying to see from his perspective.

(And I just have to say isn't Matt Smith also rather wonderful. Funny and unafraid of looking daft and yet at times achingly alien. Just brilliant as the Doctor.)

In return, the Doctor shows Vincent another perspective by taking him into the future, showing him the long view of history of the Time Lord. And Amy gains new perspective when she realises that one good day isn't enough to save him.

Is it sentimental, to bring Vincent Van Gogh to the present day to show him a future that loves him? "Sentimental" is a cheap kick at Richard Curtis, after "Four Weddings…" and "Love, Actually", but is it fair? We've known since Dickens that the Doctor is not above bending the laws of time, or dropping a few "spoilers", to let the people he admires know that they are admired, so it's not out of keeping with the series. Is it tritely playing with our emotions? No, I think that the emotional response is earned.

And the episode is as nothing if the Doctor does not repay Vincent with the one kindness that he can give, even knowing that it won't change his fate – even knowing that perhaps it might (and I've seen a cogent argument that seeing the future, knowing he'll never be appreciated until after he's dead may have contributed to Van Gogh's suicide rather than prevent it).

The Doctor's point is about seeing life not as win/lose but as a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and he's trying to add to the pile of good things. Think about that and remember where he's been taking Amy recently.

Mind you, as the indie rock of Athlete comes crashing in on the soundtrack over the top of the montage of images, you do have to wonder whether Richard Curtis didn't brief himself on new Doctor Who by watching an episode of Doctor Who Confidential by mistake.

Most of all, this episode is a different perspective on what it is to be "mad", to be "mental", to be "depressed", to be a bit different. And we should treasure it for that.


Next Time… If you can't get enough of the World Cup, then I'm sure the Doctor playing footy with Smiffy out of Gavin and Stacy is just what you need to fill a gap. If you don't want to know the scores, look away now. Safety deposit and a month's rent up front, please, for "The Lodger".

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Day 3438: A Totally Unwarranted Comparison

Monday:


How can ANYONE think of comparing the State of Israel to the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea?!

I mean, Israel would have to have:

• nuclear weapons;
• sealed borders;
• denials about people starving in their country;
• unresolved war issues with their neighbours;
• defied UN resolutions;
• an attitude that they can do what they like 'cos they've got a Superpower ally;
• and to go around attacking ships from other countries…

…oh.

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Day 3435: DOCTOR WHO: Cold Turkey

Saturday:


Saturday was a bit of a WRECK, what with one thing and another, but at least we had Dr Woo to cheer us up, eh?

Well, except it was a bit SAD. And a bit SLOW. Though with a sort of PONDEROUS GRACE.

A bit like a HIPPOPOTAMUS ballet-dancing the SWAN LAKE in SLOW MOTION!

And if it was STUPID, at least Mr Chibbers was finding entirely NEW and ORIGINAL ways to be stupid!

A story using the Reptile People, and using so much of the Pertwee back-catalogue that goes with them, really ought to be cleverer than this.

The Doctor should not have been kind to Ambrose at the end. "It was murder" was his line to the Brigadier; it should have been his line to Ambrose too, and not to realise that misses the point of "…and the Silurians" by so far as to be truly shocking. Notice, "evil" murdering Silurian Restac ends up poisoned because she won't heed the warnings; equally murdering Ambrose gets let off with a stern lecture to "teach your boy to be better", a disparity of treatment by the writer that is probably racist or something.

If the Daleks are Doctor Who's metaphor for the Nazis – and stories with them are about the undiluted evil of treating the unlike as the enemy – then the Silurians and their stories are the flip-side of that: racism remains the point, but they are representative of a conflict where each side ends up acting like the Daleks by failing to recognise the "humanity" of the other.

That requires a parity of treatment by the writer so that the viewer can see this.

In "…and the Silurians", diplomatic Okdel, warlike Morka and scientist T'ko are an imperfect mirror of the Doctor, the Brigadier and Dr Lawrence (imperfect only in the sense that characteristics do not match one for one: Lawrence not the Brigadier is the overt xenophobe on the human side, say; and that there are more human characters). In "The Sea Devils", even though the Reptile People have rather less characterisation, it is still clear that there is a kind of equivalence between the chief Sea Devil and Captain Hart: they are both warrior leaders; they are both thoughtful of the cost of war, and so on. Even in "Warriors of the Deep", clearly the least of the classic series trilogy, you can spot reflections between the "noble leaders" Commander Vorshak and Silurian Icthar and their more belligerent subordinates.

"The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood" ends up crushed in the mismatch between the entire Silurian civilisation and one human family. The sense of scale in "Cold Blood" was at least widened – cities full of Reptile People, the fate of the world, a thousand years of history (although, was that opening monologue anything more a crushingly banal rip-off of Timothy Dalton's narration in "The End of Time"? )– but it was at the expense of drawing in sundry other stupidities.

Most egregious is the point where Nasreen protests: "we can't negotiate on behalf of humanity," and the Doctor dismisses this with a casual, "sure you can." No, Doctor, they really, really can't, any more than I could commission the next series of Doctor Who on behalf of the BBC just because I'm a viewer.

If they hadn't failed to establish the "big" project in "The Hungry Earth", Nasreen could have had the government connections to maybe make it credible that she could at least open talks.

What we should have here is a situation where the Silurians don't even believe that humans are sentient; what the Doctor should be doing is having Amy and Nasreen change their minds through talking to them. Convince lead Silurian Eldane (played with weariness by Stephen Moore, best known as Marvin the Paranoid Android) and then he can end the threat of war.

It could have been genuinely interesting if Eldane had not believed humans to be intelligent until he actually met some; contrasting with the warrior cast Alaya and Restac who know perfectly well that humans are intelligent, but are ignoring it because they are so clearly into racial supremacy in a big way.

As a side-order of stupidity, we might point out that all the women are murderous bitches. Well, okay, Amy is just a Rio-obsessed bitch, and Nasreen is lovely, but apart from that…

We might hazard a guess that female actors were hired to play the warrior Silurians and male actors to play the scientists in order to establish some kind of species dimorphism – if only someone had said something along those lines. As it is, it doesn't half seem like the scary scaly ladies need the level-headed lizard gentlemen to set them straight about a few things. Sigh.

Nor was the story sufficiently clever to be drawing some kind of nurturing/vengeful mother parallel between Alaya and Ambrose.

