TV Review | Doctor Who: “Fugitive of the Judoon” by Vinay Patel & Chris Chibnall

After Spyfall’s apparently aberrant shift back towards the show’s past (in both its returning antagonist and some of its stylistic trappings), the subsequent brace of episodes saw Doctor Who return to the format of its previous season, cultivating a sense of security that even the well-publicised return of everyone’s favourite trigger-happy space rhinos didn’t seem likely to threaten. My little girl and I were certainly excited by the prospect of her Doctor locking horns with the brutal and bureaucratic Judoon of “Smith and Jones” fame, but neither of us were even remotely prepared for the fist-pumping rollercoaster ride that would begin, of all places, in contemporary Gloucester. 

Penned in part by the writer of one of last year’s best stories, “Demons of the Punjab”, the only clue as to this episode’s surprising significance is to be found on its title card, which credits Chris Chibnall as Vinay Patel’s writing partner. Indeed, with the exception of the unusually moody and arc-heavy TARDIS scenes, which I had assumed would account for the showrunner’s co-writing credit, the opening of the episode plays very much as expected - the Judoon cordon off the sleepy cathedral city with an enforcement field as they hunt for their eponymous fugitive. The lively and often humorous plot steers viewers squarely towards secretive Bathrooms 4U employee Lee Clayton (Neil Stuke, Game On), while in the background a more likely suspect emerges in the skies above Earth – one who’s trying to scoop the Doctor up onto his ship, and not making a very good job of it. Despite some beautifully sharp dialogue, perfectly pitched performances even some absolutely sumptuous Glostonian visuals from director Nida Manzoor, “Fugitive of the Judoon” initially feels a lot like the routine rhino runaround implicitly promised by its billing.

And then an alien ship speaks with a familiar voice, and what would in any other episode have been the bombshell of the week is dropped as Captain Jack Harkness materialises in front of a baffled Graham. It’s the sensational shot in the arm that the show needed after last week’s relative calm, and John Barrowman milks the moment for all that it’s worth, aided and abetted by Bradley Walsh at his incredulous best. The former Torchwood chief might not look a day older than he did a decade ago (and why would he – he’s immortal), but the Doctor has certainly changed since they last met, and like Stephen Fry’s C before him, Jack inevitably mistakes the Doctor’s eldest companion for his old Time Lord friend. Jack’s ensuing reaction to news of the Doctor’s change of gender is wonderful in its cheeky exuberance – it’s as if all his Christmases have come at once when, in fact, it’s actually the viewers’ Christmases that have arrived en masse.

Jack, it seems, it just being a tease – a warning (“The Lone Cyberman - don’t give it what it wants. At all costs!”) and a promise rolled into one. Viewers barely have time to process their disappointment at having to wait for the inexorable meeting of Jack and the so-called “Thirteenth Doctor” when the episode’s titular fugitive is unmasked as Lee’s seemingly innocuous tour-guide wife Ruth (Jo Martin, Holby City). Having used a chameleon arch to make herself human, this suddenly woken – and, indeed, woke – woman introduces herself as the Doctor. And, with her flamboyant outfit and brassy attitude to match, it’s easy to believe her. 

Yet Whittaker’s Doctor has no memory of being her, and vice-versa. More confoundingly still, Martin’s Doctor hails from a time in which Gallifrey and its resident Time Lords are a power in the universe. This immediately suggests that, if she’s legitimate, this new Doctor must either pre-date William Hartnell’s “original” or exist between the Doctor’s purportedly second and third incarnations (as the Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee regeneration is the only one that we’ve never been shown) – unless, of course, the Time Lords are either miraculously returned from the dead (again...) or revealed not to be. Remember, the series has only shown us a smoking Citadel and a dead planet. Grim, but hardly concrete evidence of a race’s extermination. However, while the how might be baffling, the fact of the matter seems clear - “Fugitive of the Judoon” goes out of its way to emphasise that Martin’s Doctor is the real deal, as opposed to some clone or parallel-universe iteration. Her brain chemistry matches the Doctor’s exactly. Her identity is verified through Time Lord mind-to-mind contact. Martin is even billed as the Doctor on the programme’s closing credits. The truth of her identity is chiselled in stone.

