Today Matt Smith and Karen Gillan begin their Doctor Who career proper – they have started filming.  Today we have, finally, discovered Karen’s character name and see the eleventh Doctor’s outfit.  It all feels a little bit leaked.  Was it a controlled leak?  We may never know but it certainly wasn’t the big glossy publicity shot of the two of them I was expecting.

Instead of the big headline (Doctor Who Magazine covering) shot we get a rather more intimate, behind the scenes sort of picture.  They two of them look relaxed and happy.  They look natural rather than artificial and posed. Perhaps that was the point, if there was one.  They look at home both together and on the set.  No first day nerves for these two?  Probably a twinge but there is no sign of it here.

We do know they’ve been in Cardiff for a few days.  A couple of days ago, or so, some lucky fan came upon the two of them wandering around what looked like Cardiff Bay and got their photo taken with the two of them.  A picture that quickly did the Twitter rounds before been removed from the originating website.  So clearly Matt and Karen didn’t just meet this morning.  No doubt they met up for dinner a couple of months ago, too – I know I would in their situation.

But lets get onto the meat of today’s revelations.

The Name
I have to admit to being a little disappointed that Steven Moffatt (the Vast Toffee (MN)) didn’t go with my choice of companion character name – Grunhilda Knobnacker.  Instead he opted for ‘Amy Pond’.  Okay, perhaps Karen does look more like an Amy than a Grunhilda (assuming such name/appearance correlations are valid at all!)  I’ll forgive the Vast Toffee, this time!

I do wonder why there was all that secrecy about the character name up until now, though.  It’s not a name that means anything to anyone (so far as I can tell, anyway).  Nor did they break the silence in a big shower of publicity.  It just kind of leaked out a couple of days ago and was confirmed in a ‘by the way’ fashion today, to go alongside the news of Matt Smith’s costume.  That leaves me utterly baffled as to why they didn’t release the name Amy Pond when they announced Karen Gillan’s appointment.  Confound that Vast Toffee and his unfathomable ways!

The Costumes
The real news, though, appears to be Matt Smith’s tweed jacket, complete with elbow patches, and bow tie.  A somewhat professortorial look for Doctor 11, then.  With rolled up trousers and combat boots!  He’s a man ready for action, either down in the trenches or in the library – a man for all seasons!

I have to say, I do quite like Matt Smith’s costume.  It doesn’t immediately appeal to me as much as David Tennant’s costume (perhaps because Tennant’s costume is a little bit more like I wear myself!)  Nonetheless, I do rather like Matt’s outfit.  They’ve gone for a look that I (and probably most brits) associate with the Open University and old school science teachers.  It takes the edge off his young appearance.  Makes him seem a little more timeless.  Job done there, then.

A quick poll of people around the firm seemed to give tentative thumbs up, although one person was concerned that he looked exactly like ‘Pee-wee Herman’.  I don’t know how well that character is known in the UK – I’ve heard the name referred to in US films and TV but don’t really know who he is.  I don’t think the 1950s/60s American High School ‘Poindexter’ look means much on this side of the pond – that’s certainly not what I see in his costume, as I said he looks like an old school professor to me.  I do wonder if Amy will start calling the Doctor ‘Professor’!

I’m not quite so sure what to make of Karen/Amy’s outfit.  For one thing, it is probably more likely to change as time goes by, as Rose’s did (more so than, say, Martha’s).  Has she stolen Tennant’s shoes, though?  I know she’s tall but I doubt they’d fit her!  To be honest, I preferred her outfit from the publicity shots they did for the announcement of Karen Gillan’s appointment.  Maybe we will yet see something more like that – who knows what might be under that baggy pullover of hers!

Conclusion
To sum all that waffle up – I’m happy with the 11th Doctor’s costume.  I like the new companion’s name (even if it wasn’t the silly name I came up with!)  I am really encouraged that they look so relaxed on set on their first morning of filming.  I am a bit disappointed these new facts weren’t released as some big publicity drive with cool looking promo photos but these more informal shots have given me real confidence that Karen and Matt are going to be a great duo.

Good luck to both Karen Gillan and Matt Smith – enjoy it, make it the time of your lives.

We must be mere days away from Matt Smith beginning his tenure as the Doctor by filming his first scenes.  David Tennant has already filmed his last scene as the Doctor for the series proper (future guest appearances aside, such as in 2013).  So, it’s all Matt Smith’s now?  He IS the Doctor?  No, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be that simple for him.