Do I have to mention again that the Reptile People's city really is supposed to have implausibly survived down there for tens of millions of years. It does at least get implied that generations of Reptile People have been staying awake doing all the dusting. But that's stupid too. Even if you avoid mentioning that that's a fairly impressive span to live though without evolving into anything new, has no one thought to ask them why they didn't just wake up the rest of their species as soon as it became clear that the moon was not going to draw off the atmosphere or smash the planet or whatever else they feared? I mean it does just slightly negate the stories whole premise.

Along the lines of Reptile People being awake when they shouldn't, there seem to have been some kind of story points with Silurian Scientist Malohkeh that got dropped. The business about never harming the children, and that he's been at this for three-hundred years – probably tying in with the blue grass fairy rings last episode – and the implication that he's been up to something all fizzle out and go nowhere.

Also, at what point did the guy who conducts vivisection on live – and conscious – victims become the "nice" Silurian? Saying he doesn't harm children is surely begging a big big question, one which the stitching up Mo's tummy seems to answer. I'm reminded of what the Doctor said to Margaret Siltheen: "just because you let a few go, doesn't mean you aren't a monster".

On the flip side, Malohkeh then gets murdered by Restac, a development which looks sure to have repercussions for her… Only they never happen either. And no one in the Doctor's party seems to notice that Malohkeh seems to have gone missing either, even when they're planning on turning on the poison gas. Was there a whole scene excised where they found the body? It would certainly have helped develop Eldane's sudden desire to help them in any way that he can.

Just as unresolved was whatever was supposed to be going on with the all-new Silurian sting, green and poisonous and spreading over Tony Mack's neck and chest. One minute he's dying; next he's not but it's caused a mutation; finally, never mind all that, we'll just all go into hibernation together because the episode is over in five minutes.

Frustratingly, Tony's tale has got all the plot devices of a story, but none of the actual plot.

Did Alaya's sting not kill him because humans have evolved? Or because the venom interacted with paracetamol in an unexpected way? Or because of something Malohkeh might have been doing – was Tony, perhaps, one of those kidnapped by the Silurian as children and "altered" already?

It almost looks as though someone, somewhere along the line thought about doing a story where humans were being hybridised with Silurians (with possible implications for Alaya and Restac's racial purity) and then abandoned it.


The Doctor himself is being particularly dense today. Admittedly he's always had a serious blind spot about the Earth Reptiles – while, funnily enough he's always seeing the worst in those Martian reptiles, the Ice Warriors – but he's talked to Alaya. She's a full on name-rank-serial number soldier. Not to mention an fanatic. Any idiot should be able to see she's no more use as a hostage than a paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines as a spy or a terrorist. And although terrorists have been known to take hostages in order to secure the release of one of their own, it must be a bit unusual to respond to hostage-taking by seizing one of the terrorists. She's not an innocent here; she's a criminal. Once again there is no equivalence between taking her prisoner and the kidnap of Mo, Amy or Elliot.

And anyway, he knows that she wants to provoke a war by getting herself killed. Leaving her exactly where she wants to be, particularly when you've seen how Ambrose's first instinct is to reach for weapons, is surely just asking for trouble. What he ought to be doing is dragging her back to the Reptile People city and, in front of any council of elders he can find, demanding an explanation for exactly why she's trying to do that.

Also, it's a bit stupid, and not actually accurate, when he says that the Silurians who he encountered before were "attacked by the humans". Under the circumstances – trying to prevent a Silurian invasion of the surface – wouldn't the truth have been a better idea? Those Silurians chose to attack the humans, underestimated their resourcefulness and got wiped out by them in retaliation.

Isn't it a key point that, while the Reptile People are immensely technologically advanced – though not so much further than they think – humanity has numbers on its side. Any war would do vast damage to both.

When trying to persuade the Reptile People of this, isn't "your cousins all got killed because they wouldn't just listen to what I'm trying to tell you" a cogent argument?


On the other hand, you can maybe forgive the Doctor being stupid about Alaya's deviously dippy plot, when it appears to be so obviously unnecessary. Alaya's own sister, Restac, is in charge of the whole Reptile military down in the underground city, and not only seems to be as entirely gung-ho about invading the surface as her sister, but also appears to have the keys to the freezing facility and can unlock her army any time she likes.

So why is there any need for a pretence? Just fire up the Tyrannosaurs and make like you're America liberating Iraq.

For the story to make any sense on its own terms, either Restac should have been opposed to the subjugation of humans and therefore needed to be converted to the war party by Alaya's "murder"; or she is in on the scam but not in a position to revive her army without a "pretext" i.e. she needs something with which to convince Eldane.

And, incidentally, the head of the military is the baddy is such a grisly cliché. Racist megalomaniacs tend not to get promoted to senior military positions for the very good reason that they cause a lot of wars and get a lot of people killed, which is not actually that good a military strategy.

(Far be it for me to point out how, in recent years, the politicians George Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair were much more hawkish that their military, or even ex-military like Colin Powell.)

Alex being fair though, points out that there wasn't another race for her to be racist about when she went into the deep freeze, so nobody could have spotted that she's a megalomaniac since she doesn't go round, say, just shooting other Reptile People… Oh.

I know I said it about the last episode but it really is just all too Minbari. Has Chris Chibnall watched any television other than early-Seventies "Doctor Who" and "Babylon 5"? (I dread to think that he's only following the career of Guy Siner, as that means he'll be taking his characterisation from "Allo Allo"!) And there's just not the time to develop the different Earth Reptile factions properly, leaving the plot points to be taken from just the crude sketch of the Minbari Warrior/Religious Caste divide.

And we return to the series story arc. And let's be quite clear that this year it really is a story arc, just like they do in "Buffy" or "Heroes" or, oh all right, "Babylon 5". It's not a Russell Davies "light touch" allusion to an ongoing story through a series of impenetrable hints; it is a proper story that depends on you seeing each of the bits to understand the developments. That's an important change, because it's something Russell did not feel would work in Doctor Who, or at least not in his Doctor Who.

So, we return to "Doctor Who and the Cracks in Time".