Above: “Something was taken, and something was lost.” David Morrisey was not the next Doctor

But I’ve been burned before. When the news of David Tennant’s departure was quickly followed by a Christmas special entitled “The Next Doctor”, fandom was alight with speculation of precisely the sort that is currently lighting up every corner of the Internet. Back then, despite sharing many an adventure with earlier incarnations, a reigning Doctor had never encountered a future self (on television, at least), and so the idea that the show would be bold enough – and prepared enough – to dip into its own future was incredibly tantalising. Unfortunately, David Morrissey’s Doctor proved not to be an illicit glimpse of a future life but a parody of a past one, and whilst Martin’s performance here is, comparatively, a study in seriousness, it is typified by a number of troubling traits that don’t sit well the Doctor’s typical characterisation.

Admittedly, most of the Doctors have been just as ruthless as Martin’s is – Sylvester McCoy’s was a destroyer of worlds, while John Hurt’s warrior incarnation was prepared to commit double genocide in service of a greater good. Even the post-Time War, pre-Jodie Doctors were brutal to their enemies. But, crucially, they all drew the line at using firearms to kill. There is something very wrong about the image of the Doctor looking down the barrel of a gun at a foe with malicious intent, and Patel and Chibnall really play upon this unease as the incumbent Doctor struggles to reconcile her own self-image with this evident embodiment of her past or future.

Above: Faces of the mid-1970s Doctor Who production team, or evidence of past lives...?

The creation of Martin’s Doctor is tantalising move, however you look at it, and one that successfully revivifies the Who in Doctor Who for the first time since the show’s anniversary year. The longer the programme has run, the more difficult it has been for its writers to sustain the mystery of the Doctor. Over the years, different production teams broached the issue in different ways. The intrigue surrounding the character was never greater than when Steven Moffat’s need to fill Christopher Eccleston’s shoes in the fiftieth anniversary special forced him to create Hurt’s forgotten incarnation who’d renounced his name to fight in the Last Great Time War. Ultimately though, the “War Doctor” was not only explained but fully explored – the fleeting sense of mystery conjured by the closing moments of “The Name of the Doctor” lost in service to the story.

Above: Not in the name of the Doctor... John Hurt as (another of...?) the Time Lord’s forgotten incarnation(s?)

Some of the more successful attempts to recapture the Doctor’s initial magic were more subtle. The procession of pre-first Doctor faces drawn from the fourth Doctor’s mind in The Brain of Morbius was the programme’s first reference to potential incarnations preceding William Harnell’s, but not its last. In the late 1980s, John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Cartmel took this intriguing idea and elevated it - Sylvester McCoy’s many littered asides in serials like Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis all hinted a character who was “far more than just another Time Lord.” Whether the Doctor’s life prior to his supposed first incarnation would ever have been explored on screen or not, we don’t know, but the Virgin range of New Adventures novels that picked up where the original series left off saw it through to its conclusion, delving into the fascinating intricacies of Gallifrey’s Intuitive Revelation and the ancient ruling triumvirate that created Time Lord society: Rassilon, Omega and another whose name history forgets.

Above: The Doctor, the Doctor and the... Other?

As we know from The Three Doctors, Omega’s time travel experiments would eventually consign him to a universe of anti-matter, while Rassilon would become such a tyrant that the Time Lords rebelled against his cruelty - including this “Other”, who cast himself into one of Rassilon’s earliest progenerative chambers to be reborn long after the tyrant had fallen from power - perhaps reborn as the first Doctor. I don’t think anyone expects Martin’s Doctor to be this Other, but the notion ably demonstrates the sort of freedom the writers have to work with when it comes to the Doctor. Ghost of the past, vision of the future or even sideways on and upside-down, Martin’s Doctor could be anything they need her to be.

Personally, I would be thrilled if Martin’s Doctor turned out to be the original Doctor. Such a move fits reasonably well with how she is portrayed in “Fugitive of the Judoon” – Hartnell’s Doctor might have eventually become quite noble, but at the outset he was an irascible kidnapper who was quite prepared to cave in a caveman’s head with a rock if it saved his own skin. There is even enough wiggle room with the Doctor’s initial run of regenerations for this idea to work as, in his hurry to address the restrictive “Time Lords only have thirteen lives” rule arbitrarily imposed by Robert Holmes in The Deadly Assassin before leaving the show, Moffat counted the Doctor’s aborted regeneration in “The Stolen Earth” as one of his allotted twelve. I had no issue with him doing so – it makes perfect sense as it saved the Doctor from that Dalek’s blast as effectively as a new body would have – but, equally, I’d have no issue accepting otherwise if it gave us an exciting new Doctor to explore.

