TV Review | Doctor Who: “The Giggle” by Russell T Davies

Despite William Hartnell going missing for half of it and three-quarters of it being missing from the BBC’s archives, The Celestial Toymaker remains one of the first Doctor’s best remembered stories. In years to come, I dare say the same will be true of the Toymaker’s second coming and David Tennant’s second going, “The Giggle”.

Of course, The Celestial Toymaker’s fame is as much down to infamy as affection. Brian Hayles’ scripts were rewritten several times by several people as the serial found its budget slashed. One of its characters proved to be so “Bunteresque” that the BBC had to air a disclaimer to avoid a potential copyright lawsuit, and, more importantly, great swathes of the audience struggled with the whimsical fantasy of the piece. Since then, changing times have made the Toymaker as played by Michael Gough (Batman) a divisive figure. Despite Gough’s Toymaker having enough beguiling charisma to carry almost an entire episode of the serial acting against nothing but a disembodied hand, his sartorial style wreaks havoc with current sensibilities. What in 1966 was simply an exotic-looking mandarin costume is today, to some, cultural appropriation. There has even been concern that the word “celestial”, clearly and obviously a reference to the Toymaker’s outer-space godliness, could be taken to be a veiled reference to Chinese emigrants to the West.

Given all this baggage, Russell T Davies’ take on the classic monochrome villain has to be regarded as one of his most inspired reimaginings to date. Rather than run from the quagmire of potentially audience-offending issues, Davies’ script embraces them, actively exaggerating the Toymaker’s theatrical insensitivities and even having him display overt signs of racism. The fact that he has the power of a god and is still petty enough to make racist remarks to Charles Banerjee gives him a malignant edge that outdoes Gough’s playful performance. Davies’ script even removes any ambiguity surrounding the word “celestial” – though it does it at the expense of sounding inordinately clumsy. 

Being only the second American to assume the mantle of a classic Who antagonist, Neil Patrick Harris uses every weapon in his arsenal to make his turn as the Toymaker as memorable as possible. From conjuring tricks to musical numbers and wild accents, Harris seizes the role with fiendish glee. His physicality is by turns elegant and brutal - his manhandling of Mel and Kate to the sounds of the Spice Girls makes for particularly uncomfortable viewing. His maniacal monologues are even more chilling still, yet largely built on irrefutable psychosocial analysis that even the Doctor can’t refute. Indeed, the scariest aspect of the Toymaker is what he evokes in the people of 2023. Doctor Who may not be the only science fiction show to pass scathing comment on the state of our social media-driven society (The Orville never lets up with it), but it’s perhaps the most memorable as it takes all the faceless, righteous indignation that props up the Internet and unleashes it across the globe, damn near causing a cataclysm.

It also helps that this time around the Toymaker is backed up by a truly terrifying entourage that leaves Cyril and all his clowns and knaves in the shade. Doctor Who seldom terrifies me as an adult, but I absolutely can’t stand things like china dolls and ventriloquists’ dummies, and so having the Toymaker use Stooky Bill, John Logie Baird’s famed TV-test dummy, as a means to unshackle all the horrors of human behaviour really sets this special apart from even last week’s grotesquery.

“The Giggle” is also littered with all manner of nostalgic Easter eggs befitting an anniversary special. These range from cryptic to explicit and from hammy to heart-rending, but are probably best typified by the unexpected presence of the Doctor’s former companion Melanie Bush – the computer programmer from Pease Pottage who never went near a PC on TV and, despite being played by Bonnie Langford, a noted musical performer, only ever hit the high notes when she was screaming at a Tetrap. Whether Langford was drafted in to fill lines sadly vacated by Bernard Cribbins or whether she was always a part of Davies’ plan I don’t know, but whether she’s working on code at a UNIT terminal or singing a mesmerising arpeggio, it’s immensely gratifying to see Mel finally being used well in a televised episode. There’s even something fitting about the Doctor regenerating with a redhead tugging on each of his arms. The one hair colour he wants, and the one he never seems to get.