There appear to be two distinct kinds of crack – or the producer hasn't properly made his mind up (surely not): in "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Vampires of Venice" we have cracks that "something can come through" (be it Prisoner Zero or the eponymous Vampires aka Saturnynians); alternatively, in "Flesh and Stone" and again here in "Cold Blood" we see a crack that is spilling out "time energy", which does the "erasing you from history" thing. What's the difference? And what is the mysterious "silence" that we witnessed falling at the end of the Venice story?

In passing, how does the Doctor avoid getting his hand erased from history when he's pulling shrapnel out of the "wound"? We can probably put that one down to "Time Lord Powers(TM)"; he does appear to be a bit agonised by the process, so possibly he is sticking his hand into non-existence.

So he stuck in his thumb and pulled out a… plot coupon: a fragment of TARDIS casing.

Where Moffat borrows from Lawrence Miles, here Chibnall writing for Moffat borrows from "Unnatural History" by Kate Orman and John Blum – which sees the TARDIS stuffed into a crack in time to stop the Universe shattering – and "The Shadows of Avalon" (again) by Paul Cornell – where the old girl explodes on colliding with a similar anomaly.

Jennie is quite rightly shocked by the Internet's casual disregard for this: it ought to be a truly shocking development, the death of the "most faithful companion" that we were promised in "Journey's End". Except of course, it's because of "Journey's End" – and all the other "prophesies" that came to nothing – that we just don't believe that any more. They've cried "Bad Wolf" too often!

So, in fairness, of the two it is Rory who is far more likely to remain dead. The series has killed off companions before, but destroying the TARDIS is pretty much the end of the show. Even if they hadn't just spent a fortune on a shiny new (and very beautiful) TARDIS set. The last time that the TARDIS was destroyed utterly and forever (in the aforementioned "Shadows of Avalon") she was back six books later. There's really just no keeping a good Type 40 down.

Killing off Rory – unless he's subsequently resurrected too, and I'm putting nothing past them at this point – will certainly add a certain amount of "memorability" to this story, generating an (undeserved?) amount of sentiment at the end.

But the question of "what does erased from time mean?" raises its ugly head again. It is difficult to work out how differently this adventure would have played out without Rory, thanks to his presence turning out to be pretty ineffective at each juncture. For example, I realise that she's a reptile and so it probably wouldn't work, but it's still odd that Rory the nurse doesn't even attempt CPR on the electrocuted Alaya.

What would have been more interesting was to do this as a three-parter: make Rory more integral to this week's plot and then re-run it next week without him to show the (presumably disastrous) differences.

It is inevitable, given that the format of the show presents the producers with a requirement to keep returning to a near-present Earth that is at least vaguely recognisable as our own, that a peace treaty between humans and Reptile People is going to fail. Doctor Who isn't a series like Stargate where the dedicated fanbase follow as the internal continuity drives the world gradually further away from the one we know; Doctor Who appeals to a broad audience as well as we, er, more enthusiastic followers, and you can't expect people tuning in at random to know why there are alien-looking people wandering about. There probably is a really interesting sci-fi series about Reptile People trying to integrate into human society – as it happens, it's Alien Nation – but it needs to be an ongoing series, not something you dip into once or twice a year. Besides, it would be bogglingly expensive to achieve. But that's no reason not to play with people's expectations first.

Consider this possible scenario: Restac has been shooting her mouth off about murderous apes; Ambrose, full of remorse, presents herself and confesses to killing Alaya; Restac gains the authorisation for defrosting her troops that she's been after… and then Rory arrives with a revived and shame-faced Alaya. War is averted, the Silurians sign a treaty with the humans and a new age is ushered in, flash-forward to the next thousand years of peace and cultural progress… Except then the vengeful Restac tries to kill the Doctor, gets Rory, and then Rory is erased from history, leading to a completely different version of the story next week.

So forgive me for saying that "Cold Blood" opened up a number of opportunities for being really interesting… and missed every single one.

Next Time…History: it's that place that famous people live. Not satisfied with one celebrity cameo this season? Let me paint you a picture, it's Vincent a-Go-Go in "Vincent and the Doctor".

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Day 3428: DOCTOR WHO: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Saturday:


Writing for Dr Woo has to be the official BESTEST JOB IN THE WORLD EVER™ but, in spite of this, it can be quite tough getting anyone to have a go. Apart from Miss Kate Bush who wrote "Kinda" and Mr Stephen Fry whose episode fell through, the only REALLY famous person was Mr Dougie Adams.

But now with Mr Simon Nye, Mr Richard Curtis and Mr Neil Gaiman writing episodes, you've got to admit the Grand Moff has been really jolly successful at getting some famous and talented people to write for him.

And also Mr Chris Chibnall.

If you didn't know there are alien space lizards in this (who aren't ACTUALLY aliens OR from space), then… oops, it's too late to warn you about SPOILERS, but here's Daddy Richard's review:

The easy thing to say about "The Hungry Earth" is that it's a very traditional Doctor Who, and a very slow one. Which overlooks that for all its lack of incident, for all its incredible Pertwee-era-redux wish-fulfilment, for all that even a Pertwee seven-parter could have got through the plot faster, it is actually quite enjoyable.

So, Chris Chibnall, bane of John Nathan-Turner and/or viewers of TV's Torchwood according to your taste, here tries to pull off Steven Moffat's trick of taking familiar elements and reworking them into a new story. The emphasis being on the word "tries".

The elements in question start with references to the televised adventures of the Earth Reptile People – "…and the Silurians", "The Sea Devils" and "Warriors of the Deep" – almost too numerous to recount, but including: the Doctor name-checking almost every variant on what the Reptile People have been called; his determination to try diplomacy; the monster point-of-view shots; the "examination tables" of the Silurian scientist; the description of a "network of underground caves"; from the trailer, the Sea Devil-like weapons and so on. "Warriors of the Deep" was supposed to see the Sea Base (under siege) plunged into darkness before the Silurian attack – which indeed happens here. Perhaps most subtle, subtle to the point that I might be making it up, are the blue-grass patches forming fairy rings in the drilling fields – with the Reptile People becoming the Unseelie Faerie Court in Paul Cornell's novel of the Eighth Doctor, "The Shadows of Avalon".

Nor do the "borrows" from the show's history end there, with – just for starters – the church and energy barrier from "The Dæmons", a hint of "isn't that us from the future" from "Day of the Daleks", the graveyard mystery of "The Curse of Fenric", and the Doctor being what monsters are frightened of also in the mix too (which is more Paul Cornell by way of Steve Moffat, of course).

