Starting next month on BBC One, The Night Manager is a six-part adaptation of the 1993 John Le Carre thriller:
The drama follows a former British soldier
Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) who goes undercover to infiltrate the criminal arms trade. Hugh Laurie plays the arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper. Olivia Coleman and Tom Hollander also play leading roles.
The Radio Times has broken the story that Steven Moffat will step aside as showrunner of Doctor Who after overseeing one more series. His replacement will be Chris Chibnall who has prevously written five episodes for the show and has had great success as the creator of Broadchurch.
Moffat's final 12-part series will not air until spring 2017 and Chibnall’s debut series will launch in 2018. This means there will be no new Doctor Who on TV this year apart from the Christmas special.
BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore explains:
“I have decided to schedule
Steven’s big finale series in Spring 2017 to bring the nation together for what
will be a huge event on the channel.
2016 is spoilt with national moments including the Euros and Olympics
and I want to hold something big back for 2017 - I promise it will be worth the
wait!”
Steven Moffat says of his decision to leave:
“Feels odd to be
talking about leaving when I’m just starting work on the scripts for season 10,
but the fact is my timey-wimey is running out. While Chris is doing his last
run of Broadchurch, I’ll be finishing up on the best job in the universe and
keeping the TARDIS warm for him. It took a lot of gin and tonic to talk him
into this, but I am beyond delighted that one of the true stars of British
Television drama will be taking the Time Lord even further into the future. At
the start of season 11, Chris Chibnall will become the new showrunner of Doctor
Who. And I will be thrown in a skip.”
Chris Chibnall, a lifelong fan of the show, expressed his excitement:
"Doctor Who is the ultimate BBC programme:
bold, unique, vastly entertaining, and adored all around the world. So it's a privilege and a joy to be the next
curator of this funny, scary and emotional family drama. I’ve loved Doctor Who
since I was four years old, and I’m relishing the thought of working with the
exceptional team at BBC Wales to create new characters, creatures and worlds
for the Doctor to explore."
Chris Chibnall has extensive experience as a television writer and producer since 2002, His TV career started as the creator the BBC drama Born and Bred. In 2006, he was chosen by Russell T. Davies to be the lead writer for the first two series of Torchwood and wrote eight episodes for the spin-off. For Doctor Who, Chibnall wrote the episodes 42 (2008), Hungry
Earth/Cold Blood (2010), Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three (2012). He then created Broadchurch for ITV which was a huge hit with audiences and critics, attracting a peak of over 10 million UK viewers in 2013 and winning the BAFTA for Best Drama Series.
Here is Chibnall talking about his career and favourite TV dramas in a video released last year on the BBC Writers Room YouTube channel:
Guest writer Stephanie Atherton investigates the Sherlock special
(beware the spoilers):
As someone new to everything Sherlock Holmes, the modern BBC
adaptation immediately had me hooked; as I begin to indulge in the stories, I
can see that the Sherlock of the first two series was definitely a modern
reflection of the original character, with his staggering intelligence and quick-witted
ripostes. The third series, however, had a much different feel. At times it
bordered too close to light-hearted rom-com, rather than the genre of
crime/mystery which is the bedrock of the entire franchise. I was excited then,
as many viewers were, to see trailers for the Christmas special which:
a)Seemed infinitely darker than the last few
episodes (quite literally, with scenes of a smoke-drenched London and a dusky maze
taking centre frame)
b)Harked back to the traditional, Victorian Holmes
The episode starts off promisingly (after the rather
out-of-place current series montage), and we’re treated to an exact mirroring
of the beginning of Sherlock in true
Victorian style. John – or rather, Watson – is narrating events, immediately setting
the scene amongst the original stories, with lines copied almost verbatim from A Study in Scarlet. We soon meet
Sherlock – Holmes – fervently whipping a corpse in a scene we now find oddly
charming... His sharp, calculated deductions about Watson enthral us all over
again; the accent Cumberbatch is assuming and the theatricality of his
expressions are very Brett-esque, which definitely suggests this episode to be
a stand-alone piece.