The rub comes in the shape of the TARDIS’s shape: the Doctor’s ship’s chameleon circuit doesn’t malfunction until the end of the series’ first episode, which would of course be in this new Doctor’s personal future if she were somehow a pre-Hartnell Doctor. However, I think Chibnall is likely to worry less about continuity points like this than he is what he predecessor got up to. Surely a more pressing concern is that a forgotten Doctor has not only been done before, but recently and superlatively? There’s not an actor alive today who could do as fine as job as John Hurt did. As such, I think this new / old / new old Doctor is most likely to be the third Doctor - particularly with this episode’s focus on her “job”, which is of course the focus of the second Doctor’s post-War Games adventures in the existing canon.

Above: The earner of little privileges. Following his trial at the end of The War Games, the second Doctor’s sentence was suspended while he carried out top-secret missions for Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency. Who’s to say that he wasn’t mortally wounded on one of these missions, triggering his regeneration into Jo Martin’s Doctor?

Martin’s Doctor hailing from the programme’s relative future would be a much safer but just as stimulating ploy, albeit a ploy much more difficult to pull off - the series would be set on a fixed course which, unless Chibnall and company are über-prepared, would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention potentially very limiting. Moffat didn’t let this stop him throwing Peter Capaldi’s incarnation into “The Day of the Doctor”, of course, though the circumstances there were very different as Matt Smith’s reign was all but over and work was already well underway on Capaldi’s first season. Bringing in a new Doctor now, at least a season and a half early (when going by recent lead’s tenures), would be completely unprecedented – and utterly thrilling.

For all its excitement and potentially wide-ranging repercussions, though, “Fugitive of the Judoon” has one rather glaring little weakness, and it’s one that’s becoming something of a worrying trend. We’re now at the season’s half-way point, and only Spyfall has catered for all three companions well. When an episode focuses heavily on the Doctor, as the last couple have, it’s at the expense of her three companions. This episode is the season’s worst example so far as it effectively treats them as one amalgam entity as opposed to three individuals – they’re growing more curious about the Doctor together. They’re getting annoyed with the Doctor together. Sure, Yas has the odd moment in which she can utilise her police background in this episode, just as Graham’s flexed his working man’s wings last week, but there is nothing of substance for them to run with. Sadly, there just isn’t enough screen time for each character to have a different reaction to this season’s drip-fed revelations, which is incredibly frustrating given how well Chibnall’s first season built up each one of them.

This time last week, I was writing about an episode that I felt destined for obscurity. “Fugitive of the Judoon”, however, is its opposite in almost every meaningful way. It’s either the series’ most significant episode since “The Name of the Doctor”, or its greatest hoax since “The Next Doctor”, but either way it is one that we’re going to be talking about for a long, long time.

Doctor Who airs on Sunday evenings on BBC 1 and is available to stream for the foreseeable future on BBC iPlayer. A season pass comprising all ten episodes of the season in 1080p HD and bonus material is also available from iTunes for £20.99, with episodes typically becoming available the day after their transmission on BBC 1. A Blu-ray steelbook is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.

TV Review | Doctor Who: “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” by Nina Métivier

With its Rotten Tomatoes’ audience score hitting a derisory 13% and its broadcast attracting just 4.04 million viewers, a low not seen since the dark days of The Trial of a Time Lord back in 1986, the numbers really don’t look good for “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” – which is quite ironic, really, as it’s effectively Doctor Who by numbers. Although viewing figures don’t mean anything like what they once did and Rotten Tomatoes is hardly the most reliable gauge of a programme’s reception, The A List’s Nina Métivier’s first script for the series still feels a little underwhelming. Following hot on the heels of the thrilling Spyfall and provocative “Orphan 55”, it has a seemingly inevitable whiff of mediocrity about it that most will struggle to overcome.