Actually, it's been suggested that this episode is, more than anything, an homage to the opening stories of season twenty-one: "Warriors of the Deep" supplying the monster; "The Awakening" donating the church with sinister something breaking through from beneath; and "Frontios" giving up the empty graves and earth that sucks its victims down. Next week, we discover that it's really the Daleks who are mining numismaton gas to sell to the Sirius Corporation… or maybe not.

Alex, on the other hand, thought it was very, very much "… and the Silurians", plus a lot of "Inferno", and then loads of "Frontios", but hardly any of "The Sea Devils" or "Warriors of the Deep" at all.


It's all so clunkingly obvious, though. As though it's an exercise in ticking the boxes in your spotter's guide, rather than using them as extra polish to your own story.

The centrepiece is one of those "big science projects" from the early Pertwee-era, like the National Space Centre ("The Ambassadors of Death") or the Nunton Nuclear Reactor ("The Claws of Axos"). The Wenley Moor experimental cyclotron in "…and the Silurians" is another one, of course, though the most obvious parallel is the drilling project in "Inferno" – but done here on the cheap: only three staff at the ground-breaking drilling project? Where are all the extras in white coats and wellies moving purposefully about in the background, eh?

This is one of the key things that undermines (pardon the pun) the story: this is a huge scientific endeavour but it appears to be being run as a schools science project at the whim of Meera Syal's character Doctor Nasreen Chaudhry, assisted by her chum Tony and his son-in-law, Mo (presumably, in another reference, he's named for "Project Mo-Hole", the attempt to drill to the Mohorovičić discontinuity – aka "Moho" – that inspired the original "Inferno"). And it all appears to take place in their back yard. I mean, I do realise it's not completely without precedent – in "The Seeds of Death", Professor Eldred appears to have built an entire space rocket in his shed – but nevertheless it's just… bizarre. Ultimately what's it all for? Doctor Chaudhry claims that they are investigating the minerals in the blue grass. So, um, isn't that a bit of a leap to "let's drill twenty miles into the ground"?

Of course, it's all just a bit too obviously betraying the smallness of the cast – and couldn't they have avoided that by having Chaudhry, perhaps after some visit to brief the minister in London or Cardiff, arrive back at her huge project and be astonished to find all her staff have vanished? (Well, that's exactly what happens except her "staff" is established in the pre-titles as "one bloke".)

"Doctor Who and the Silurians" is about a clash of two civilisations: as a story it's huge, and not just because it's seven episodes long. The scientific installation and its staff represent an urban and elite Britain, but the setting of Wenley Moor with farm and cottage also take in Britain's rural aspect. We see people ranging from junior ministers to the local doctor, army officers and soldiers to commuters and a railway porter. In short, this feels like the whole country is involved. And for the Reptile People the stakes are even higher: even though there are only three speaking roles for "Silurians" – and their three-note whistle – Mac Hulke still manages to convey a sense of an entire race and all their technology and even their sense of aesthetics. And it could all come to nothing because the planet – their planet – has been overrun by verminous apes.

In contrast, "The Hungry Earth" seems to be about one family in Wales living in an oddly otherwise-empty village. (Just who does Ambrose prepare meals on wheels for?)

It doesn't half make talk about an all-out war between Reptile People and "apes" seem a little overblown.

On the other hand, maybe the small cast and the slow pace are deliberate so that the writer has more time than is usual for a modern Doctor Who to develop character.

I will say one thing for Chibnall: he's not indulged himself in the ongoing treatment of Rory as a "joke" character – something not helped by the unkindness of not adding Arthur Darvill to the opening titles, leaving his character seeming less of a "proper" companion than Karen Gillan's Amy. Which is a shame because Doctor plus two companions is a nice mix and not one that Russell really tried in his five years (yes, yes, aside from five minutes of Rose and Captain Jack, and Mickey barely stepping into the TARDIS before he was first sidelined into the B-plot, then into the B-universe).

Here Rory gets some actual character traits – he is, for example, slightly petty about Amy wearing her engagement ring – and even his own proper storyline, as he gets to be the one mistaken for a police officer. And he does gamely try to carry it off, even if admittedly he doesn't get very far with his investigation.

Amy, in contrast, seems almost under-characterised, mainly bitching about being dressed for Rio (which she's not, really), though, if we are to believe Doctor Who Confidential, this is because she suffered most from cutting the episode down from almost an hour in the first edit to the forty-five minute slot: a long chat with the Doctor as they progress to the drill-site being the – understandable – main casualty. A shame, as it sounded like an interesting conversation, and I hope it makes the extra features section when the series gets to be released on DVD and Blu-Ray.

It does seem odd to be praising the normally über-macho Chibnall for the softer side of his characterisation this week, but clearly it's something he's been working on. There may not be many of them, but at least the cast of characters do feel like real people with real motivations. Tony's sudden kiss of Nasreen at a moment of high tension is human and believable. Her appreciation of it plays against the usual cliché too.

Likewise, it is rather lovely that Dr Chaudhry expresses both scientific curiosity, which drives her to insist on accompanying the Doctor, and undiluted delight, both when she sees the marvellous interior of the TARDIS and at her discoveries in the cave passages once they’ve been dragged underground. She is a character who actually enjoys what she does – too often Doctor Who features scientists who seem actually grudging of making discoveries, like that isn't what they got into science to do.

There is also nice work on Eliot, son of unlucky Mo, who has dyslexia and attitude, and on his mum Ambrose who is a strong woman capable of shaming the Doctor when he's been alien and therefore stupid about letting Eliot wander off. My money is on Ambrose as "the one who will kill", just because she is a wife and mother. (Though that green stuff taking over Tony might be worth an outside bet – possession by green alien goo being, naturally, another lift from "Inferno".)

And of course, the Doctor. With a slower pace to the episode, Matt Smith gets to show that he can do the Doctor as a character without needing all the frenetic flapping around. Chibnall actually appears to get what that other Chris, Christopher H Bidmead, was trying to get across all those years ago, about an old man in a young man's body. There's a lovely moment where the Doctor goes to Tony (a man of, for a human, more than average years) slaps him on the shoulder and says "well done, lad". Robert Pugh's look is priceless. But also the terrible mistake with Eliot occurs because Eliot mistakes the Doctor for a young person and the Doctor forgets what young people are like, casually waving Eliot off without thinking what he's going to do. Or maybe the Doctor makes the reverse mistake: assuming someone who looks young might be just as self-reliant as he is himself.

