Felix and Murdo

Armstrong and Miller, how could you? A few brief
laughs surrounded by a load of misses and
some spectacular bad taste. © Channel 4 2011

A disappointment. You can tell it’s not written by Armstrong and Miller themselves, but by Simon Nye – who, after writing the thoughtful Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice, should know better… but then I suppose he did create Men Behaving Badly. Whatever possessed the talented comic duo to throw their lot in with this show? The sets and lighting looked like a bad early 90s soap, the acting was hammy, the premise flimsy and the jokes swung between dull and bad taste. “Hey, I know what, we can have a reference to these two toffs attending Oxbridge, then show a flashback of them bumming in a bush! That’s the kind of insightful satire that Channel 4 really wants brought to a sitcom pilot set in 1908!” I won't even bother to cover the lame shreds of plot in summary form.

Great Expectations

Can Sarah Phelps' adaptation live up to previous
outings of Dickens greats? © BBC 2011

At last, another big Dickensian on the BBC. Having been blown away in my mid-teens by Andrew Davies’ gaspingly epic Bleak House (just look at the cast list – 50 names in the principal corps and not one of them without a Wikipedia article) and the slightly smaller but no less enjoyable Little Dorrit in 2008, it’s about time. But does this three-hour tiddler show the BBC tightening its purse strings, or a lesser commitment to gargantuan period storytelling? Let’s hope not.

Absolutely Fabulous: Identity

Edina & Patsy (Jennifer Saunders & Joanna Lumley)
in their glory days. © BBC 2011

Having never seen a full episode of Ab Fab before, I didn’t know exactly what my expectations for this should be. I’d seen miscellaneous work by most of the cast (Saunders’ Shrek 2 voicing and French & Saunders, Lucy Montgomery in Armstrong and Miller, Horrocks’ Little Voice, the fleeting Naoko Mori in Doctor Who and Torchwood and of course Lumley’s ball-crunching takedown of MP Phil Woolas on the widely-reported issue of Gurkhas’ resettlement rights in 2009, as well as various Comic Relief sketches and her Bond Girl performance), and the occasional clip of the show – my favourite’s at the end of this post – so I almost felt I could grasp the shtick of each character. Patsy Stone is drugged-up, opinionated and completely out of touch with the world, Edina Monsoon is also trying far too hard to be ‘cool’ and younger than she really is through clothes and speech, her daughter Saffy’s the long-suffering sane one trying to help them and her Mother is prying, unappreciated and a kleptomaniac.

And of course I’d heard of the general reputation of the show – my parents thoroughly enjoyed its original run and I remember it being talked about, so it wasn’t a surprise that the buzz for its return in the form of three 20^th-anniversary specials was high. In fact, after cursory research, it appears the show was more highly lauded than I’d expected – the BFI’s 17^th greatest British TV show of all time in 2000, and celebrated recently by Attitude magazine’s Paul Flynn in the Guardian as “prescient […] tour de force comedy and searing satire”. High praise for sporadic splurges of 37 episodes over five series, a two-part TV movie, three one-hour specials and a Comic Relief sketch (and apparently plans for another film). So why did this new half-hour reintroduction feel a bit flat?

Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Claire Skinner's Madge Arwell saves the day... but
doesn't quite trump the year. © BBC 2011

After the usual period of Doctor Who-less anguish since the barnstorming (if not quite the best ever) finale back in October, I was looking forward to the Christmas episode, as my only piece of pinned-down Christmas Day TV, with mild trepidation. Christmas episodes in the past have always been a compromise between the overarching story of the Doctor and Christmas-Day, for-the-kiddies, we’re-filming-this-in-June-but-what-the-hell-let’s-overdo-the-snow-anyway concessions to the season.

The last Christmas episode (the most epic A Christmas Carol, with the ever-regal Michael Gambon, Laurence Belcher as Kazran Sardick giving the best performance I’ve ever seen from a child actor in Doctor Who – which may have helped him gain his recent role in X-Men: First Class, Katherine Jenkins providing the least excruciating celebrity cameo I can remember, and the only Christmas episode up to then not set in London) was the best I’d seen, and gave me real hope for the future of Moffat’s series. This in stark contrast to the nearly unremittingly-with-the-exception-of-Tovey awful Voyage of the Damned (yeah, the one with Kylie and the Poseidon Adventure references… ugh) of the Russell T. Davies let’s-save-something-even-bigger-than-the-world-every-time era.