john_amend_all | Christmas wishes / episode reactions

Hope you're all having / had a happy Christmas.

Brief thoughts on a couple of TV shows:

Professor Branestawm:

I thought this was very well done. Given the necessity of a more involved storyline than the original short stories, they still managed to incorporate a great deal that was true to Norman Hunter's plots. Harry Hill was an interesting choice for the Professor, but he and his inventions were both very good matches for the original Heath Robinson illustrations. I also liked Colonel Dedshott managing to make good use of his catapult.

Like SJA, I think this show approaches closer to some eras of Classic Who than modern Who does (and, of course, it explicitly drew the parallel, and wasn't the first to do so). I'd quite like to see more of this particular eccentric protagonist with his mobile telephone booth and explosion-obsessed schoolgirl sidekick.

Doctor Who:

OK, that was pretty much an hour of paranoia fuel (or rather, would have been, if you were so trusting as to accept that the Doctor ever really escaped from the Matrix in 1986, or the Matrix in 1976, or the Land of Fiction back in 1968, or the Toymaker... well, you get the picture 😜). Plus something else to worry about every time you get a headache. I do wonder what on earth the Doctor-Clara dynamic's going to be for the remainder of her tenure.

... Also, one of the crabs succeeded in absorbing its victim, didn't it? So it's still on Earth, and laying eggs, and soon there'll be more crabs...