Fortunately, “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” is at times more than just a join-the-dots Doctor Who story. In framing the narrative in the unusual way that she does, Métivier cleverly flips viewers’ perspectives, allowing us to see the Doctor and her gang from the viewpoint of the eponymous futurist. This plays particularly well as Tesla bucks the well-trodden trend of open-mouthed incomprehension when faced with aliens and technology apparently indistinguishable from magic. What he doesn’t immediately grasp, he theorises about; nothing seems to faze him. Such qualities make him immediately endearing, not just to us watching at home, but evidently to the Doctor too. Jodie Whittaker and Goran Višnjić are suitably electric together – if anything, their characters’ relationship could have been taken a little further, and I dare say would have been were the genders reversed. David Tennant and Matt Smith’s Doctors were often being kissed for far less.

With the focus so firmly on the Doctor, there’s precious little room in this episode for her friends to shine, but even so Bradley Walsh manages to find a little time to place his workplace ethics squarely at odds with Edison’s, while Ryan’s evolution into something of a player continues in the background as he seems to take an interest in Dorothy Skerritt - much to Yas’s exasperation. However, “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” is more of a vehicle for its guest stars, two of whom already have a firm grounding in the Whoniverse. Peter Davison’s old Sink or Swim co-star Robert Glenister, who famously appeared alongside Davison in the fifth Doctor’s stunning swansong The Caves of Androzani, returns to the programme in the guise of Thomas Edison – America’s greatest inventor, and Tesla’s greatest adversary. My little girl was delighted to see the programme taking such a forthright look at a man that she’s been learning about at school, especially as he’s seen here through Tesla’s eyes, offering her a fresh and significantly less favourable take on him to challenge her teacher with.

Meanwhile, the story’s alien menace are given a face by The Sarah Jane Adventures’ Anjli Mohindra, who serves up her best Sarah Parish impression as the Skithra’s scorpion queen – something that it’s hard to blame her for, given the similarity of the creature’s design to that of the Racnoss queen famously seen in “The Runaway Bride”. Whilst “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” might be a lovely character piece, it is sadly let down by its alien antagonists. Racnoss rip-offs and cloaked, lightning-hurling figures are at best unimaginative; at worst so derivative that they border on plagiarism.

Like Tesla himself, “Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror” is no doubt destined for relative obscurity, remembered more for its poor performance than its objective merits. Such a fate is regrettable as while it’s certainly no world-beater, it’s nonetheless an enjoyable and educational episode that ticks all the requisite boxes – and a few more besides.

Doctor Who airs on Sunday evenings on BBC 1 and is available to stream for the foreseeable future on BBC iPlayer. A season pass comprising all ten episodes of the season in 1080p HD and bonus material is also available from iTunes for £20.99, with episodes typically becoming available the day after their transmission on BBC 1. A Blu-ray steelbook is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.

4K Ultra-HD & Blu-ray Review | Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut directed by Zack Snyder

Who watches the Watchmen these days? Well, thanks to HBO’s new spin-off series, probably a few million more than were doing so a few years ago, by which time Zack Snyder's divisive masterwork had begun to fade from recent memory, overshadowed by the MCU juggernaut and DC’s ill-advised attempts to duplicate it. This revival of interest has led to the long-awaited UK release of the movie’s Ultimate Cut on the new 4K Ultra-HD format, with Zavvi even offering a luxuriant steelbook version for those prepared to invest a little more.

Above: The sold-out steelbook edition. Click to enlarge images.

Even in its theatrical form, Watchmen is one of my favourite comic-book movies – pretty unsurprisingly, really, given that the Watchmen graphic novel is generally regarded as one of the medium’s greatest masterworks and Zack Snyder is one of my favourite directors in the genre. Given his penchant for dark and moody interpretations of even the most colourful of comic-book characters, Watchmen was the ideal fit for Snyder’s subversive style as it came with its cerebral themes and sordid intricacies already in place. All Snyder had to do was stay true to the source material and his own instincts, and the “unfilmable” could finally be filmed. 

Above: The sold-out steelbook edition. Click to enlarge images.

The Zavvi-exclusive steelbook is extraordinarily striking – a yellow Rorschach ink blot on black steel is the canvas for a colour-drained montage featuring all the principal players. It may not be as iconic as the smiley-face Blu-ray steelbook, but it’s a considerable improvement on the movie poster version that was issued, and it comes jam-packed full of all manner of trivial treats ranging from a blood-spattered smiley sticker to collectible art cards. The steelbook slots safely inside a protective cardboard slipcase that shares the standard release’s artwork, which itself has been very nicely done, but as was the recent Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald steelbook, the bonus disc is separately housed in a cheap cardboard slipcase of the type you’d generally find bundled with a broadsheet newspaper. The discs themselves are unremarkable too – picture discs seem to be becoming more and more and thing of the past – but of course it's what on them that really counts.