In stark contrast to his predecessor, one Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant seems to be clinging on for all he’s worth!  No sooner than the likes of Russell T Davies are talking about Tennant filming his last scene, than they are talking about Tennant being back as the Doctor in The Sarah Jane Adventures.  Then he’s back again for a seven part animated story.  Then RTD adds: “… it would be nice to round things off with a Special Project 3… I can promise, it’s worth waiting for!”  I can’t but begin to wonder – has David Tennant really quit the role at all?!

Right now we don’t know what the special third project is, rumours of a big screen film adaptation aside.  Whatever it is, though, we do now, effectively, have two Doctors running concurrently.  Special projects one and two (the Sarah Jane Adventures and the animated stories) are designed to fill the gap of Doctor Who on our screens this year – they will air before Tennant’s official final scene, even if they weren’t recorded in that order.  As for this third project – we just cannot say for now, it is likely that it too is designed to fill the gap before Matt Smith’s on-screen début as the eleventh Doctor.

No problem then.  A bit of concurrent recording can’t possibly cause Matt Smith any problems.  On the face of it, no.  Except I can’t help but think if I were in Smith’s shoes I might be getting a bit concerned that the wildly popular chap I’m supposed to be replacing is still doing my job!  Perhaps Matt Smith isn’t nearly as insecure as I might be – almost certainly not.  Nonetheless, you don’t want your predecessor breathing down your neck when you are trying to make the role your own.

I am, undoubtedly, overplaying this rather – at least I hope I am!  If those rumours of a major Doctor Who feature film turn out to be true and it isn’t Matt Smith on the big screen (especially if it is, instead, David Tennant) then perhaps I am not overplaying it at all.  Any such film won’t be out until long into Smith’s tenure as the Doctor.  The whole film theory is probably unlikely though, isn’t it..?

Before I leave you to your thoughts on this, I would like to point out that I am a great fan of what David Tennant has brought to the series.  His has got to be the most popular Doctor since Tom Baker’s.  David (breaking into first name terms even though I’ve never met him but it feels like I have) genuinely seems to be a great chap – a really down to earth guy who I think would fit in perfectly amongst my group of friends.  He’d be great on the podcast!  I don’t for a second think he’d ever do anything personally to undermine Matt Smith, quite the reverse.  Nor do I think that Matt Smith isn’t capable of taking the role and making it his own, no matter what else might be happening elsewhere.

No, I didn’t want to see David Tennant leave the series but, now that he has, I am very keen to move on and welcome Matt Smith.  Perhaps it isn’t Matt Smith that these David Tennant ‘Special Doctor Who Projects’ are undermining but my own sense of closure.  I felt a tinge of sadness at the announcement that Tennant had filmed his last scene.  Maybe I needed a bit of time to mourn, even.  Now it almost feels like David Tennant is playing ‘cry wolf’.  Will the big bad wolf of David Tennant truly leaving the role ever come?

It was a brave move by 2|Entertain/BBC Worldwide to release this incomplete Patrick Troughton story on DVD.  The problem they are facing is that only 6 of the 21 Patrick Troughton stories are complete in the archives, the other 15 are missing at least one episode.  As I write this only two complete second Doctor stories are left to be released.  Their solution to this big problem was to hire Cosgrove Hall (famous TV animators behind the likes of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula) to recreate the two missing episodes, with hopes to do the same to other such stories.  Apparently The Invasion DVD didn’t sell that well, though, so plans for any more animated recreations are sadly on hold.  Or are they?  Rumours abound of the same being done for Power of the Daleks but that has zero surviving episodes, so I have my doubts.

Before I continue, I should say that I am writing this before we recorded Staggering Stories Podcast 48, where we discuss this story (or will!)  This is, in part, my way of gathering my thoughts before we talk about it.  It will also, I hope, expand upon that podcast slightly.

The obvious place to start is with the length of the story.  The Invasion is eight 25 minute episodes long.  The average (mode) is 4 episodes per Doctor Who story, so clearly this was twice as long as most stories.  It doesn’t drag as badly as you may think but there is quite a gap before we see the alien villains of the piece, at the end of episode four.  There’s a lot of messing around with our heroes gaining access to the human villain’s lair (more than once!)  Fortunately some great characterisations keep it enjoyable.

