Doctor Who: Under the Lake

"Two weeks of "Mysterious Girl" by Peter Andre- I was begging for the brush of Death's merciful hand."

The obvious point to make about this two-parter, from what we've seen so far, is that it seems to be playing interesting structural games with the two parter format- the first episode is set in the later time period and the second in an earlier period, meaning that the first episode sets up a puzzle to be solved by the second. In other words, the two halves of the story are in different time zones: sort of The Ark in reverse.

The less obvious point, though, is how resolutely traditional this episode feels: a base under siege with all the narrative short cuts that implies and, brilliantly, the first time since the series came back in 2005 that we've had a proper, old-fashioned, first episode which has time to breathe, explore the environment the TARDIS lands in and set up the mystery. I suspect that this, as much as the structural playing, may have been the original aim of Toby Whithouse in writing this. This may be a deeply and exaggeratedly traditional episode of Who, but it also manages to lovingly deconstruct traditional Who in doing so. The Doctor can hardly help pointing out all the tropes of the base-under-siege story he finds himself in. I love this sort of metatextual fun.

Oh, and it's also the scariest episode in yonks.

Other positives: not only do we have a deaf character, whose first language is BSL, but she's in charge. The script is delightfully witty, and the chemistry between the Doctor and Clara is perfect; I love the bit with the cue cards! The ghosts look brilliant- oh, and one of them is a Tivoli, one of whom was played by David Walliams in The God Complex. And the cliffhanger is brilliant.

I'll refrain from praising this too highly until I've seen the second episode- this feels like half of a puzzle- but so far I'm very, very impressed.

Four Lions (2010)

"Waj, why are you doing this?"

"Rubber dinghy rapids!"

I've resisted reviewing any outright comedy for this blog so far, film or TV, for the obvious reasons: trying to analyse humour is about the most po-faced thing I can possibly imagine. I don't really hold to the oft-repeated belief that you ruin a joke by looking at how it works, but it's still hard to do it without appearing to have no sense of humour and, as John Cleese once said, an Englishman would rather be accused of having a really small penis than that.

Still, I've reviewed quite a few films now, and I can't keep ignoring a whole genre. I have to find some way of talking about it. And it isn't that I haven't found humorous things to discuss before (Flash Gordon, for example. Actually, that's a comedy, innit?). So I've deliberately decided to have a go. Originally I was going to review Kind Hearts and Coronets, but I had to give up five minutes in as there are no subtitles on my DVD and the dialogue just isn't clear enough to compensate. I'm a bit pissed off about that, really; a DVD release without subtitles is not acceptable.

So, Four Lions. It's a brilliant film. But the first thing I have to say is: DO NOT BUY THE DVD. Just record it off the telly or something. The DVD forces you to watch about ten minutes' worth of trailers that can't be skipped. Any DVD that does this has to be boycotted, otherwise they'll just keep on doing it.

Crikey. Got out of the bed the wrong side this morning, didn't I? Anyway… I picked Kind Hearts and Coronets so that I'd be able to talk about the class subtext instead of trying to analyse jokes. This was my second choice, obviously, because there's a political subtext to talk about. Thing is, though, there's not an awful lot to say about it, cleverly done though it is. All sorts of taboos are cheerfully ploughed though, as you'd expect from Chris Morris, but it's funny for rather old fashioned reasons. The format is basically that old classic, thick bloke and thicker bloke. The three thicker blokes (the Stan Laurels / Buttheads / Garths / Syd Littles, depending on your cultural reference point) are Waj, Faisal and Hassan, and the two thick blokes (the Hardys / Beavises / Waynes / Eddie Larges) are Omar and Barry. There's a bit of an added level of this between these two, jostling for the spot of alpha male, but it's Omar who's ultimately the least thick, and the leader. Of course, though, the humour lies in the fact that they're all wazzocks. This is co-written by the creators of Peep Show, and feels like it.

It's Omar and Barry who are fleshed out more as characters. Omar has a loving wife and young son, and the family relationships are quite heartwarming. Yet his wife is enthusiastic for Omar's plans to blow himself up, and their son is being brought up to idolise jihad and martyrdom. His brother Ahmed, a far more observant and pious Muslim than Omar, who is forever referring to Western pop culture, is appalled at all this, yet we can't quite side with him as he's such a zealot that he locks his wife up in a "little room"! So many contradictions.

Barry, although charismatic, is a little semi-detached because of his white ethnicity, his convert status and his lack of Urdu. I suspect this, rather than anything else is the real reason why he refuses to attend the mosques (he wants to blow then up!) and prefers only to associate with other Muslims who accept him as one of them, not an outsider, which pushes him towards extremism. He doesn't quite belong anywhere, precisely because of his stubborn adherence to a particularly narrow version of "Islam". So many contradictions.

And it's the contradictions that make this film so funny. Barry accuses Omar at the end of killing his thick brother by dragging him into this, but he did the same himself with Hassan. Waj ends up about to blow himself up inside a kebab shop full of Muslims. Omar and Waj go to train with Al Qaeda and end up blowing up Bin Laden. And Omar blows up a branch of Boots, something which he's mocked earlier.

There's something almost Monty Python about the explosions, too. All of them, from Faisal's crow to Faisal himself to Barry's choking demise are very, very funny. It goes to show that the subject matter, being fundamentally absurd, is ripe for humour. I'm glad that a film like this exists, and that it's good.