And the centrepiece of the episode, what it all builds up to and then depends upon, is a character piece: the confrontation between Matt's Doctor and the Reptile Person Alaya played by the hugely talented but unrecognisable Neave Campbell McIntosh [thank you, Dan] (who we remember as the Lady Fuchsia in the BBC's disastrous "Gormenghast").

As I said to begin with: the easy thing to say about "The Hungry Earth" is that it's a very traditional Doctor Who, and a very slow one.

That's easy to say and sadly true, but this is also, much more unusually for this series, a very political story with Alaya seemingly on a suicide mission to use her own death to provoke a war between humans and retile people. It's a strategy reminiscent of those employed by the "honourable" Minbari in episodes of "Babylon 5", where the warrior caste try to reignite the war between Earth and Minbar, and indeed Alaya explicitly refers to herself as warrior caste here. This builds on the basic premise of the Silurians – that to them, we humans are the invaders of their world – adding the contemporary spin of asymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics.

That's quite a complex motivation, and interestingly not one that sits with her given explanation that she and her fellow warriors were recently awoken because the drilling disturbed the hibernation bunker's life support. And we do know that she will lie, as "the drilling woke us up" isn't her first story. That was the failed "I'm the last of my race" gambit, an interesting self-aware reference to the series own habit of over-doing that cliché.

The presence of an enormous Silurian city twenty-one kilometres down also would appear to give the lie to the "we just woke up" line. Together, these things suggest that the Reptile People under the earth are rather more familiar with the civilisation of "apes" living up top than we humans are familiar with them. Moreover, we can further infer that the Reptile People in the city have decided that they would rather live down there than try to reclaim the surface – otherwise why build their city? Thus, on top of that, we conclude that Alaya may represent a faction opposed to the status quo among her people. Why else does she have to provoke warfare? Why would there need to be a pretext for war if the Reptile People were already keen to retake the surface?

(Alex points out that when I say "build", I overlook the possibility that the city is just supposed to have survived down there, untended for three hundred million years, what with a towering spindly city being so much more crunch-proof than the reinforced shelters that Malcolm Hulke described in the Cave Monsters, most of which had been crunched anyway. But he's kind enough to add that that, even if "true" in the story, would be very, very stupid.)

The Reptile People are redesigned again – thankfully referred to as another species by the Doctor, and thanks to "The Sea Devils" there is precedent for reptile people coming in different stripes – and their appearance is both beautiful and totally wrong. Beautiful because it's a work of scaly art, and allows for expressive facial movement and interaction. But wrong not because of, as so many people have pointed out, the mammalian eyes – or, even less subtly, the mammalian mammaries oh-so obviously unconcealed by the oh-so obviously form-fitting bustiere of her armour (and after the cyber-basque-and-kitten-heels of Chibnall's "Cyberwomen" this is starting to look like a pattern) – but because the whole point of the Silurians is that they are earthlings who could barely look less like us. The original series, "…and the Silurians", even goes so far as to suggest that humans have the screaming ab-dabs from just being near them they are so alien to us.

Unless, of course, there's actually something genuinely subtle going on and that these reptiles have had even more contact with humans than we've already inferred. Are those fairy rings a bigger clue than they appear? Should we be led to believe that these fey people have been taking away humans for a while now?

(I'm tempted to make a terrible "Deep Space Nine" joke and ask if the Reptile People might look like the Jem'Hadar but actually turn out to be changelings… no, better not.)

That's almost certainly an inference too far. I don't want to anticipate a far more interesting story than the one we're really going to turn out to be in the middle of… Next week we will probably see Mr Chibnall return to typical macho form and finish with a big fight.

Which reminds me: the other question for next time, of course, is whether there was any point to the opening scene in which future-Amy and future-Rory wave at present-Amy and present-Rory from across the valley. Or was Chibbers just indulging in a bit of gratuitous timey-wimey to show that he's got with the Moffat programme?

Forgive me if I analyse the "next time" trailer for a moment – yes, I know, spoilers on top of spoilers – but there appears to be the suggestion that the Doctor has an opportunity to re-write human/Earth Retile history (provided he can arrange a peace accord a thousand years early) because this isn't one of those "fixed points" in time. The "fixed points" appear, from "The Fires of Vulcan", to be "things that we know must be history"; or at least, from "The Waters of Mars", things that the Doctor knows must be history. But how can that be the case when future Rory and future Amy are able to come back here and wave at their earlier selves? To them, the events of "today" (all right, this day in 2020) must also be "things that we know to be history".

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying things here. The Doctor says that he can see the difference between times when he can and cannot change things. Meaning that presumably there is some flexibility to the course of history that allows re-writing (and of course, he's recently discovered the possibility of un-writing history too, through the crack in time). And yet surely the long-term, knock-on effects of making peace between human and Reptile People now would be so massive and wide-ranging that they would have to impact on some fixed points sooner or later, as it were. I suppose you could say the same for his intervention in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", except he'd already visited a "future" (relative to 2164 AD) and seen humans travelling in space (in "The Sensorites") so you could argue he was setting time on the lines he knew it would take – as in "The Fires of Vulcan", being the cause of the fixed timeline not changing it (see also "The Romans" and "The Visitation").

Nevertheless, we still arrive back at the problem of whether the Doctor can really change anything in the here and now of this story without causing at the very least a major continuity error in the timeline of his two companions.

Mind you, "Day of the Daleks" managed a continuity error between the two "they meet their past/future selves" scenes too. Maybe the Blinovitch Limitation Effect means that always happens.

We'll find out next week, I guess. Before then there's a cliff-hanger to be resolved.

Typical of the episode, the cliff-hanger is just too soft-peddled. Amy's revealed to be in peril, sort of, and then the Doctor and Nasreen find… a balcony…

Okay, the reveal of the city is nice in a slightly muted way, but what the story called for was to overturn all the "smallness" that we've had up to this point with something huge! We shouldn't have had just Amy and Mo on the examination tables… we should have had Amy and Mo and a hundred other slabs with the rest of the scientists from the drilling project. We shouldn't have just had the Doctor and Dr Chaudhry overlooking the Reptile People city… we should have had a swooping "crane" shot through the city full of Reptile People and then cut back to the reverse on the Doctor and Nasreen so we can see their faces as, with the sound of running feet, they are surrounded by a dozen Reptile guards. It's the difference between "oh, a city" and "oh WOW, a city!"; the difference between "oh, they're in trouble" and "oh NO! They're in real trouble!"