 

Like many not-quite-recent films, Watchmen was finished at 2K, which means that its resolution here is only marginally greater than on its 1080p Blu-ray release - the picture has just been upscaled to 2160p. Already abounding with grain, the upscaled image does precious little to enhance what was already a near-perfect presentation. This release doesn’t benefit from a new Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack either - it simply ports over the Blu-ray release’s lossless 5.1 mix. This is not to say that the 4K release isn’t worthwhile, though - the HDR presentation is so drastic as to completely alter the movie’s tone, taking already dark scenes and making them even more atmospheric while allowing the comic book’s deliberately ugly accent colours pop as intended - purples, yellows, magentas and greens appear to be much more vibrant here than on the Blu-ray version from which this article’s screengrabs have been lifted (and which is also included here in the same curious way that DVDs were bundled with Blu-rays for years).

However, I was less concerned with any uptick in technical quality that this release might offer than with the expanded version of the movie itself. One of Watchmen’s great strengths on the page is the sense of total immersion that it offers - it’s not just a story, but a window into another world; a world with a rich, divergent history that twists everything from the that way war is waged right down to the contents of comic books. Zack Snyder's theatrical cut of Watchmen did a fantastic job of translating the comic book’s narrative into the movie medium, even improving upon its already jaw-dropping final act by making it much more personal, but where I found it wanting was in its absent asides. The flavour of the world conjured by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons was there, but it was missing its substance. This Ultimate Cut seeks to remedy that, finally putting one of the genre’s most divisive films on the same footing as the graphic novel on which was based.

Above: Tales of the Black Freighter, present and correct

What sets this Ultimate Cut apart from the Director’s Cut released on home video a decade ago is its seamless assimilation of the Tales of the Black Freighter animation starring Russell Crowe. A dark and impressive piece of work its own right, its inclusion within the main body of the film goes a long way to recapturing the expansive feel of the comic book. Its presence resonates outwards as it draws the audience into the street-level world of Bernard the news vendor and Bernard the comic-book fan while also serving as a grim parallel of Adrian Veidt’s own journey.

Above: Under the Hood - missing in action

At a mammoth two-hundred and fifteen minutes, this cut of Watchmen is amongst the longest movies that I’ve ever watched, yet I’m still left with the nagging sense that it should have been longer. When Tales of the Black Freighter was released on home video just prior Watchmen’s theatrical run, it was paired with Under the Hood – a forty-minute, faux-documentary that sought to capture the spirit, if not the letter, of the excerpts from the original Nite Owl’s memoir that peppered the pages of the original Watchmen issues. Snyder quite rightly took the view that dramatising Nite Owl’s accounts would have killed their world-building flavour, and so instead he crafted a spoof magazine show entitled The Culpepper Minute on which Nite Owl appears to promote the release of his book. The programme’s central chat sees Nite Owl recount several of the passages published in Watchmen almost verbatim, yet in a manner that doesn’t feel even the slightest bit artificial. Adding colour are brief snippets of interviews with Carla Gugino’s original Silk Spectre and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian that instantly bring to life the events that torn the Minutemen apart.

Above: Under the Hood - missing in action

Above: You'll need to hang onto this release for a while yet...

In my view Under the Hood is an even more crucial part of the fabric of the Watchmen than Tales of the Black Freighter as it deals directly with the rise and fall of the Minutemen and how this alternative world’s history diverged from our own, and it does so through the beautifully subjective accounts of some of those who lived through it. Admittedly, weaving Under the Hood into the narrative would have been a more challenging task than doing the same for Tales of the Black Freighter – whereas Tales’ colour-dense animation serves as a stark contrast to the murky live-action of the main narrative, Under the Hood is a live-action piece which utilises many of the same players. Yet its period 4:3 aspect ratio instantly distinguishes it from the 2.35:1 main feature, particularly as the footage has carefully been aged in the same way that later prints of the original book used dot patterns to segregate its Tales of the Black Freighter panels from the main Watchmen panels. Its exclusion from the Ultimate Cut really reeks of missed opportunity.