It’s a Cyberman story, let’s not try to hide that fact.  There aren’t in it very much and we certainly don’t get any kind of face off between them and the Doctor.  Instead we find the familiar (particularly in later third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, stories) concept of a power mad human using an alien invasion force to personally rule the world!  The obvious benefit of this is that you have the Doctor battling someone that can emote (snear, mainly!)  In this case we are presented with the evil Tobias Vaughn, played brilliantly by Kevin Stoney.  Vaughn is so perfectly archetypal that he wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond film.  He’s an electronics mogal, a bit like a less evil version of Alan Sugar, who has somehow (rather glossed over) made contact with the Cyberman fleet in deep space and ‘done a deal’.  Vaughn gets a leg up on his competition with electronics technology donated by his allies and within five years has cornered the market.

You can see that Stoney is enjoying the part, especially on those many occasions where he says “Packer…” (during the commentary many of them, notably Nick Courtney and Fraser Hines, do their impressions of Stoney saying ‘Packer’!)  Like most evil genius villains he doesn’t really get to leave his lair, at least not until the very end and I don’t think he makes it off the grounds!  That’s a shame as it means he has little interaction with most of the cast.  If this were the Pertwee years you could be sure that the Brigadier would get to storm into his office and then have to slope off after getting a warning from some top ranking politician under the villain’s thumb!

That brings us neatly onto Tobias Vaughn’s human associates.  The most notable of these is, of course, Packer.  A sadistic thug who has the brains of a turnip.  At first I couldn’t figure out why Vaughn would want such an incompetent as his closest ally.  Then I realised that his lack of intellect was exactly the point – such villains as Vaughn often make the mistake of trusting someone too ambitious, someone who will inevitably stab them in the back to take over themselves.  Packer would never dream of doing anything like that – he knows he couldn’t replace Vaughn.  Packer’s loyalty reminds me of a hunting dog, waiting patiently (for the most part) for his master to unleash him on some unfortunate little animal that he then enjoys tearing apart.  In the end, though, Packer’s incompetence in capturing the Doctor indirectly leads to Vaughn’s downfall.

Other characters in Vaughn’s employ appear to be few and far between.  He has at least two large complexes, one in the country and another, a skyscraper, in central London.  Odd then that the only other employees we see are Packer’s security men (again in true Bond style) and a couple of scientist types.  Are these buildings otherwise empty?!

I’ve mentioned the Pertwee era a few times already and that’s no coincidence.  This is a prototype Pertwee story, plain and simple.  The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) is first introduced and Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart makes his second appearance in the series, this time promoted to his famous rank of Brigadier.  I haven’t seen ‘The Web of Fear’ (Lethbridge-Stewart’s first appearance) but by ‘The Invasion’ he seems to be the fully formed Brig who becomes a regular in the next season with Jon Pertwee – crappy stick on moustache and all!

The only other really important guest characters are Professor Watkins and his daughter Isobel.  Watkins has been kidnapped by Vaughn because he had a device that might give Vaughn power over the Cybermen.  Isobel is, effectively, a third companion – there mainly to give Zoe someone to get into trouble with while the Doctor pairs up with Jamie.

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it, though.  This story is echoed by many later Cyberman stories.  Let’s start with the brain washing.  At first it is key people, government types it would seem.  At the end of the story that is extended to the entire human population of Earth via a special circuit put into all of International Electromatics products (IE being Vaughn’s company).  Very much like the earpods in the New Who, alternate Earth, Cyberman creation story ‘Rise of the Cybermen’.  Then there are the sewers.  This is more like a call back to ‘The Web of Fear’ where the Yeti were also roaming around under London (in that case in the London Underground metro system rather than sewers). Once they’ve had a taste for the London sewers the Cybermen can’t seem to get enough, though – in Colin Baker’s ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, full of historic Who references, the Cybermen travel back in time so they can frolic in the sewers once again!

