Doctor Maitlis will see you now

 

As the blog's official Doctor Who correspondent, I did watch the New Year's Day edition, Revolution of the Daleks. 

Of course, I was only doing so in my official capacity, so I could report back to you, dear readers. 

The last two series, under the showrunnership of Chris Chibnall, earned the programme the nickname 'Doctor Woke' in some quarters. 

Its endless string of politically correct messages, its clunky scripts, its dull companions, its so-in-your-face-that-it-almost-pops-out-of-the-back-of-your-head 'diversity casting', its endless box-ticking, and its re-writing of sacred Doctor Who lore (so that the first-ever Doctor wasn't William Hartnell but a black baby girl) also saw a falling-off in viewing figures so drastic and undeniable that even the BBC must have been seriously alarmed - though they publicly defended the show. 

That precipitous plunge in ratings surely explains why this one-off episode largely eschewed all the earnest lecturing. (Yes, surprisingly, there wasn't even a bended knee for BLM anywhere to be seen!). 

Of course, the human baddies were Chris Noft's returning pantomime Donald Trump-like character and Harriet Walter's scheming, security-focused British PM (with shades of Andrea Leadsom. Deliberate?) and the main human victim was a well-meaning black scientist, but - to be fair to Chris Chibnall - lazy stereotypes of wicked American billionaire politicians and wicked Tory politicians and nice, hand-done-by black people are a given in BBC dramas these days, aren't they?

Anyhow, this episode went instead for a CGI-heavy story about one set of dopey daleks easily exterminating another lot of dopey daleks and both getting very easily outsmarted by The Doctor, which was fun - though there were also lots and lots of dull soap opera style stuff with the dull companions to to pad it all out for another three quarters of an hour. 

The entertaining, Big Daddy v Giant Haystacks-like dalek v dalek stuff struck me as a would-be crowd-pleasing rehash of one of the most popular battles of the David Tennant era: the daleks v cyberman battle in Battle of Canary Wharf, when the two sets of monsters bad-mouthed each other and all the cybermen got blown up. Lesson for Chris Chibnall?: If you urgently need a success, shamelessly copy and paste something that's worked before and was popular. 

P.S. The programme featured a cameo appearance from Emily Maitlis, interviewing the double-crossing Trump character after he blagged his way out of seemingly betraying Planet Earth to the daleks.

Fake Newsnight!