Unfortunately, that would probably have cost just that little bit too much more money.

With a new production team and a new TARDIS to build and the switch to HD – which I have to say looks gorgeous – and a cut in the budget on top of all that, it's almost like we're back in 2005 and they're having to feel their way into a new way of making a TV series, making the ends meet. And I suspect that it's making them… cautious.

Admittedly, it's a different kind of caution to the one they had in 2005. The Eccleston series was quite audacious in the range and style of stories it threw at the screen – mainly because they feared it was their one and only chance – but kept them quite small in production: the "biggest", meaning most effects-laden, being "The End of the World". Russell's caution was "let's do what we can because it may be our only chance"; Steve's is "let's do what we know works".

It hasn't really – up to this point – shown on screen, except it occurs to me now that perhaps this is part of why 2010 feels a little… less than the last five years. I've been putting it down to Russell writing "emotion" and Steve writing "plot", meaning Russell's stories just connect more, but a new thought occurs to me. They're trying too hard not to break it.

In a way, that's actually encouraging, because it means that it's not that they can't do it, and that they'll get better as they gain confidence, just as Russell's team grew in confidence about what they could ask for and achieve.

Next Time… And the Doctor talked it all over with Okdel and sorted everything out in a jiffy over a nice cup of tea and they all lived happily ever after. Or not. "Cold Blood"

You know, if you DIDN'T know that there were alien space lizards in this then putting it on after Junior Apprentice where Lord Sugar-Plum-Fairy has his OWN alien space lizards – or the Sir-alan-lurians as they are called – was a bit of a GIVE-AWAY, wasn't it!

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Day 3407: DOCTOR WHO: Fleshed Out or Just Stoned

Saturday:


They say that a week is a long time in politics. Well, sometimes a bit of politics means it's a lot more than a week between episodes of Doctor Who.

I'm going to have to have a stern word with Daddy Richard. Last time he did any of his reviews, Dr Woo was trapped in the Maze of the Dead and surrounded by the Weeping Angels.

Honestly, I've not BLINKED for a MONTH!

"Flesh and Stone" feels less like part two of "The Time of Angels" and more like part five of "Doctor Who and the Cracks in Time".

The form of this two-parter eerily resembles another classic of macho posturing, "Earthshock": the first half involves the team of big, butch soldiers and one lady archaeologist running around in a system of caves, while something picks them off one by one; in the second half, the monsters, an old enemy, come out into the open while the action switches to a spaceship where the Doctor engineers a series of delaying tactics and strategic withdrawals.

The Cyberleader, though, makes for a more engaging conversationalist than Angel Bob. Which is saying something.

(And when I said that the rather nice tornado-like teleport effect looked like the Blake's Seven series four teleport "done right", Alex retorted that this was just more of the early-Eighties machismo showing up.)

Before we start, I just have to say the "previously on Doctor Who" is brilliantly edited; I've never seen a better one. Normally they're just the "important" clips strung together, but this one someone seemed to have taken the trouble. I wonder if the director was planning ahead when directing the first episode to make sure these moments could be used twice – like a post-modern nod to the conversation via DVD Easter egg in "Blink".

After that, though, the episode hangs – if you'll forgive me – between two startling moments where the effect of artificial gravity changes our perspectives with a twist of the camera: the opening escape from the surrounding angels by jumping up to the inverted surface of the starship Byzantium; and the conclusion where the crack in time swallows the fallen angels.

Is this just using the same plot device twice, or can we call it clever foreshadowing? As the Doctor says when Amy asks "What happens if the gravity fails?": "We all plunge to our deaths. See, I've thought about it".

The problem is with what we have in between, which is very little: one of the lamest "base under siege" Doctor Who stories ever. As Alex says, even the Troughton-era stories had greater depth of character and more diverting interaction than this.

With Bishop Octavian remaining stoical and mostly silent, and his remaining clerics having almost nothing to say before they "go into the light", what we're left with is more badinage between the Doctor and River about her oh-so-fabulous backstory and Amy counting backwards.

(Actually, the counting is moderately interesting – like some sort of numerological Tourettes – and the explanation, that the angels are sadists, is at least appropriate for monsters.)

The truly terrible thing about the forgotten clerics is that they are so totally forgettable. We're never given any reason to care about any of them. We were barely given a reason to care for Cleric Bob last week before he had his neck snapped – and even having his larynx borrowed by a living stone does not appear to have removed much timbre from his character – but the grunts in the forest don't even get that.

Nor, it has to be said, am I that impressed by the Church's ability to get its troops to obey (holy?) orders. They're told to defend Amy with their lives and yet by ones and twos they troop off on a pointless recce leaving her blind and alone in a clearing they know to be surrounded by hostile monsters and succeed only in getting themselves annihilated.

The purpose of this character carnage is, of course, to enable Mr Moffat to fill the middle of his story with a whole new way to terrify the kids: by transforming his deadly game of grandmother's footsteps into a fatal form of blindman's buff!

Even though doing so means completely overturning the "rules" of how his monster works.

Charlotte Gore is quite right when she rails against Moffat changing the rules like this. And she's right again when she says that actually seeing them move destroys the angels' unique selling point.

Last week, Moffat seemed to be escaping from the logical problems thrown up by his creations by having the angels inhabit the perceptions of the people looking at them; this week he has them turning to stone if they think they're being looked at. As Charlotte puts it: What?

He also seems to have forgotten the crucial rule – and it's crucial because the climax of "Blink" depends upon it – that the angels can't move if they can see each other. Aren't they called Weeping Angels because they cover their faces with their hands to prevent exactly that? And yet, in the secondary control room, the Doctor is looking from side to side to try and keep them motionless and the angels on the side he's not looking at are in motion – even though they are clearly in the line of sight of the angels that he is looking at. Later, in the forest, there are whole crowds of angels, all of whom ought to be paralysed in each other's sight, particularly once the whole place is lit up by the light of the time energy.

And that's even before we get into questions about whether the sensors of the tree-borgs ought not to be keeping the angels frozen too.

