Doctor Who
Rating: 
Freddie Mercury: Last Act
Rating: 
Each episode of Doctor Who (BBC1) has a time when the Time Lord struggles with an unresponsive Tardis.
Buttons are broken, levers are thrown, lights flash, and sirens shrill. However, nothing will make an old machine run again.
Jodie Whittaker is the current Keeper for Sonic Screwdriver. That sums up Jodie’s dilemma. She and writer Chris Chibnall are trying everything they can — resurrecting classic villains and blowing a fortune on special effects.
It’s a starry cast, with higher stakes and more intense plots. . . It stubbornly refuses all of it.
Partly, that’s because Chibnall still seems unsure how to write a female action hero. Whittaker’s Doctor is the same as her predecessors.
Many of her mannerisms are similar to Matt Smith and David Tennant, but she has longer hair and a stronger voice. She’s less irritable, it’s true, but that actually detracts from a well-loved persona.
The elderly machine cannot be made to work again. Levers can be thrown and buttons battered. Jodie Whittaker is the current Keeper for Sonic Screwdriver. That sums up Jodie’s whole problem.
We know she is braver and smarter than the male characters — chiefly because they’re halfwits.
Comedian John Bishop, as do-gooder Dan, bumbles around with his jaw hanging open like a broken ventriloquist’s puppet. Neither funny nor lovable, he’s a big name wasted.
In every scene, it’s hard to see the point of him. Cold Feet’s Robert Bathurst, playing the posh Army officer in charge of Earth’s anti-alien defences, was so dim he’d struggle to get a walk-on part in a P.G. Wodehouse tale.
Kevin McNally brings thoughtful touches and depth to every role. But his Professor Jericho is a Cluedo-type character. They all talk to each other, trying to understand the bizarrely convoluted events.
Craig Parkinson is a villainous extraterrestrial who has a deadly snake as a spine. But even that doesn’t chill us. His character is thin like cardboard.
Comedian John Bishop, as do-gooder Dan, bumbles around with his jaw hanging open like a broken ventriloquist’s puppet. Neither funny nor lovable, he’s a big name wasted
Chibnall takes no time at all to create them. One moment we’re in Constantinople in 1904, the next at an English country house in the 1950s, then in a spaceship between two universes, then back to modern-day London or Nepal a century ago.
The story veered into Agatha Christie’s world with an assassination attempt on a luxury liner. The Doctor was soon reunited to her foster mother, Barbara Flynn. She had just enough time to go over a few details before she was attacked by Swarm. The bereavement seemed to have not bothered the Doctor. If she doesn’t care, why should we?
Problem is, although a Time Lord may have two hearts, the show doesn’t really have any. It’s hollow. The depiction of Queen’s flamboyant front-man, in Freddie Mercury: The Final Act (BBC2), was all heart. It is his fierce loyalty that he inspires in friends and loved ones that gives the most accurate measure of him.
Roger Taylor and Brian May, the lead guitarist and drummer of the band, appear to be ready for any slur about their fellow chums.
This moving, engrossing documentary by James Rogan, the film-maker behind last year’s three-part portrait of Vladimir Putin, was as much a history of the Aids epidemic as a homage to Freddie.
It gave us a rare glimpse of the singer in conversation, thanks to interviews taped by the Daily Mail’s matchless showbiz commentator, David Wigg.
One surprise to emerge was that Freddie’s bandmates seemed hardly aware that he was gay for many years.
He didn’t talk about his private life. Imagine any other celeb doing the same thing now.
Simon Reeve was the Atomic Thief of The Weekend. He posed for a nuclear terrorist to break into Sellafield and steal plutonium on The Lakes, his Cumbrian travelogue (BBC2). Only a selfie cam was all he had to rely on for his weapons. His savage plot was easily stopped by machine gun-wielding guards.