Then we have some pretty blatant cast holidays.  For an episode Zoe (and her story companion Isobel) are kidnapped and don’t appear in an episode.  Then we have Jamie unexpectedly shot (just a flesh wound, we are told) and missing from the final episode as he recuperates.  Zoe’s absence was so well written into the script that you hardly notice it is exactly one week she is gone for.  Jamie’s is rather less well done – he’s shot.  You’d think that would be a major plot point, something they’d play up for dramatic effect.  They don’t – it goes hardly remarked, just enough to say he was only very lightly injured.  At least in the final, pre-recorded location scenes, they did have the foresight to give Jamie a bandaged leg but I didn’t get the impression they’d really given it enough thought!
Another thing I thought was a little odd, poorly plotted even, was all that stuff in the first episode.  Namely the IE colony and the general ‘1984’ air to it that disappear in subsequent episodes.  International Electromatics go from being a sinister cult who controls a sizeable part of the country to a man in an office with some security thugs, albeit a sinister man in an office!

Another interesting but rather glossed over element is the partial cyber-conversion that some IE personnel have apparently undergone.  The first evidence of this are the super strong workmen who are shifting the inert cybermen (in their boxes) around.  Next was Vaughn’s laughing immunity to bullets.  I can just about imagine Vaughn agreeing, even being eager, to be ‘upgraded’ – so long as his mind is left unaltered.  He’d want the results – the physical superiority to match his intellectual superiority.  I’m less convinced he would trust the Cybermen enough to let them actually carry out the, no doubt, extensive surgery.  How could he have been sure he would have woken up without any alterations to his brain?  Perhaps he had some kind of insurance, a hold over them stronger than their merely needing his company, IE.  Sadly such details are glossed over, especially considering the story is over 3 hours long!

All these criticisms aside, it really is a good, fun story.  Patrick Troughton is a great Doctor and his teaming up with Frazer Hines’s Jamie really did produce one of the best Doctor/companion pairings of the entire series.  Wendy Padbury’s Zoe is by no means bad but she just can’t match the chemistry between Patrick and Frazer.  There are a lot of really good performances and characters, as previously mentioned.  That’s the real strength of this story – it’s not the slightly hackneyed plot and certainly not the deus ex machina resolution (would the Cybermen really be vulnerable to that?!).  No, watch this story to enjoy the characters.

To minimal surprise, ITV has cancelled its early Saturday evening family action/adventure drama series Primeval.  If you will indulge me, I’d like to just say a few things about this sad outcome.

The ITV Contender
Let’s not pretend otherwise, Primeval was ITV’s attempt to rival the BBC’s unexpectedly popular revival of Doctor Who (no doubt there are some that will now say they always expected New Who to be as massively popular as it now is but I certainly wasn’t amongst them and nor were the BBC suits in London (but let’s not get into that right now!))  As a series, Primeval never quite hit the heights of Doctor Who, not in terms of viewing figures, audience appreciation figures or the general saturation into popular culture.  Of course Doctor Who had something of a head start, what with a dormant affection, in many of the older generations, for the original series and a rich history to plunder from.  Primeval had to start from cold.

The Winning Formula
Children like dinosaurs!  They also like Doctor Who and that’s got time travel.  So, thought ITV, lets make a rival to Doctor Who with people who time travel to prehistoric Earth!  Even better, extreme wildlife programmes, such as the BBC “Walking with…” series, are popular – lets make those time travellers modern day zoologists and animal conservationists!  No, this isn’t Primeval I’m talking about but its immediate predecessor, Prehistoric Park.  Borrowing heavily from the Jurassic Park idea of conserving otherwise extinct animals (mainly ‘dinosaurs’ to my untrained eyes) in a vast animal preserve.  Real life naturalist and wildlife presenter, Nigel Marven, played himself as the head of the Prehistoric Park team and the whole thing was played as a ‘docu-fiction’.  They even had David Jason narrating it.  It was entertaining enough but, as it was supposed to come across as a documentary, they were limited in the dramatic licence they could take (even though they were jumping back through man made time portals and coaxing extinct wild animals back through them).

Clearly ITV decided they needed more drama, more adventure.  The production company behind Prehistoric Park were contracted to take their CGI dinosaur expertise and make a true rival for Doctor Who.  Prehistoric Park, with its time portals and dinosaurs coming through to modern day, was gone, instead we had Primeval, with its temporal anomalies and, er, dinosaurs coming through to modern day…  On paper they sound quite similar and it is clear to see how they took the Prehistoric Park premise and retooled it for an action/adventure family drama.  The park was gone and the man made time portals are replaced by (apparently) natural temporal anomalies.  Nigel Marven’s leading role is replace by an evolutionary biologist character named Professor Nick Cutter (played by Douglas Henshall).