Although... the Doctor doesn’t regenerate, does he? This time, in keeping with both the specials’ non-binary subject matter and the unwritten rule that an anniversary special must develop the show’s already sprawling mythology in some significant way, the Doctor bigenerates.

“Imagine how much fans love new things and will really rejoice when this happens,” quipped RTD as he giggled along with Doctor Who Unleashed. Well, he’s got me pegged. As I saw Ncuti Gatwa emerge from David Tennant’s body, the (now entrenched) views that I first espoused following the Doctor-Donna metacrisis started to spill out of my mouth at almost Tennant-Doctor-like speed. I’ve never liked the idea that the Doctor is somehow divisible or replicable. Hell, years ago I used to get mad at the mere suggestion that different quantum versions of the Doctor played out irreconcilable adventures in media-specific parallel universes as I felt, and I still feel, that the Doctor, for all his multitudes, should be unique. Oh, for the simplicity of those days now.

Having the Doctor spawn another self and in so doing also repair the Galvanic beam-sized hole through his torso doesn’t make a lot of sense even within the misty logic of the Whoniverse, which is really saying something. Regeneration is famously a way to cheat death; cheating death while also effectively giving birth feels like the Doctor’s taking the piss.

If you take a look at other big properties in the genre – properties that RTD namechecks in justification of the switch to bigeneration - many people broke faith with Star Wars movies once they started messing about with the nature of the Force in The Last Jedi, and Marvel’s slide into Phase Four and the multiverse has been exactly that – a slide. “The Giggle” goes much further than either Star Wars or Marvel have, though, leaving Doctor Who fans having to contend with a whole new regenerative paradigm that fundamentally alters the nature of their show’s eponymous hero. Putting the carbon-copy of the TARDIS to one side and just looking at the core character issue, who’s Who now? Isn’t a Time Lord the sum of his memories? If so, what happens once these two start making new, separate memories? How can we fret over Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor when he’s got a proper, Time Lord copy of himself safely backed up in Donna’s back garden? Is David Tennant’s Doctor going to fly off in his “Memory TARDIS” to bookend many a classic adventure in the – I’m sorry, but unbearably twee - Tales of the TARDIS? Or, more likely, become the humble curator of the Under Gallery, revisiting an “old favourite” face with each subsequent regeneration? Of course, that’s assuming he doesn’t bigenerate again instead. If he does, then by the time of the seventy-fifth anniversary we might have had a Tribble-like outbreak of Doctors.

Fortunately Davies is smart enough a scriptwriter to leave the concept of bigeneration woolly enough to allow for interpretation. What interests me the most is the conceit that Gatwa’s Doctor is somehow older than Tennant’s (by my watch, I make them exactly the same age at the end of “The Giggle”) and that, by extension, Gatwa’s Doctor has recovered from his past incarnations’ traumas thanks to the “out of order” rehab that Tennant’s Doctor is about to undertake. The implication is that, unaccountably, Fourteen’s future is still a part of Fifteen’s past; somehow Fourteen’s ongoing experiences must find their way back into Fifteen’s head - and hearts. Well that’s alright then! How the minds of these two divergent Doctors could possibly be reunified is, it seems, another story for another day, but it will no doubt involve the word “contact” and some frantic cutting between close-up eye shots.

 

My ire has also been softened by the fact that the execution of the show’s first-ever bigeneration is a thing of a cosmic and comic beauty, with the dissection of the Doctor even extending to parts of his outfit to ensure that both residual incarnations are duly covered where it counts. Making the Doctor’s clothes – and the division thereof – part of the regenerative process was probably about the right level of anniversary leap for me, and I dare say there’ll be a fan or two out there who’d even have reservations about that much of a change, but there’s nonetheless an illicit sense of joy to the whole scene that is largely down to the sheer energy and cool of incoming Time Lord Ncuti Gatwa and all the all-pervading magnificence of David Tennant.