However, I welcomed nods to the series. Mrs Hudson is her usual
feisty, funny character, rather than the literary portrayal of herself that she
is protesting against. A joke about Watson’s moustache goes without saying,
really. And there is an echoing of the ‘bachelor pad’– a personal highlight
being the stag head with ear trumpet accessory. Over all this Watson is
narrating (his introduction reminiscent of original story The Five Orange Pips, which becomes relevant later), presenting the
case of The Abominable Bride. The richly-coloured
fireplace setting of 221B is transposed into the scene as Holmes observes it
unfolding, with fantastic camerawork which inclines towards the updated series.
Enter deranged bride Emilia Ricoletti terrorising a London street before
shooting herself. Later, her husband is intercepted by none other than his
recently deceased wife, singing a chilling ditty before placing two shots in
him too. She turns for us to see the gaping wound in the back of her head,
before disappearing mysteriously into the fog. Naturally, we’re hooked.
(So, she shot herself in the head and didn’t die – sounding
familiar? Just in case you missed that, Holmes helps us out a little later in
the morgue: “How could he survive?”)
Time for a little light relief, then, with a visit to
someone “cleverer than Sherlock”. Mycroft Holmes was omitted from the trailer;
the reason for this becomes apparent and is a bit groan-inducing. Whilst Conan Doyle
describes the elder brother as having “a gross body”, he did not describe him
as being ‘permanently surrounded by a cartoonishly large amount of food’.
Still, if Doctor Who is anything to
go by, a Moffat Christmas special is expected to have its silly moments. And
younger viewers will have doubtlessly enjoyed Watson’s sign language mishap…
Mycroft leaves Sherlock with a request to accept a case, and The Five Orange Pips comes back into
play. After receiving pips in the post, a Sir Eustace Carmichael receives a
visitation from ‘The Bride’. The scene is set perfectly as we follow Lady
Carmichael into the maze, with dense, ominous fog and claustrophobically high
hedges. Yet again there is that haunting, musical murmur, and the petrifying
apparition of Emilia Ricoletti tells Sir Carmichael that he will die tonight.
Moffat and Gatiss again seem to think we’ve coped with
enough for now; and so begins yet another forgivable-only-because-it-is-in-the-Christmas-special
scene. I have enjoyed the ongoing references to Irene Adler throughout the
series; whilst only appearing in A
Scandal in Bohemia, literary Holmes muses about her beyond this in similar
ways: “A formidable opponent, a remarkable adventure”. This scene becomes
laboured, though – too much like an adult trying to have ‘the talk’ with their
pubescent son. I do quite like the idea that Holmes as a heartless, calculating
machine is only the character Watson presents, and this of course relates to
his modern depiction; still, they could have cut out the cringeworthy euphemisms
to get this point across (I, too, have never been more impatient for them to be
attacked by a murderous ghost!).Thankfully, Emilia Ricoletti returns to distract them, and Sir
Carmichael is found impaled through the heart. Holmes is visibly agitated – as he
is in The Five Orange Pips when his
client is found dead – and we are reminded of The Hounds of Baskerville as he chastises Watson; “You saw what you
were supposed to see!”
And
now, the twist; a note is found on the body with those two horrifying words:
‘Miss me?’. Holmes returns to 221B in waiting, and we see him produce a needle.
Soon after, our favourite psychotic villain enters, preceded by a deathly
shadow. This is where things start to go odd, as often happens around Moriarty.
Their first exchanges are taken from The
Great Game, and everything seems entirely too modern given the setting. Scott
in particular is not at all in-keeping – he’s still pulling faces and acting the
fool. Yet again, if we needed reminding, Moriarty poses the question: how could
Emilia Ricoletti return after shooting the back of her head off? Suddenly, the rattling
room transforms into a jet bumping its way down a landing strip, and the
episode itself begins its descent into a confusing mess. Present day Sherlock
comes round where we left him in His Last
Vow. Lady Carmichael is not his client, but his pilot, and he seems to have
dreamt the whole thing.