I won’t go into massive detail but the basic plot is that each week a temporal anomaly will appear in modern day England linking back to, usually, a prehistoric period.  One or more ‘monsters’ will emerge and wreak havoc and Cutter and his team will be called in to clean the mess up (usually getting the animals back through the anomaly).  It was very much ‘monster of the week’ fare.  As the series went on we would begin to see future creatures come through (a chance for the CGI team to come up with something not based on fossil records) and a political intrigue storyline was layered underneath the familiar monster attack theme.

The format was beginning to feel a little tired, even with a rival ‘evil’ team and Professor Cutter’s ‘evil’ wife on the rampage.  The producers slavishly stood by the monster of the week format, though augmenting it with these extra elements.  Now I can’t claim to have seen every single episode but I have seen the majority of them.  I have to wonder, though, if I was getting a little fed up with the formulaic nature of it, what were people who had seen every single episode thinking?  Presumably those people would be its biggest fans and probably rather liked it how it was.  The more casual viewer might not have minded either – after all they knew they could miss an episode or two but still tune in and know what to expect (the plot ‘arc’ wasn’t deep or all that necessary to follow (and, yes, the naming of the Anomaly Research Centre (ARC) cannot have been a coincidence!))  Millions of people tuned in every week and there are a lot of very vocal fans, so perhaps they weren’t wrong in their approach.  I can’t say the series really grabbed me but maybe that is just me.

Drama bad…
Beyond the merits or otherwise of Primeval, what does its cancellation mean for genre TV?  Clearly it isn’t good.  Primeval was pulling in respectable numbers, not quite up there with Doctor Who but that isn’t a fair comparison.  With a retooled format (and perhaps slightly more engaging characters – or is that just me, too?) it may have gotten Who levels of viewers and audience appreciation.  I do rather doubt it, though – at least for the viewing figures side.  ITV has been in a massive decline for some years, as has TV viewing in general.  ITV consistently trails the BBC nowadays but it is not without its successes.  I am, of course, talking about the likes of Britain’s Got Talent and other talent, reality and game shows.  Popular and very cheap to produce.  You can just imagine the ITV bean counters saying to one another – we can spend more on a drama series or spend less on a talent show and get higher ratings, let’s fill our schedules with talent shows!  Thank goodness for the BBC, whose charter prevents such short sighted thinking.

Money Matters
It’s not just the success of their cheap programmes at ITV that has sealed the fate of Primeval.  Obviously money is the important factor and CGI dinos don’t come cheap, even these days.  ITV intends to cut £160m from it’s programming budget over the next three years and, in the past day or two, an ‘ITV spokesman’ has been widely quoted as saying “Our current focus is on post-watershed dramas,” although they are not ruling out commissioning or airing pre-watershed dramas entirely…

Talent shows and reality TV might be cheap and popular but where are the merchandise opportunities?  People don’t (as far as I know!) buy DVDs of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity… Get me Out of Here’.  Action figures?  Books?  Computer games (actually quite possibly for talent shows!)  Film rights (such as the proposed Hollywood adaptation of Primeval?)  Look at the massive Doctor Who merchandise industry and imagine all that licensing money that must be coming into the BBC.  Then add in overseas TV rights.  According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge!) new Doctor Who has been sold to at least 42 countries. I cannot find such information for Primeval but I don’t doubt for a second that it has much higher international interest than, say, Britain’s Got Talent.  Even the repeat (or ‘rerun’) value of a good drama like Primeval has got to be vastly superior to a talent show where the audience voted for contestants (but, clearly, cannot on a repeat).  It does feel like a false economy to axe Primeval if they were looking beyond the very short term.

Going It Alone
I think we can be certain that Primeval’s intended stablemate, Demons, won’t be returning either.  That really won’t surprise anybody, especially after Philip Glenister very publicly stated he wouldn’t return for a second season.  How much did the failure of Demons affect the cancellation of Primeval?  We can never be sure but if we look at Primeval sitting out there on its own in the ITV schedules and then turn the channel to BBC 1 and see what they are doing… Very quickly after the success of Doctor Who, the BBC announced they were going to create a new Robin Hood series, to take the same slot as Doctor Who but in the Autumn (as opposed to New Who’s Spring slot).  Now BBC 1 also has Merlin in the same early Saturday evening family drama slot that Doctor Who created.  When Doctor Who returns in 2010 the BBC will have such family, pre-watershed, drama on throughout the year (the quiet summer months aside and assuming both Robin Hood and Merlin continue).  That’s a pretty solid line up that will keep people coming back week after week.  ITV just didn’t have that.  They tried but Demons destroyed that hope for them.  Without the money to create a replacement for Demons there wasn’t really a sustainable place for Primeval, it just wasn’t making a big enough mark on its own.