Leaving Under the Hood out of the Ultimate Cut might have been made a little more palatable had it at least been included in this three-disc set, but sadly the bonus material on offer here is limited to the film’s original complement of special features. This means that Under the Hood is nowhere to be found, nor is the stand-alone cut of Tales of the Black Freighter or even the enlightening twenty-five minute documentary, Story Within a Story, which served as a fascinating exploration of both. This release’s “Ultimate” billing also gave me false hope that I might finally be able to get my hands on a full-HD physical copy of the 2008 Watchmen motion comic, but, again, a corner is cut. In many respects, that motion comic is every bit as gripping as this set’s flagship live-action motion picture.

Above: The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics

What has been included, though, is still most impressive. DC and Warner Brothers rarely disappoint in their documentaries, with the depth and quality of their features seeming to increase the more that the focus is turned towards comic books, as opposed to their adaptations. The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics is a typically comprehensive half-hour retrospective devoted entirely to the creation and reception of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' acclaimed graphic novel. Obviously Moore himself doesn’t appear, but Gibbons shares a number of fascinating insights into their collaboration, and a number of DC executives and those involved with the production of the film are on hand to dissect and celebrate what many still hold up as the greatest comic book of all time.

Real Superheroes: Real Vigilantes is slightly shorter in length, but not substance. Whilst only tangentially linked to Watchmen, their themes marry quite nicely as this piece also challenges the glamorising of have-a-go heroes, taking a sober look at vigilantism with especial focus on New York's Guardian Angels organisation and a pair of real-life superheroes who are as hilarious as they are worrying. Similarly entertaining is the seventeen-minute Mechanics: Technologies of a Fantastic World feature in which Professor James Kakalios – an academic who uses nothing but comic books to teach science classes – discusses the believability of the film’s fantastic concepts, using the novel idea of a “miracle exemption” to look beyond a one-off “power” and study how that power might work in the real world. The making of the movie itself is well documented in more than half an hour’s worth of video journals, all eleven of which each take a brief look at a different scene or concept. Rounding out the extras package is the promo video for My Chemical Romance's cover of Bob Dylan’s "Desolation Row” – a track that’s clearly eclipsed by Bob’s own “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that memorably underlines the movie’s opening Minutemen montage.

This may be the Ultimate Cut, but it certainly ain’t the Ultimate Edition – we’d have needed at least two more Blu-ray discs for that. This release gets most things right that matter, but completists like me will inevitably lament what’s missing rather than celebrate what’s here.

The Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut 4K Ultra-HD and Blu-ray set is already becoming difficult to find - the steelbook edition sold out long before the first one was shipped, and even the standard edition is now selling out fast. HMV still have copies in stock priced at £19.99 with free delivery to your local store, while Zoom will charge you a penny more to deliver to your door. Amazon are charging £19.99 plus delivery. However, you can stream (at a lower bitrate) a 4K Ultra-HD version on Apple TV and download a 1080p HD copy to your iTunes library all for just £4.99.

App / Streaming Service Review | BritBox in the UK

The world is changing – and it’s not all necessarily for the worse. When I was a child, my parents used to pay a hefty monthly fee for their advertisement-strewn Sky TV subscription, and on top of that they also had to provide me with a seemingly never-ending supply of blank VHS tapes so that I could capture my favourite shows in all their 625-line standard-definition glory, “sparklies” and all whenever it rained. I’d get up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning or stay up into the early hours on Monday nights in my quest to cut the adverts out of every UK Gold Doctor Who omnibus, try to make sense of out-of-sequence Only Fools and Horses repeats, and even waste a disproportionate amount of time in a futile attempt to catch the episode of Bottom (I still remember the one - “Gas”) that I’d repeatedly missed due to bizarre scheduling. Today though, on-demand streaming services have become the new satellite TV. Whereas twenty years ago there might have been a single Sky multi-channel package entertaining a household, nowadays you’re just as likely to find a collection of sundry digital video subscription services mounting to broadly the same cost, but offering a much wider array of content that can be enjoyed on demand (i.e. without the need to produce seven planet-killing ounces of plastic and magnetic tape to capture every hundred and eighty minutes of it).

The latest entry into the UK streaming market is BritBox, an extraordinary co-venture between BBC Studios and ITV plc that collects together many of the finest British television programmes ever made along with a Film4-curated British film library. I’m currently around a fortnight into my thirty-day free trial and, even though I have my own fairly comprehensive collection of digital media, I’ve still been impressed by the quality of the service. 