It
soon transpires that he wasn’t ‘dreaming’ as such, and has in fact taken what
we can assume from John’s reaction to be a lethal cocktail of drugs. There is a
brief flashback to Mycroft in his mid-20s tending to Sherlock in a doss house,
giving us another small taste of the brotherly backstory which is being
gradually eked out to us. There is the very obvious criticism to be made that,
in the space of five minutes, Sherlock has gone from speaking with incredible
coherence on the phone to Mycroft to falling into some sort of drug-induced
hallucinatory coma, despite being “high before he got on the plane”. Sherlock
insists he’s been in his mind palace, but this can’t really be the case, given
that he hasn’t always been the focal point of this narrative as he is in other palace
processes (thinking particularly about the fantastic sequence from His Last Vow).
Then
we flip back to Victorian times, in a way that is altogether too Doctor Whoish, for the conclusion of the
case. It was women all along! There has been a lot of backlash regarding the ‘mansplaining’
of feminism in this scene, comments on which can be read elsewhere, and it does
damage the conclusion. However, I would argue that the suffragettes being
dressed in pointed hoods is not Moftiss insinuating that this movement was an
extremist hate group, but is only intended to be a throwback to The Five Orange Pips, where Holmes correctly
deduces the perpetrators of the crime to be the KKK. Sherlock’s subconscious continues
to scold him for ‘lying to’ Janine and ‘ignoring’ Molly – the latter of which has
seemingly been an important character in the sidelines of this story,
proficient as she is in the provision of decoy corpses.
But
we aren’t finished there. Cue more flipping backwards and forwards in time that
becomes even messier – the less said about the re-animated skeleton of Emilia
Ricoletti, the better. Eventually Victorian Holmes wakes up at the edge of the
Reichenbach falls where, in the stories, he falls to his supposed death with Moriarty.
Presumably the unconscious Sherlock dreaming all this has made the connection
with Turner’s art piece which he returned at the start of The Reichenbach Fall, else Moftiss have imbued him with the
qualities of his fictional counterpart – definitely too much like a Doctor Who plot (Robot of Sherwood, anyone?). Either way, good old John Watson
arrives to save the day, as he ever does, kicking Moriarty to his death in a
display of the friendship and affection the detective has for his companion. Watching
the episode again with the knowledge that it is all set in Sherlock’s head, his
silent appreciation of John’s true intelligence and worth shines through
throughout the episode, particularly in helping Sherlock to interpret emotion (e.g.
Lestrade and the decanter) and thus humanise him.
Sherlock
wakes up for the final time back on the plane. So, the last twenty minutes has
been some sort of Inception-like transition
between dream stages?... After an insolent spat with a concerned Mycroft, he
concludes after all that Moriarty is definitely dead, with the teaser: “I know exactly what he’s going to do next”.
Naturally, we are all left scratching our heads wondering what he’s referring
to. There is a last cosy piece with Holmes and Watson besides the fireplace
before the credits, which definitely confirmed for me what I thought all along:
this should have just been a Victorian special, separate to the modern
storyline. I was enjoying it up until the transition to modern day. And as truly
wonderful as Scott is, he didn’t need to be here. The mirroring between
Ricoletti and Moriarty’s deaths needn’t have been so overtly hammered home to
the audience, and for me at least a little more subtlety would have been
appreciated. Holmes could have solved the case, and we could have been left on the
same agonising cliffhanger that would keep us going until 2017 – did Moriarty
survive or not?
But,
it happened. We must move on. And after the special, there are two features of
interest which must be considered (sorry – couldn’t resist):
1)Moriarty - is Sherlock right in categorically stating that he is
dead? And if so, who is using his image to terrorise London? Perhaps it is
finally time to put a modern face to “the second most dangerous man in London”,
Sebastian Moran…?