Competition and Imagination
Whatever the cause of Primeval’s extinction (and the wider extermination of drama on ITV) it is a very sorry tale.  Doctor Who has some indirect competition from Robin Hood and Merlin but is that enough?  I think it is vitally important that ITV gives BBC 1 competition as well.  Clearly that is not going to happen from now on, for a good few years, at least.  Thank goodness for Doctor Who – if that hadn’t have come back in 2005 we would almost certainly be completely bereft of quality family drama now – as we were for so many years before.  At least there is something out there to fire children’s imagination but our hopes for a multi-channel family drama renaissance have been destroyed.

I just want to quickly expand on those few thoughts we expressed in Podcast 47 on the subject of Karen Gillan‘s new Doctor Who companion.

Name?
First, before an announcement leaks out to ruin everything, I want to quickly discuss this new character’s name, or lack thereof.  We are in a rather unusual situation where we know the actor but not the character name.  For the announcements of both Billie Piper and Freema Agyeman each were given their respective character names in the initial press release.  Catherine Tate was, of course, a special case insomuch as she was originally a surprise guest star.  That leaves Karen Gillan as the first modern day Who companion announced but not named!  We’ve got to ask ourselves, why?  What is Steven Moffat (the Vast Toffee (MN)) up to?  Yes, it is a long time until we will see her onscreen but that’s no reason to withhold the name – it’s just a name, isn’t it? We knew the name ‘Rose Tyler’ similarly early but that too was just a name at that point.  What could possibly be different this time?  A famous person from history or otherwise a name that might give away something about her?  A relative/descendant of a past character? If she retains her natural red hair does that mean she might be the love child of Vislor Turlough and Donna Noble?!  Probably not…

Whatever the secret is (and there may not be one – just a new level of media management by the Vast Toffee) we are left referring to her only by the name Karen Gillan.  As I suggested before the recording of the last podcast, we should speculate on what name she might be given.  Pointless but fun!  Here were our choices:

• Grunhilda Knobnacker
• Jaden
• Blodwyn Puddephat
• Dementia Nightterrors
• Megan

Yes, my suggestion of Grunhilda Knobnacker might sound slightly ridiculous (and vaguely rude, in a Slartibartfast sort of way!) but, you may be surprised to learn, I have it on very good authority from someone close to the production team that the character’s name will, in fact, not be that!  Yes, not be that.  Actually that’s not true at all.  I don’t really have any insider knowledge (or links to anyone with such knowledge), so we can all rejoice – it may yet be Grunhilda Knobnacker!  Isn’t speculating fun!

Karen Who?
What about young Karen Gillan herself? Another name that we all said ‘who?’ to.  It was Matt Smith all over again!  Unlike with Matt Smith‘s casting, this time there wasn’t too much speculation in the press.  A few silly names were bandied around, most notably pop star Lily Allen (clearly influenced by the previous choice of Billie Piper – except that Billie had already moved into acting by that point (and was rather good at it, too!)).  Despite the muted speculation, her name, like Matt’s, came out of left field.  Certainly no one can claim stunt casting this time!

Now I must admit I’ve not really seen Karen Gillan in anything yet, a few short YouTube clips of The Kevin Bishop Show aside.  But, of course, pretty much every Doctor Who fan has probably already seen her as a Soothsayer in last year’s The Fires of Pompeii.  I haven’t rewatched it yet but from what I remember it wasn’t exactly a meaty role, so don’t expect to learn much about how she will play Grunhilda from that.  Matt Smith was a little different for my initial ‘who?’ reaction (I heard the name some 20 minutes before it was officially announced on TV) but I did recognise his face when I saw it, though not his name.  I had previously seen him in both the Sally Lockhart dramatisations.

