Fear Her

Jacob Clifton, who writes the Doctor Who recaps over at the Television Without Pity website – and very good they are too – has a theory about the series. Well, actually he has many and varied theories about the show, which are often expounded upon at length in his pieces – never one to shy away from analysis and subtext, is Jacob – but perhaps chief amongst them is the idea of Doctor Who as an unconscious depiction of the United Kingdom’s low sense of self-esteem. “The Healing of Albion,” the idea than Britain and the British should be put through the wringer and subjected to all manner of evils before they come out clean on the other side.

He’ll certainly have a field day with Fear Her, if and when the US Sci-Fi Channel ever gets around to showing it. For one of the chief ideas the episode carries – and probably one of its most accurate – is the boost to national self-esteem and sense of worth that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 will provide. We have seen before in just about every other country that’s held the Games that the pride and patriotism which comes from being chosen to be the custodian of the grand tradition of sportsmanship and something great and good about the human condition can be a boost to even those who are not directly connected with anything going on at the Games. Merely being there, in the country and seeing the verve and joy it brings to the nation, is enough.

Occasionally such pride and patriotism can go too far – I know that the Atlanta Games of 1996 made some people feel almost physically ill, and it’s perhaps very appropriate that this episode first aired in the UK the day before England played their second round match at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. An episode based against one of the two greatest and most-watched sporting events on the planet, being shown while the other one is taking place – no accident on the part of the production team, you’d think.

But the World Cup, like the Olympics – although the Olympics suffers this to a lesser degree, being mainly about individuals rather than groups – is often criticised for the flag-waving patriotism being only a stone’s throw away from nationalism, which leads us down the ugly path of superiority complexes and racism. In Fear Her we see the streets bedecked with Union Flags, although the number of them around and about is pretty tame compared to the swathes of St George’s Crosses currently covering English front room windows, car aerials and pub beer gardens.

There’s nothing wrong with getting behind your country and its representatives in a sporting event, and flying a flag to show your allegiance – indeed, the pride and passion and love and emotions of all kinds that such sporting events bring out in us all, the sense of togetherness and unity as we bind together to celebrate our nation is one of the few times when such a thing as Englishness ever exists – Britishness too, perhaps, as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem strong enough in their own identities as individual nations even without the aid of sports teams.

Often a minority of morons will spoil it for the many thousands who do no wrong; they take it too far, sing the racist songs, get drunk and start violence. Less so now, but still idiotically. It’s happened the weekend this episode aired, with a tiny, tiny minority in Germany ruining the good reputation English fans have been building up there, so it was good to see Fear Her taking a stand and showing that sports events en masse can be a good thing.

That said, however, it did almost feel on occasions as if the episode could have just as easily been sent in the present day, with the 2012 setting used merely to provide that Olympic backdrop and the chance to throw in a few audience amusing novelties such as the idea of Take That, complete with Robbie, performing at the opening ceremony, or Shayne Ward bringing out a Greatest Hits CD. And whoever’s idea it was to get Huw Edwards doing the commentary ought to hang their heads in shame – getting real people in to play themselves sometimes works, as Andrew Marr showed back in series one, but Edwards is pretty awful here.

I do have to admit that Fear Her was not an episode I was especially looking forward to, mainly because of its writer. While I did very much enjoy Matthew Graham’s work on Life on Mars earlier this year, the previous effort of his I’ve seen – ITV’s 1999 post-apocalyptic serial The Last Train – was a clunker, and in every interview I’ve seen with Graham I’ve got the distinct impression that he doesn’t really ‘get’ Doctor Who. I know that’s a terrible arrogant and fannish thing to say, and many of you will doubtless think it’s simply because he’s not an out-and-out fan like most of the other writers on the current incarnation of the show. Not so – I never got the same sense of unease with Toby Whithouse or Tom MacRae when I read interviews with them before their episodes aired. Graham, however, just seemed too… Well, ‘ordinary’, I suppose. I’m not saying all Doctor Who scriptwriters ought to be hand-crafted by Telefantasy Angels, touched by Grace and handed down to us from high on a mountain top with their CVs carved on tablets of marble, but… Well, it’s hard to explain.

Anyway, the important point is that on the whole I was pleasantly surprised. The central concept of the episode is pretty damn good – the idea of a little girl who can snatch people into her drawings. Very Sapphire & Steel. The nightmare vision of her dead father, trapped in the wardrobe, was also superb, and probably conceptually the high point of the episode. I would not be at all surprised if the father was not featuring in a few real nightmares after this episode went out. There is also some very good interaction between the Doctor and Rose – when he thinks that she’s holding her hand out to him made me smile, and just before that when he reveals that he was, indeed, once a father. We’ve always known he must have had children at some point, in fact it’s practically the first thing we ever do learn about him, but it’s nice to have it referred to again for the first time in a very long time.

Mind you, not all of the Rose and Doctor scenes are spectacularly good. The very end of the episode, for example, where the Doctor broods on an approaching storm could not have been less subtle had it been painted luminous yellow and leapt up and down on the spot, singing Three Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds in a screeching falsetto while holding up a large sign saying ‘This is foreshadowing events in the season ending two-parter!’ We do get the idea, you know – there’s no need to sledgehammer it home.

Aside from that, there was little to complain about – only the Doctor lighting the Olympic flame, which was ridiculously over the top and made even less bearable by Edwards’ continuing awful voiceover, really irritated me. The guest cast were all good – the girl playing Chloe especially, and it was good to see yet another Casanova co-star of Tennant’s in the form of Nina Sosanya, who I’m a fan of.

So, certainly not a stellar episode, and probably not one that will live long in the memory of the general audience or rate highly in the fan rankings. But a solid enough stop gap, marking time in the schedules before we come to what looks like a truly epic adventure to follow.