(Loved the tree-borgs by the way – loved the whole forest-in-a-bottle-on-a-spaceship-in-a-maze – and are they perhaps the start of the evolution of Jabe and her tree friends in the year five billion?)

Likewise, when Amy is "pretending to see" using the communicator as a sort of radar… how is that different to really seeing? The communicator is presumably sending out radio bleeps and receiving them back, essentially detecting the angels with a stream of photons… just like seeing them. We return to the idea that it is Amy's perception of the angels that lets them move or not.

You can't fool your own perceptions; Amy knows she can't see and by the new rules that ought to be enough for the angels to move. And by the old rules, where it was observation that froze them, they can definitely move.

But if the angels are ideas, conceptual entities, then what Amy thinks the rules are may matter more than what they actually are.

You can't fool your own perceptions, but is the scripting tight enough for the Doctor to have fooled Amy's perception or rather conception of the angels? Is it that, so long as she believes that this will work then it will work. If he tells her that "acting as though you can see means that they can't move", will that mean she has enough belief that they really can't move? It's lurching dangerously towards questions of "faith".

In which case why is the Doctor repeatedly undermining her faith in the process?


The other thing that is clearly supposed to be important in the middle of the episode is Moffat's trademark timey-wimey stuff about the crack in time, clearly there as exposition for the whole year's story arc.

Certainly, it's something of an innovation, and a refreshing one, for the Doctor to spot this year's running story before episode twelve.

But are we actually supposed to be impressed by this sort of unfocussed, muddled, unexplained "what's going on"-ness just because it's "something to do with time"?

How exactly, for example, does this un-writing of people's timelines work? We have several of the clerics – first a pair, then a third then the last of them – wander into the light and then they are forgotten because they never existed. Thing is, if they never existed then wouldn't Octavian have brought someone else along instead? Should we not have lost Marco, Pedro, Philip and immediately gained Julius, Benedict, and Nick? Of course, they go wandering off into the light too, but you see how this works, don't you.

For that matter, the Doctor, Amy, River and Octavian only survived the angels' attack in the airlock because those four clerics were there to provide covering fire. So if they ceased to have ever existed, shouldn't the angels have (retrospectively) got 'em? Or does the presence of the Doctor somehow shield people near him from that form of paradoxical time alteration?

"Sapphire and Steel" did that sort of thing, but they did it by giving us an explanation; it just happened to be a baffling one. Here it just seems that if time has gone wrong all bets are off.

One other thing that may be explained later, from the file "things I learned from the Internet": as the Doctor is leaving Amy in the care of the forgettable clerics, he suddenly reappears, leaning in close and speaks to her to reassure her, and he tells her it's important that she remember what he said when she was seven. It's a tight close up, so it's not at all obvious, but the Doctor is wearing his jacket, the jacket he just lost to the Weeping Angels. A simple continuity error? Or a clue that he's re-writing his own past?

It's possible that all will all become clear once we've seen the whole series – though "The Trial of a Time Lord" should stand as a warning of what happens when you put your explanations ten weeks later.

The Doctor, however, thinks he's worked it out already. There's a clear moment – just before the bishop is caught by an angel – when the Doctor realises, or infers, that there is a reason why no-one remembers the Cyber-King in "The Next Doctor" and why Amy does not remember the Daleks invading the Earth in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End". His inference is that this is because he is going to end up being eaten by the time energy, that it is his timeline that will be unwritten.

This may not actually be right, but it seems to be what he's feeling, and why he's so very, very angry with River, after Father Octavian's death – another hugely impressive performance from Matt Smith, it nearly goes without saying. The bishop was confronted with an inevitability and faced it with dignity; the Doctor's not quite sure he can manage that equanimity himself.

At the end, though, he's positively skipping he's so happy that the angels fell into the time energy instead of him. Now he's starting to think again, and thinking that time being re-written may give him a way out.

And, of course, there's River – a living prophecy about his future life. He seems to find the possibility that she's his murderer intriguing. At least having a death is better than never having lived.

So is River not just the Doctor's wife but his death? Is Steve really, really taking the rise out of Lawrence Miles and stealing "Alien Bodies" as well?

That certainly seems to be the implication of all that "they say you killed a man, a good man," "The best I ever knew" bit. Although by that point Alex thought that they were laying it on with such a trowel that it had to be a double bluff.

I wonder, in passing, if every encounter between River and the Doctor is supposed to take place in reverse order. Surely not, or why would she have to consult her diary to work out where they are up to each time? There's got to be a story to tell about how she eventually gets out of this Storm Cage prison and before she gets her Professorship.

Moffat has now promised, via Doctor Who Confidential, that we will get to see the whole of the River Song story, though surely that's a promise he can't expect to keep: she must see at least one more of the Doctor's regenerations (else why refer to him as becoming "baby faced"). If she sees out two more incarnations, she can shoot his thirteenth and that'll be the end of him. Unless he regenerates into Joanna Lumley.

Maybe thatis the Grand Moff's plan, to outlast John Nathan-Turner in the producer's chair and finish the series.

Still, at least River's signoff is rather wonderful: "That is a fairy tale" "Who isn't?" And we're promised we'll see her again "when the Pandorica Opens". Which translates as "in episode twelve".

The irony, of course, is that "Flesh and Stone" is not a fairy tale. Unlike "Blink" it does not have that magical slightly-removed quality. In "Blink", the angels mean something: they're what haunts the old dark houses, the curiosity that killed the cat, the thing that moves in the corner of your eye. In "Blink", the Doctor isn't the star; he's a magician, a slightly untrustworthy force of nature with his own agenda, who provides only just enough answers for the plucky heroine and hero for them to fulfil his plan.

"Flesh and Stone" isn't like that. It is an episode in the ongoing series of adventures of Doctor Who, the monsters are just monsters and the Doctor is a Time Lord from Gallifrey, tune in if you want to find out more about Mrs Who or Timey-Wimey Why.

It’s not that it’s unenjoyable. In fact, watched again, as part of a pair with “The Time of Angels”, its weaknesses translate into sustaining and drawing out the tension that has been wound up over the first half of the story. Watched as part of the whole season it may well be essential.

But it’s not quite magic.



And then there's the tag scene. Amy tries to jump the Doctor's bones. I do wish she hadn't. It seems such a clumsy way of setting up the arc for the next few episodes of the Doctor travelling with both Amy and fiancé Rory.

