Victoria: Faith, Hope and Charity

"If I follow my conscience, I will destroy my party."

We knew it was coming; Victoria does the Irish Potato Famine, and it’s as devastating as you’d expect. This is not a normal episode, exactly; an unusual amount of time is devoted to the famine, and the character of Dr. Traill, a good man through whom we see both the unimaginable suffering and the equally unimaginable Malthusian bigotry that blames the “feckless” Irish poor for their own fate. It’s an outstanding piece of television, ending unusually with a caption telling us of Dr. Traill’s unfortunate fate.

Victoria herself cannot, of course,  be seen to be anything other than deeply horrified, and much of the episode consists of her trying to persuade Sir Robert Peel to do something, which she finally seems to do- I suspect there’s a sprinkling of artistic licence here, but in opening the Pandora’s Box that is trade and tariffs, Peel will be scratching at the persistent itch that is the Corn Laws. I suspect they will loom large in the remaining episodes.

Elsewhere, we discover that Ernest has syphilis, and may have aff Fred his sexual partners, including the newly widowed Duchess of Sutherland. And kindly Albert makes a loo for the servants. But Ireland, of course, overshadows everything in what is an extraordinary episode.

Victoria: Warp and Weft

"They don't need balls. They need bread."

A much better and more substantial episode this week. Victoria is back on track. The conceit of Victoria holding an opulent ball in the middle of the Hungry Forties is a superb fulcrum from which we can explore all kinds of historical and character development. And I don't care about such deliberate inaccuracies such as the fact that Lord Melbourne lived fpr a good seven or so years after the birth of Victoria's second child...

Lord M is clearly dying, getting worse as the episode progresses after his apparent stroke, and this leads to an emotional yet restrained parting with Victoria. His death, interestingly, is juxtaposed with that of Dash; indeed, we deliberately hear Victoria give a funeral speech which seems to be for Lord M until we learn otherwise.. Victoria's old intimates are dying; she has only Albert now.

We learn of the Corn Laws; tariffs to protect the interests of the aristocracy as the poor suffer foreign competition. This is clearly going to be a defining issue for the season, as are the Parliamentary sparring matches between John Bright and Sir Robert Peel. I think the defining issues of the season may have been set. I look forward to it all.

Victoria: The Green-Eyed Monster

"Am I just an ignoramus who has to have things summarised by my husband?"

A somewhat awkward and directionless episode this time, it must be said, despite the clever use of Othello to examine the idea of jealousy between the royal couple. It doesn't really go anywhere or develop Vicky and Albert's relationship notably more than we saw last time.

Vicky suspects Albert of a somewhat unconvincing infatuation with Ada Lovelace, daughter of the notorious Lord Byron, when it’s clear that the nerdy prince is only interested in her and Charles Babbage’s difference engine. This contrived jealousy subplot isn’t really adding anything, and nor is the rehashing of the old debates about the impropriety of Vicky’s friendship with Lord M. Still, Melbourne doesn’t seem to be as well as he lets on.

Elsewhere we get hints of an upcoming affair between Ernest and Miss Cook, and the Coburgs continue to be annoying snobs. Sir Robert Peel continues to impress with his progressive attitude, a contrast to Lord M, while Vicky is pregnant with a second child so soon after the first.

Much though the A plot may be a damp squib, then, the long-term characterisation and plotting continues to impress, as do the performances and direction. I’m sure things will be back to the usual quality next week.

Victoria: The Queen's Husband

"Ten times?"

Vicky is married, very much enjoying the bedtime activities that come with that, but rather concerned to avoid children for the time being. Abstinence is, of course, not an option, but the only options for contraception that she's made aware of are somewhat, er, Victorian.

Meanwhile, continuing Tory wariness towards Vicky manifests itself at dinner; it is not Albert but one of Vicky's uncles who must escort her every evening. Yet Vicky soon deploys her Machiavellian wiles to engineer a victory here, while Albert begins to find a role in supporting those causes that the Sovereign cannot, making a well-received speech against slavery. The history is very logically turned into a narrative structure that works, but leaves us in no doubt that the problem of Albert's role is only partially solved. He is an intelligent man, not an ornament.

Meanwhile, Miss Skerrit discovers that Francatelli's liking for her may be less creepy than she'd assumed; he risks his life to help her relatives and all he want in return is her first name this, I begin to suspect, may be a budding romance "downstairs" to balance out the events "upstairs"; ordinary people matter too.

Victoria: Ladies in Waiting

"Spreading through the palace like a miasma of corruption..."

This episode Victoria learns the hard way that she has constitutional duties, Lord M will not be prime minister forever and that her ministers must sometimes be Tories as well as Whigs, and she must show no bias towards the man who may be moving from father figure to something else. All while still in her teens. And in the background lurks Conroy, plotting to impose a regency.