2)Redbeard – despite the fact that we have seen Sherlock’s faithful
childhood pet in His Last Vow’sMind Palace sequence, the name has come
up again in the special, and is clearly written in Mycroft’s notebook. Are we
to conclude there’s more to learn…?
Doctor Who Christmas's specials can be divided into two categories: epic adventures at the beginning or end of a Doctor's regeneration (The Christmas Invasion, The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor) and one-off, usually more comical, stories. This episode falls into the latter category and the lightness of the story is welcome following a very dark Series 9. The tone of the episode is set with the appearance of the first guest character (Nardole played by comic actor Matt Lucas) and the Doctor's re-introduction wearing novelty reindeer antlers. It is Nardole who mistakes the Doctor for a skilled surgeon and summons him to his employer, the time travelling archaeologist, River Song.
It was thought that River Song's role in Doctor Who may have concluded after she last appeared as a hologram in The Name of the Doctor (2013). There is a slight concern that River's reappearance contradicts continuity with that episode because River had shown no hints of awareness that the Doctor would live on beyond his thirteenth regeneration. However, it could be explained that the timeline has since altered or that River was hiding the truth. Writer Steven Moffat was obviously keen to see Peter Capaldi and Alex Kingston act together for the first time, and their chemistry and the characters' relationship is refreshingly different to that between River and Matt Smith's Doctor.
The twist here is that the River doesn't recognise that Doctor. This brings their relationship full circle because it is a reversal of River's first appearance in Silence in the Library (2008). We also get to see what River gets up to when the Doctor's not around. Her behaviour is amoral, marrying the tyrant King Hydroflax (Greg Davies), in order to gain possession of the precious diamond which is lodged in his brain. River's actions reminds us she is not a suitable full-time companion for the Doctor; that role requires a moral conscience.
Much of the episode's wackiness derives from antics with King Hydroflax's disembodied head and his robotic body. The Doctor and River flee the robot body with the King's head in a bag and the body takes poor Nardole's as a replacement. Young children watching will have enjoyed these aspects. There is not much sense of threat and this is suitable for an earlier broadcast time on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, there is limited sophisticated comedy for the adults. The banter between the Doctor and River is not as funny as it should be and many of jokes, such as the Doctor feigning surprise at the TARDIS being "bigger on the inside", are quite obvious.
River steals the TARDIS and takes the Doctor to a starship restaurant where she intends to sell the diamond in Hydoflax's head. Here , the episode changes direction and explores the lead characters' relationships more thoughtfully. River reveals that her diary, given to her by the Doctor in Let's Kill Hitler (2011) is nearly full and she, and the audience, knows this means her life is nearing its end.
The plot takes an "awkward" turn when it transpires that River's buyer, and the rest of the restaurant patrons, are actually a followers of the King. The Doctor and River amusingly try to talk their way out of this predicament before Hydroflax's body turns up seeking a new head. The Greg Davies head is disintegrated; the comedic talents of both Davies and Lucas are rather wasted. The cowardly maitre d' Flemming (Rowan Polonsksi) promises Hydroflax that he can get the Doctor's head through River. She admits that she loves the Doctor but states that he does not love her back: "He does not go around falling in love with people" (perhaps excluding the David Tennant's Tenth Doctor). Finally, the Twelfth Doctor reveals his identity to River before she reveals her escape plan; her prior knowledge that the starship will be hit by a meteor strike River delivers an excellent pay-off line to Flemming: "I'm an archaelogist from the future. I dug you up!"
The crashing starship conclusion is underwhelming, perhaps because of the similarities to previous Christnas specials Voyage of the Damned (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2010). Escaping the crash on the TARDIS, River and the Doctor find themselves on the planet Darillirium. Finally, we see their last night together, as it was established back in 2008, and he gives her the special sonic screwdriver, Many casual viewers will have missed these continuity references but the touching final moments bring a satisfactory conclusion to a fairly average episode.