As a scene from "Coupling" it was a perfectly adequate, but was deeply awkward and uncomfortable in an episode of Doctor Who. It makes me feel prudish, and I don't want to feel prudish. And I don't want to see the Doctor flapping about like Steve from "Coupling", even if he's been doing something similar ever since Cameca slipped him a cocoa in "The Aztecs". In fact, William Hartnell deals with romance and the Doctor in a more gentle and whimsical way, and a much more accepting way. And I certainly don't wanting him going "ew, ew, but you're human" when it seemed not to matter a jot to him in his ninth of tenth lives. Matt Smith's eleventh Doctor is older and wiser and deserved to have a more dignified way to put Amy off.

Or perhaps it was just in this episode of Doctor Who, where it seemed a huge emotional swerve from the "sharing secrets" moment of Amy responding to the Doctor being forced to reveal his relationship with River by showing the Doctor her wedding dress. Isn't Moffat the one who's always on about this being a kids' show? Kids' shows usually find so many more intelligent things to talk about than just sex. Sharing of deep and painful secrets is a very "kids" thing to do; casual sex is really not.

And wasn't it odd, after five years of Russell-ness, for the Doctor not to respond to Amy's advances by going all misty-eyed and to mumble about Rose?

We also have – returning to Russell-era tropes – absolute date and time confirmation: Amy's present day is 2010. Strictly: 26th June 2010, which, unless they drop a week, should be the broadcast date of episode thirteen: ominously, "The Big Bang".


Next Time… Pretty girls in veils and white dresses and Amy wants to join in. The Doctor's determined to have her remember she's marrying Rory, and reckons that a romantic trip to plague-era Venice is just the trick. Trouble is, as usual, something's a bit fishy. Altogether now: there's something in the waaaa-teeeerr… "The Vampires of Venice"

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Day 3426: Who's On First? Good Luck Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo

Thursday:


Congratulations today to Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo, not just for discombobulating Mr Naughty on the The Today Show with her surprise announcement, but also for totally opening up the contest to be the next loser leader of Hard Labour.

The contest was looking increasingly like a choice of pale-male mini-me's to be Hard Labour's Mr William Vague.

Now we have a genuine choice! Will Mrs the Queen's Loyal Opposition be led by the next Mr Vague or… the next Mr Michael Foot!

Seriously, though, it IS a relief to see a genuine lady-person in the contest for the top job.

And, as well as being – as Mr Frown might point out – a woman, Ms Abbott-and-Portillo also represents one of the MINORITIES for Hard Labour: yes, she actually BELIEVES in things…

Because, of course, the REAL significance of Ms Abbott-and-Portillo is NOT that she LOOKS different to the other candidates, but that she THINKS different to the other candidates.

If you can get past the fact of her "celebrity comedy career" as part of a double act – famous for their "Who's OFF First" routine – with one-time Conservatory leadership contender Mr Michael Abbott-and-Portillo (no relation) AND that she radiates more than enough SMUG-ON radiation to have prematurely aged her share-ee of Mr Brillo Pad's sofa, even in spite of his natural OIL SHEEN of protection, you have to admit that she stands for a distinct BREAK from the Labour of Lords Blairimort and Mandelbrot.

It was GOOD to hear her wanting to re-engage Hard Labour with the CIVIL LIBERTIES agenda. It's about time they recognised that BURNING the MAGNA CARTA does not a happier safer country make. And, after what Daddy would have said in his speech, it was EXTRA good to hear her speak up AS a child of immigrants for a BETTER debate about immigration, particularly when she went on to say that the real problems were housing, jobs, services… hey! has she been reading my diary?

She'd be definite lurch to the left. But for a Party that was starting to make Mr Genghis Khan go "phew, they're a bit right-wing", that's really no bad thing. And she'd assuredly try to reconnect the Party to its roots… as bunch of well-off middle-class Islingtonians writing manifestos for poor people they've never met and certainly wouldn't want their kids to share a school with. Sorry, what?


Still, if you can't get over where she keeps her reproductive organs, or the amount of melanin she has about her person, I think it really HELPS the country see itself AS one country if people of all colours and genders and backgrounds can be seen to be in with a shot at being Prime Monster, so Ms Abbott-and-Portillo is to be warmly congratulated for stepping up to the plate for that reason too.

Parliament was already looking like it was reverting to a debating club for boys even before Mr Balloon set up a Cabinet which only included FOUR women to replace "reforming" Mr Frown's Hard Labour Cabinet… which, er, only included FOUR women.

But it would be really SAD if people thought you HAD to look like Hair-of-Blair to get anywhere in politics.

Well, of course, ACTUALLY, Mr Bully Balls is more Hair-of-Brown than Hair-of-Blair… and the Millipedes are more SPAWN-of-Blair than Hair-of-Blair… and Mr Andy Crash-and-Burnham is closer to We-Don't-CARE-of-Blair than Hair-of-Blair…

…I'm drifting!

Look, I'll admit it: it didn't help when Captain Clegg put five Liberal Democrats into the Cabinet and they all had "Y" Chromosomes.

Of course, the Liberal Democrats DID have a great many REALLY REALLY good lady candidates at the election – and in "winnable" seats too – but, by one of those HUGELY IRRITATING quirks of the voting system, most of those winnable seats LOST, making us LOOK a bit rubbish on the representation front. We'll have to mend that.

I think we can all guess that if Ms Julia Good-as-Goldsworthy had not lost, she'd have been a hot tip for the Chief Secretary job; and if Ms Susan Kramer-versus-Kramer had lost out to snotty-nosed rich-boy, er, valued Conservatory ally [retch, barf] Mr Slack Goldfinger she would have been a sure pick for the negotiations team and a fast track to a top job there too.

(Not that the boys aren't BRILLIANT, but you do see what I mean: we could have gone for 60:40 gender split with no loss of talent if the voters hadn't decided otherwise.)

Anyway, Parliament is supposed to represent the whole country and all points of view so that we can be SEEN to be coming to good decisions TOGETHER. At least that's what the NEW POLITICS should mean. So a Parliament that represents ALL people is a BETTER Parliament!


And anyway, as Auntie Stephmog says: Ms Diane Abbott HAS to win, if only so Mr Balloon can say, "I was arguing with a black woman last week…"

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