Though he’s clearly been aided on this front by Davies’ conscious decision to do away with post-regenerative trauma, I don’t ever recall an incoming Doctor arriving and taking instant command of the role in the way that Gatwa does here. Doing it whilst in the company of one of the most respected Doctors to date - the only man to have been cast in the role twice; arguably The Doctor - makes the feat all the more remarkable. He’s cool. He’s cocky. He’s even well-adjusted in a way that’s as 2023 as Ace’s ghetto blaster was 1987. Self-love, Fourteen, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting. The jukebox, the mallet and the brotherly arm around the shoulder say it all for me. This Doctor, “Fifteen”, if you will, is going to be phenomenal. And boy can he catch.

Yet Peter Capaldi’s time in the role showed that it doesn’t matter how brilliant the actor playing the Doctor is, if there’s no gas left in the tank, then the show will tank. I’m certainly less confident about this nascent new era after “The Giggle”, and not just because of my reservations about bigeneration and what I see as the dilution of the show’s central character. Whilst some alluring seeds of future dramas have been sown throughout the specials (promises of “Legions”, a veiled reference to “the Boss”, explicit mentions of the Master – and we still have mavity to sort out), seeing that red-nailed hand reach down to collect the gold tooth containing the Master instantly took me back to “Last of the Time Lords” - it’s basically the same shot, just with a gold tooth instead of a ring. And this comes just moments after a new Doctor has defeated a villain up amongst the daytime clouds just by throwing; moments after yet another iteration of David Tennant’s Doctor has been created out of some nebulous regeneration voodoo to give viewers a happy ending when, in my firm view, the Doctor shouldn’t ever get an ending at all. He’s the lonely god. Ancient and forever, that’s him. Or her. Or them.

I think Davies’ hope for “The Giggle” was that it would shake up the status quo and move the series forwards in the same way that “The Five Doctors” and, for better or worse, “The Day of the Doctor” did. However, as enjoyable as it is, “The Giggle” doesn’t feel fresh or innovative; it feels derivative of Davies’ prior work on the show. The Toymaker claims here to have “made a jigsaw” of the Doctor’s history, but Davies’ script plays Guess Who? with the Doctor’s present and future. I’ll keep the faith, of course, and just hope that this time I won’t be vindicated in the way that I was after the Time Lords were saved in “The Day of the Doctor”, only for them to be lost; found; and then promptly destroyed all over again in a series of increasingly futile and demystifying adventures. 

All that being said, the return of the Toymaker can’t be regarded as anything but an astonishing triumph (it’s raised his profile enough to finally see an animation of The Celestial Toymaker’s lost episodes commissioned) and now we’ve got the long-overdue present of getting an African-born, energetic and utterly electrifying Doctor for Christmas. In its finest moments, “The Giggle” is a veritable treatise on entitlement and cancel culture, but even with the infamous Toymaker back on the roster spitting venom, there is certainly no danger of Doctor Who getting cancelled anytime soon.

“The Giggle” is available to stream in the UK on BBC iPlayer and overseas on Disney+. You can also watch the episode on iPlayer with an in-vision commentary.

The Celestial Toymaker Blu-ray steelbook is available to pre-order now, with today’s cheapest online retailer being HMV who have it listed for £29.99 with free delivery.

The audio adaptation of The Nightmare Fair, which was originally planned to be the Toymaker’s return to the show in 1985, is available to download from Big Finish Productions for just £7.99. Its sequel,the Companion Chronicle Solitaire, is also available to download for just £2.99. The Magic Mousetrap, also available to download for £7.99 from Big Finish, is also likely to be of interest to fans of the Toymaker.

The BBC novel Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell, which also features the Toymaker, is long out of print but may be available second-hand on eBay.

TV Review | Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder” by Russell T Davies

This review contains SPOILERS from the outset. 

