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Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp

Catherine Tate as Donna Noble with a giant wasp
  • Posted at 9:06pm
  • 17 May 2008
  • by WilliamGallagher-RT
  • 3 comments

Admit it, you want to read Agatha Christie novels now. Tonight's Doctor Who was a 43-minute advert for her and I'd have said there could be no harder customer to convince than me. Miss Marple leaves me looking at my watch, the Orient Express is just a train and Poirot makes me crave slapping people. Mostly Poirot himself.

But put the woman herself into a Doctor Who comedy murder mystery with a jewel thief called the Unicorn and a ten-foot wasp and I'm sold. It's only a surprise that ITV1 didn't go the same route when it revamped random Christie novels into the modern-sounding, hip Marple.

Doctor Who doesn't always do comedy very well. In the old days, it sometimes did farce, though not intentionally. I'm thinking Sylvester McCoy, primarily, but there were other guilty parties. William Hartnell wasn't a natural comic, for one.

But he did meet the Zarbi and the Menoptra in The Web Planet (1965): they weren't what you'd call wasps, but they were human-sized insects, so bear with me. I sat in on an audio commentary recording for the DVD of that story. It was the first time I met Verity Lambert, whom I'd admired for donkey's years, and Martin Jarvis, who told me all about his production company. Unfortunately, they were more interesting than The Web Planet. In its day, it was a balletic classic that transcended language to convey a beautiful story of insect humanity, er, insectanity. Today: not so much. Everybody looks a bit too silly.

Which is what I thought would happen tonight: the trailers showing Donna cowering from a wasp didn't make it seem like the most impressive-looking effect but then in the show, with motion, with that buzzing, it was revoltingly scary. Fantastic.

I love stories that end with the gathering of the suspects, where there's always someone who just has to say: "But there's one thing I don't understand, Inspector." I think that was the sole murder mystery cliché that didn't appear tonight. And maybe that was a problem: just a little trimming of the jokes might've tightened it up. There were perhaps too many that didn't absolutely work, it broke you out of the episode's little bubble.

But where last week you ignored plot problems because Jenny and the Doctor were so good, here you somehow made a pact with the show that you'd go along with it. For me, the moment I knew this would be fun was the instant Donna stepped out of the Tardis and took the Doctor's arm. More than any other of the myriad period jokes and fine, fine detail in the episode, I was utterly charmed by that - because of the music.

For once, it wasn't by Murray Gold, it was the theme to Alan Plater's The Beiderbecke Affair. Alan was one of the first people I ever interviewed and we've stayed in touch since, so I rang him just now. He says to tell you that it's called Cryin' All Day by Bix Beiderbecke and it's on iTunes. He's a Doctor Who fan, by the way, but then who isn't?

Well, whoever schedules Eurovision in the middle of the series, that's who.

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  • Posted on 20 September 2008
  • at 11:14pm
  • by One-Ten

Surely the theme to Plater's Beiderbecke Affair was a version of Cryin' All Day by the Frank Ricotti All Stars, with Kenny Baker playing the cornet? And it *was* the Ricotti version used here.

  • Posted on 21 May 2008
  • at 5:56pm
  • by humblegenius

Loved the deliberate mistake - a blatant self-dig at the fact the crew were never going to traipse all the way up to Harrogate to shoot!

Everyone knows Agatha Christie stayed at The Old Swan Hotel, not 'The Harrogate Hotel' (shown twice).

  • Posted on 21 May 2008
  • at 8:54am
  • by Ionaclio

Thank goodness for Eurovison which will give us a break from seemingly endless Dr Who episodes.

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