Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor

Another Christmas offering, this time heralding the end of the Eleventh Doctor. Honestly though, it's getting a bit tiring.

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.