Sir Robert Peel's Tories don't come across here- they come close to bringing the Whig government down on the issue of slavery- but they are a fact, as they are today in our increasingly scary future, adrift, friendless and alone in a sea of tariffs and contempt. But I digress.

Below stairs, meanwhile, a metaphor for reform is played out as the attempt to introduce gas lighting uncovers a rat problem which in turn threatens to assist those who wish to label our eat-phobic queen as mad, like her famous America-mislay img grandfather, and this undercurrent provides a great deal of tension throughout. Elsewhere, Miss Skerritt's past in the "nunnery" is uncovered.

All is well in the end; there is no serious doubt as to Victoria's sanity, and a piece of parliamentary skulduggery (in real life Peel, an ambitious man, was reluctant to become PM without a solid majority) keeps Melbourne in post, for now. But has young Vicky learned her lesson?

Victoria: Doll 123

"I know that I am young..."

So begins ITV's big prime time eight part biopic of Queen Victoria, and it's gorgeously shot, designed and costumed, surely deliberately, to look like a contemporary painting from the 1830s. It certainly looks gorgeous and evokes the period well. I'm impressed, too, with the casting, performances and script. The juxtaposition of Victoria's coronation with Lady Flora's humiliating examination is a particular high point. But it all hangs on the performance of Jenna Coleman is a very different part to that of Clara in Doctor Who.

This is not the Victoria of the popular imagination but a young, guileless, well-meaning but perhaps naive young girl of 18, still under the thumb of her mother and self-serving stepfather, and Coleman evokes the innocence and the steel, striking the right balance between regal and naive. Rufus Sewell, too, impresses as the initially jaded Lord Melbourne in spite of being somewhat young for the part at first glance.

I also like the way events downstairs are used as a metaphor for what is happening; initially there are all sorts of "perks" and corrupt practices which are stopped, but Victoria eventually holds back from going too far. And it's nice, as a Doctor Who fan, to see Eve Myles and Tommy Knight; there's even a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance from Tom Price.

The history is, give or take a bit of artistic licence, accurate, strongly evoking an age which was no longer of the regency but not yet "Victorian", with a political undercurrent to everything, Victoria being opposed by the Tory supporters of her Uncle Ernest and supported by the Whig prime minister. It'll be interesting to see if this is followed through.

The ending is superb, as Lord Melbourne gives courage D to a Victoria chastened by her wronging of Lady Flora, saying that she has given him a reason to live after the death of his young son, and she is able to carry on and do her duty in that very strange job of constitutional monarch. This is a good and promising start.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

“Did you wish really hard?”

No more Don’t Scare the Hare! Oh no… what are we Doctor Who fans going to talk about now? Never mind: this is utterly superlative stuff. It’s a one-off, of course. It would become quite tiresome if Doctor Who was like this all the time. But this is right up there with the very best. Neil Gaiman may be oh-so-slightly overrated in my book, but “overrated is a relative concept. He’s no Alan Moore (we long-haired blokes from the East Midlands rule!), but he’s head and shoulders above most writers.

It all looks great, too, and the visual style is very… well, Sandman. Just the opening scene, with the junkyard planet (an obvious nod to 76 Totters Lane- Gaiman, like all right-thinking people, appreciates ‘60s Who). The characters of Uncle, Auntie, Nephew and Idris come across as very endless-like, too. It’s a very atmospheric, dark, funny and, well, Gaimanesque scene. Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the name “Idris” on the ever-faithful and in all ways reliable Wikipedia. Apparently Idris was a (male) prophet and philosopher sometimes identified with the Biblical Enoch. Not sure if there’s any actual allusion there…

Anyway, on a slightly less pretentious note, we get a quick scene in the TARDIS- and another arc-related “We saw him die,” from Amy to Rory- and there’s a knock on the door. In mid-flight. It turns out to be one of those box thingies, as used by the Doctor to summon the Time Lords in part nine of The War Games. How very fannish.

So, there is at least one Time Lord still alive, it seems: the Corsair. In just a few lines, Gaiman gives us a fantastic sketch of the character, who keeps the same tattoo in all of his (or her!) regenerations. The Corsair is apparently outside the universe, though; for the first time since Castrovalva the Doctor has to burn up some TARDIS rooms to “give it some welly”. After all these years of travelling between universes being nearly impossible, it happens in two stories in a row.

