Thanks to @wolfweed for the behind the scenes stuff. I’d never seen that either. Doesn’t SM look so young and cherubic there?
This is actually a great shout from @janetteb because apart from being very silly indeed, there are lots of clues and callbacks to what kind of showrunner SM would eventually become.
I have to admit, I was never that crazy on the more broader, more scatological humour of CoFD and I think it gets old pretty quickly here. Similarly, I have to put my hand up to never really liking the smart-arse sixth-form humour of Richard Curtis and Ben Elton either (I realise its sacrilege but aside from a few truly inspired moments, I’ve never really had a massive amount of love for Black Adder. Which is why Vincent and the Doctor, which I had been dreading, turned out to be such a delightful surprise.) So, some of the early stuff about ‘bribing the architect’ palled very quickly for me too and it felt a little like SM doing a ventriloquist act, like he was ‘doing a Richard Curtis’. And you only have to look at Coupling or SM’s own Children In Need specials where his humour is very much his own to see the difference, I think.
But what does work here, oddly enough, is the fan service, the good-humouredly poking of fun at the tropes of BG Who. CoFD interestingly exists in that hinterland between the two series, where the BG series is this source of nostalgic mockery but has yet to be reclaimed by the AG series. Thus the deliberately shonky TARDISes, the hammy Master, even the title are nice little digs at the creakiness of the show’s format at that point.
I suppose watching it now, with the benefit of hindsight as we reach the end of SM tenure as showrunner is how much of it is foreshadowed here. First of all, there is the Doctor with a romantic entanglement — something, as discussed earlier today – that falls more in RTD’s purview but which SM is clearly saying is something that the show can no longer avoid addressing.
And then there’s the Master. I love Jonathan Pryce’s performance but I think it emphasises a problem that both RTD and SM later had — that if you have a Master in full moustache-twirling mode, you then have a problem in actually figuring out what to do with him. What’s foreshadowed here is SM’s eventual solution to this — here playing for laughs the unrequited, latent attraction between the characters, something that he would examine (slightly) more seriously with Missy.
The other key take-home from CoFD is perhaps the fetishisation of regeneration (something that I think is going slightly too far these days, although only partially SM’s fault). The multiple regenerations are fun and I’m still surprised that we didn’t see something of the like done for real at the end of Capaldi’s run. And of course it’s the first outing for a female Doctor too — something SM clearly wanted to try and which, I’d be willing to lay odds, he does for real at Christmas. What’s fun here though is seeing him run through a fan’s wishlist of possible Who’s and seeing how they would perhaps fare playing the Doctor for real — Rowan Atkinson (surprisingly good), Richard E Grant (predictably terrible), Hugh Grant (meh) and Joanna Lumley (bloody excellent).
And there’s the ‘three settings’ joke, which I have to say is still my favourite.