Unlike some of the more awkward platforms like NOW TV and the accursed Amazon Prime, BritBox has clearly styled its apps on Netflix’s friendly and familiar interface. This will be particularly helpful for those would-be subscribers with limited experience of streaming as everything is big, clear and simple – the threat of accidental purchases and false-positive search results of the type that plague the Prime apps are nowhere to be found in BritBox. You just pay your £5.99 per month (to put it in perspective, about half the current TV licence fee), and receive access to what is justifiably billed as “the biggest box of British Boxsets”.

At the moment, the service is selling itself on the strength of its Doctor Who catalogue – the series even has its own tab on the app’s landing page. It’s a risky ploy, given that Netflix currently has the rights to stream ten of the last twelve seasons, but one likely to pay dividends in the long run when rights for the 2005-2017 episodes revert back to the Beeb and the service can host every surviving episode of the thirty-eight-season-strong series. In the meantime, though, even the offer of vintage Who is a great gimmick as in the past the cost of delving into the classic serials might have been off-putting to newcomers and/or casual viewers – I shudder to think how much money I spent building up my DVD collection over two decades, only to find myself starting again with the recent Blu-rays – but now they can watch any surviving episode broadcast between 1963 and 1996 (along with all the lost episodes that have been animated using off-air soundtracks, and one or two other fun little surprises) for what’s essentially just a nominal fee. BritBox even sweetens the deal with the complete fiftieth anniversary talking heads series The Doctors Revisited and Mark Gatiss’s exquisite docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time, both of which are difficult to find in HD in the UK. In some ways, then, BritBox’s current Who slate is more of a selling point than NuWho would have been – after all, in a clear attempt to undermine Netflix’s claim to the programme, every single episode of NuWho (all 160 of ’em at the time of writing) is already available on iPlayer and has been for over a year now.

Like a lot of Doctor Who fans, I already own everything Who-related that’s on BritBox, but it’s all on shiny discs. For some reason classic Who has never received a comprehensive or even half-decent digital release – the smattering of downloadable iTunes and Amazon offerings have been pitiful – and so the ease of having it all at your fingertips is fresh and incredibly alluring. Better still, every single episode appears to have been upscaled into high-definition, and although the quality doesn’t quite match that seen on the recent Doctor Who Collection Blu-rays, it does slightly improve upon the DVDs that many of us Who fans still cling to. Even on a massive contemporary TV, the original 1963/64 Dalek serial looks pretty good.

BritBox’s Who library is far from perfect, mind. The 1996 TV movie is inexplicably missing its pre-title sequence, and most – but not all - serials are represented by generic stock photos rather than attractive DVD-style covers. Furthermore, I’m sad to say that there’s still not a streaming service out there that has worked out how to do what MediaPortal was doing effortlessly a decade ago - displaying ‘specials’ in their proper place in a programme’s running order. Who fares better than most shows on the platform, though; a lot of classic comedies have had their specials uploaded as different shows altogether. Browse Only Fools and Horses and you’ll just see seven seasons, but search for “To Hull and Back” and a separate programme entitled Only Fools and Horses: To Hull and Back pops up. It’s far from slick, but sadly in keeping with video subscription services’ lazy standards. You’ll probably need Wikipedia open on your phone if you plan to watch anything from start to finish in the right order. 

The app’s search facility needs a lot of work too. I searched for “Gavin & Stacey”, which is not only the programme’s proper name but also how it’s stylised on all of its posters and promotion material, and yet nothing came up. Yet when I searched for “Gavin and Stacey”, without the ampersand, it brought the series up straightaway. You see, BritBox has it listed as “Gavin and Stacey” and the app isn’t yet sophisticated enough to realise that “&” and “and” mean exactly the same (and in this case, the & is actually more accurate).

In terms of content, though, what’s on offer is astonishing, and the library will only grow when Channel 4’s “1000+” hours of content is thrown into the mix this Spring followed by Film4’s later in the year. I also expect to see BBC and ITV content pulled from other platforms as their streaming rights come up for renewal, just as Disney have been doing with their own content now that they have Disney+ to host it, but sadly this is unlikely include any co-ventures such as the recent Dracula. The future for the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and perhaps even for Sky’s NOW TV too, looks like it is going to be limited to American imports and originals.