The TARDIS power drains away; it’s “soul” has gone. The TARDIS crew seem to be stuck on this little asteroid in this pocket universe with no stars in the sky. And then, Idris, with her new soul (and we’ve already guessed what this “soul” is) comes running to her “thief” and kisses him, among other things (“Oh, biting’s excellent! It’s like kissing, only there’s a winner”). Idris is great, and Suranne Jones does a perfect job of making her exactly the right kind of eccentric while still being sympathetic. I love the timey-wimeyness of her speech, which gives the sense that she doesn’t quite exist in the same three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we do.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are taken to meet the “House”, an extremely large sea anemone creature surrounded by a massive, world-size shell. Right from the start we get the impression that House isn’t very nice. He “mends people” when they “break”, and lots of TARDISes have landed on him in the past. Already this is wonderfully fantastical and, well, Gaimanesque, always a much better fit for Doctor Who than hard sci-fi.

It seems there are lots of Time Lords here, and there’s an interesting conversation between Amy and the Doctor; he’ll have to tell the Time Lords what he did in the Time War. But that’s just it; he wants to be forgiven.

Incidentally, the Doctor seems to have told Amy an awful lot of intensely personal things about himself off-screen. He isn’t usually so open with his travelling companions. But some things about Doctor / companion relationships are timeless, and one of these is the classic “Doctor sends companions back to TARDIS when things get a bit scary” trope.

The little boxes make the Doctor angry: Time Lord have been lured here, exploited, and eventually killed, many, many times over. His confrontation with Auntie and Uncle reveals a lot; they’re patchwork people, like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of bits of other people, Auntie has the Corsair’s arm.

The Doctor finds Idris, and they start the wonderful conversation that lasts for most of the rest of the episode. The dialogue sings, and the relationship between them is so heartwarming. They’re like an old married couple, but they obviously love each other. There are so many great things here. When the Doctor first touched the TARDIS console, he said that it was “the most beautiful thing I’d ever known”. Wonderfully, he didn’t just steal her; she stole him because she wanted to see the universe and he was “the only one mad enough”!

It seems that House feeds on TARDISes, deleting the matrixes first to make them edible. As just destroying the matrixes would cause lots of unpleasantness, he simply dumps them into a convenient receptacle (or body) and feeds off the residual Artron energy once they die, usually quite quickly. This is really quite nasty when you think about it.

The nastiness continues to rack up during the middle of the episode. The moment Rory says to Amy that “We’re in the TARDIS, so we’re safe”, it turns out that they so aren’t. While they’re aboard the soulless Ship, House had an absolute godlike ability to do any sadistic thing to them that he wants to. As many people have said, House can be seen as an analogy of the power of the writer.

Just as nasty, if blackly and Gaiman-esquely humorous, is the scene in which Auntie and Uncle “pop off”. Oh, and Idris has eighteen minutes to live. But one thing that Neil Gaiman is very, very good at is mixing nastiness, humour and beautifully poignant feelings, all with a real lightness of touch (“I think you call me…sexy.” / “Only when we’re alone…”- it’s funny but it says a lot).

There’s a lot of fanwank at this point, all in the best possible way. For the first time in decades we get to see the corridors of the TARDIS. And they have old-fashioned roundels. Yay! And it seems the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for “seven hundred years”, meaning that he spent his first two hundred years on Gallifrey, unless it’s more complicated than that. I’ve recently read the latest version of Timelink and it has some very interesting, and quite complicated, theories about that sort of thing. Most of it flew right over my head, but it’s a fascinating read.

The relationship between the Doctor and Idris / the TARDIS is great here- they argue like happily married couples do, in a way which is actually quite sweet and affectionate (“No, but I always took you where you needed to go.”). It’s actually quite romantic.

The scenes between our other married couple are not nearly as nice. House plays cruel games on Amy, exploiting her guilt over Rory waiting two thousand years for her. Back in The Impossible Astronaut, Moffat dealt with the psychological impact of this on Rory- his memories of all that time are quarantined away behind a door in his brain, hence his not being completely insane- but what must it be like for Amy to have the overwhelming knowledge that her husband did all that for her?

The Doctor and Idris set to building a functional TARDIS out of all the old dead ones (with old-fashioned roundels, again!), Idris communicates with “the pretty one”, and the plot chugs along. We get to see the old control room again- well, the oldest one that can reasonably survived in an HD-friendly condition- as they’re all archived. I love the fact that the TARDIS has archived “desktop themes” from the Doctor’s personal future!

The Doctor and Idris manage to outwit House rather cleverly, and the Doctor and Idris have a completely wonderful final conversation. The Doctor cries, and the Doctor never cries. It’s the end of a wonderful love story. And we end, of course, with the Doctor asking the TARDIS to take them “wherever we need to go.”

Idris has some final words for Rory:”The only water in the forest is the river”. What could that possibly mean, he asked, pretending he hasn’t yet seen A Good Man Goes to War?