There seems to be something of a tradition in New Who when it comes to casting companions.  All of them (bar Billie Piper, for obvious reasons) have previously appeared in the series before becoming regular companions.  By companions here I am only really referring to Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Donna Noble and Grunhilda Knobnacker.  As I said, Rose was a special case as there wasn’t any New Who before her.  Donna Noble appeared as a special guest star before landing a regular role (so she still counts, in my book!)  Freema and Karen both appeared with minor roles before getting the real gig the next season.  I don’t imagine that is deliberate on the part of the corresponding Executive Producer, just an odd twist of fate.  I’m sure there were many people interviewed for the roles of Martha and Grunhilda who haven’t previously appeared in Doctor Who (heck, maybe even Lily Allen was among them!)  It does go to show the sort of background talent they get in even for minor roles.

Age
Some people (such as Jean in our latest podcast) have raised concerns about Karen Gillan’s age, namely is she too young?  Clearly she is far from the youngest person ever to take the role as the Doctor’s companion.  The wonderful website Den of Geek has put together a list of ten companions played by actors younger than Karen: http://www.denofgeek.com/television/260706/doctor_who_10_companions_younger_than_karen_gillan.html  Far be it for me to just steal names off that list but here I go anyway! Dodo, Nyssa, Adric (of course!), Victoria, Zoe, Vicki, Jo Grant, Peri and Turlough.  Being lazy I’m not inclined to look for more but, perhaps surprisingly, the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan was actually a year or two older than the 21 year old Karen Gillan (despite playing a character that was still in school (although quite possibly hundreds of years old!))

Of course a lot of people don’t look at Karen’s age in isolation.  If it was just her that was, to many of our now older eyes, ‘too young’ then fewer people would complain.  It’s when she’s paired with the ‘youngest Doctor ever!’ that people seem to get nervous. Personally I think it is a good move for the Vast Toffee (Master of Nightmares), Steven Moffat, to (apparently) go back to the traditionally winning format of the Doctor and a younger (if only slightly here!) female companion.  In future seasons, once Matt Smith IS the Doctor in everyone’s eyes, he can play around with the format.  Older companions, alien companions, 51st century kind of companions and virtual companions could all be before us.  For now, though, (much as I hate to use the phrase) let’s get back to basics.  Matt Smith has one tough act to follow, so let’s not do anything ‘exotic’ straight off the bat.  Of course, for all we know perhaps Karen Gillan’s character is rather less normal that she appears in those three official photos we have of her (and those, I presume, weren’t of the character but of Karen).

Chemistry
There have also been concerns raised, in part due to their relative young ages, that Matt and Karen’s characters may get ‘romantically involved’ in a similar way to the Doctor (particularly David Tennant’s) and Rose Tyler.  It’s a fine line but I don’t really want to see anything quite so overt again, however I do think it is vital that they enjoy each others company.  That’s doesn’t mean Matt Smith’s Doctor can’t be stand offish with strangers but I do think he needs to take an instant liking to Karen’s character (and vice versa).  Let’s not have a repeat of Colin Baker’s early days with Peri where it looked like they hated each other (why did she stay with him?!)  That sort of behaviour is the main reason, in my view, that Colin’s Doctor wasn’t greatly liked by the masses (though I don’t entirely agree with them!)  Start lighter and go darker (as they have, to an extent, with David Tennant’s Doctor).  We really don’t want to turn the audience off the Doctor because then they will simply stop watching.  The biggest barrier to entry for audiences with a new Doctor is the chemistry between him and the companion.  It worked with Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston and again with David Tennant.  Her contribution to the success of them both, and the series in general, cannot be underestimated.  I don’t think it worked so well with Freema Agyeman or Catherine Tate (at least at first).  It didn’t matter in those cases because everyone had bought into Tennant as the Doctor already.

Hopes
So, where does all that rambling leave me?  I am very hopeful about Karen Gillan, I think she really must be something special to get the part.  I trust the Vast Toffee.  I look forward to see Matt and Karen working together, I think it really could be something special.  A duo to rival David Tennant and Billie Piper, I hope.  Time will tell.  Will my speculations about her being a traditional companion be correct?  Of course by that I mean a New Who traditional companion – the days of two dimensional, screaming, exposition prompting companions are gone (I hope and trust).  I still can’t quite shake the question – why the secrecy on her character name?  Also, why no publicity shots with Karen and Matt together yet (probably nothing but a scheduling thing – I suspect her promo shots were done whilst Matt was off in Cannes).  Perhaps closer to the time (when they actually get together, again, to start filming next month?) they will do a combined publicity shot, maybe even announcing her name at the same time.  We will see…