I didn’t know very much about “Wild Blue Yonder” going into it. Its title was cryptic; there had been no “Next time...” trailer at the end of “The Star Beast”; the episode description published on iPlayer was almost Breaking Bad-vague; and, having been saddened by Bernard Cribbins’ death in July last year, the last character I was expecting to make a comeback here was everybody’s favourite granddad, Wilfred Mott.

But with secrecy comes expectation, in an anniversary special even more so, and for many viewers that expectation was not paid off by an episode in which the Doctor and Donna, as showrunner and writer Russell T Davies put it himself, “...arrive on the spaceship and they meet evil versions of themselves. That’s it.” It’s not, though, it is Russell?

Those expecting a multi-Doctor romp to the tune of an old war song may have felt let down by this second special, but I certainly didn’t. Being treated to a fifty-five-minute two-hander between two of my favourite-ever Doctor Who stars would have been gift enough for any anniversary, but to also have them isolated at the edge of the oblivion and grotesquely duplicated in perhaps the darkest and most twisted narrative that we’ve seen since “Midnight” is nothing short of stellar.

After the rampant, comic adventure of “The Star Beast”, “Wild Blue Yonder” gives the Doctor and Donna some much-needed time to reconnect one-on-one and broach some potentially thorny issues about the events of the subjective millennia for the Doctor that elapsed between “Journey’s End” and the return of Donna’s memories. This enables David Tennant in particular to really establish his new Doctor, who, despite his mannerisms, is gradually being revealed to be a subtly different man to the one who first wore that particular face. There’s emotional maturity there, buried in Davies’ dialogue and etched into David Tennant’s older brow. Don’t be fooled by the gags about the new Doctor finally finding certain human beings attractive - “Fourteen” (we’ve really got to give up with the numbering now...) is more like a regretful ghost sent to make amends for his past life than he is the Time Lord equivalent of a pubescent teenager.

Despite its creepiness and often emotionally heavy subject matter, “Wild Blue Yonder” isn’t without its sense of fun. The pre-title caper involving Sir Isaac Newton, one of the few historical figures of note yet to appear on screen in Doctor Who, instantly re-establishes the Doctor and Donna as the gung-ho adventurers in time and space that they once were while also serving as an amusing setup for a timey-wimey plot point yet to come. The fun of the skit even extends to the post-special furore surrounding the “racebending” that some viewers saw in the casting of Nathaniel Curtis (It’s a Sin), an actor of mixed race, as an individual who, in real life, was most probably Rodney Trotter-white. There’s certainly great irony in armchair pundits bemoaning the colour of an actor’s skin, yet having no issue at all with the time machine nestled in the apple-dropping tree or the inadvertent rebranding of the mutual attraction between all things that have mass from “gravity” to “mavity”. If you want to complain about historical revisionism, I think the latter point has more weight. In fact, if you want to complain about historical revisionism, Doctor Who really is not the show for you. Historical revisionism is exactly what the Doctor does*.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Wild Blue Yonder” though is its beautiful ending, which gives the Doctor – and gives us – the chance to say goodbye to one of Doctor Who’s most enduring characters and one of the franchise’s most beloved contributors. I honestly had no idea that Bernard Cribbins had recorded his cameo for this special so close to his death, and last week’s amusing exchange on the subject of Wilf threw me off the scent of his return completely – I’d thought that bit of banter, beautifully written and played as it was, was the Whoniverse’s goodbye to the old soldier. This, needless to say, is a far more welcome send-off, particularly as it segued magnificently into a cliffhanger ending for the ages. Never waste time on a hug.

“Wild Blue Yonder” is available to stream in the UK on BBC iPlayer and overseas on Disney+.

 

* Since the events of The Highlanders, anyway. Prior to that, the Doctor was much more of a historical conservative (provided he found himself in an era prior to the mid-1960s. History was obviously open to revision after that, even for the first two TV Doctors).