My wife and I are likely to spend the next six months or so wading through two decades’ worth of Midsomer Murders (or as we like to think of it, Village Porn), which we’ve just discovered, and that’s but one of the many revered detective programmes to come out of ITV that you’ll find preserved here, all ad-free. Inspector Morse; Lewis; and Endeavour all have a permanent home on BritBox, the old Morses available in high definition (it was originally shot on film) for the first time, alongside fluffier and wackier efforts from the BBC such as Death in Paradise and Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes. On top of this, you’ll find award-winning dramas such as Broadchurch and Downton Abbey, along with a veritable avalanche of classic comedies. Just about anything you can think of ever broadcast on the BBC or ITV is here, and what isn’t probably soon will be. From Porridge to BlackAdder, The Thick of It to Detectorists – it’s comedy heaven. There’s even a growing collection of Carry On films, again remastered in HD. I couldn’t resist guiltily revisiting Carry On Camping before I watched anything else. 

One slight disappointment with the service is its deference to iPlayer and ITV Hub, which I gather will remain the immediate home for each channel’s new programming for at least a short time after its broadcast. For instance, on Tuesday night we were hoping to watch the new series of Cold Feet without commercial breaks, as subscribers of ITV Hub+ can, but at the time of writing only the show’s first eight seasons are available to stream on BritBox. Don't be fooled by landing page’s “9 Series” claim - the eight earlier seasons are preceded by that troublesome pilot that finds itself the sole occupant of “Season 0”. The curse of the specials strikes again.

A greater weakness at present is the service’s lack of original content when compared with Amazon Prime and Netflix’s sprawling catalogue of originals (many of which really aren’t… “exclusives” would be a more truthful label). However, BritBox’s budget for original programming is reportedly in the tens of millions, so no doubt this will not be the case for long. 

Perhaps BritBox’s biggest problem when measured against its competitors, though, is its dearth of children’s programming – the slogan, “From costume to comedy, drama to detectives, we've got it all,” is really pushing it beyond the scope of acceptable hyperbole when, to most people, “it all” includes something for the kids. My eight-year-old daughter’s eyes might be turning square (well, 4:3) thanks to retro Doctor Who (and believe me, eight-year-old me would have died of Vitamin-D deficiency had he suddenly discovered twenty-six seasons of Who on tap), but my three-year-old wants to know what’s happened to Bananaman and Dogtanian - and frankly so do I.

Even as it stands though, BritBox’s ease of use and vast archive is more than enough to justify an outlay of £5.99 per month. For someone like my old mam, who loves nothing more than a classic comedy or Carry On film with her cuppa, it’s an absolute no-brainer, and even for me, with my exhaustive media collection, the numbers still stack up. Before subscribing, I priced up how much it would cost us to watch the complete run of Midsomer Murders on DVD, or download it from iTunes, and it worked out at more than we’d pay for a couple of years’ BritBox subscription. And that’s just for one show.

Those familiar with Netflix’s (recently-shelved) free trials will find signing up to BritBox a doddle – all you need is a name, an e-mail address and a payment method. It couldn’t be simpler. The more worrisome of punters can even cancel their subscription immediately and still enjoy the service until their thirty days are up, though I dare say that most who do so will be tempted to reactivate it once they’ve sampled some of the treasures on offer. Admittedly, it’s a system open to abuse, but so was Netflix’s, and if anything the many freeloaders only helped to make Netflix a household name.

BritBox has, however, eschewed Netflix’s multiple users on one account setup – here you only get one list, and so if you start sharing your login you’re quickly going to be swamped with other people’s half-watched shows and terrible tastes. All the same, there is no apparent limit on how many devices you can be signed in on – I’m presently logged in on my iPhone, iPad and two Apple TVs – but I’ve never tried to use them concurrently, and as it’s mainly just my wife and I watching BritBox together (sorry kids), I don’t foresee us ever needing to. If you live in a large household, though, you might want to check out the small print before signing up.

In the US, BritBox has been a popular niche service for a long time – over here, though, it feels more like bread and butter. So believe in Britain and take back that remote control, because if there’s anything out there that can heal the cracks in a divided nation, it’s this service. The BBC and ITV have finally got BritBox done. Enjoy.

Try it free for thirty days by clicking here.