Tom Salinsky

It’s hard to remember now, but the Doctor Who Christmas special is a relatively recent invention – by which I mean it didn’t happen in the first 26 years of the show’s existence. The revived show is now getting on for twenty years old, which feels profoundly unlikely, but when the first series was a success, news rapidly came that we were getting two more series and a Christmas special. The Christmas Invasion saw new incumbent David Tennant take on the Sycorax and it had a lot to accomplish if it was going to succeed, but it did so brilliantly.

Now, for whatever reason, fandom is divided and disgruntled, as culture wars and general internet-led entitlement lead to furiously toxic pronouncements across all parts of social media. After the mixed reception that the rebooted reboot got earlier this year, Joy to the World needed to do almost as much as the 2005 special in order to be even a qualified success.

I haven’t seen an awful lot of general chatter about this one, but I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was excellent. Ncuti Gatwa, who made a very bold debut, now seems to be brimming with confidence, giving us a lonely, isolated Doctor who hasn’t even noticed that the TARDIS doesn’t have any chairs. He’s joined by a cracking guest cast headed by luminous Nicola Coughlan, but let’s not forget Joel Fry, Stephanie de Whalley, Jonathan Aris and many more. The opening is almost Moffat parodying himself, but explanations are quickly forthcoming and the Time Hotel is a lovely concept, both fresh and instantly-graspable.

Joy’s self-sacrifice isn’t a huge surprise, but that means it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and Coughlan sells the hell out of it, but my favourite bit was the entirely self-contained sojourn in that grim hotel. Structurally, this is not needed at all – it’s the kind of “closed loop” plotting which Terrance Dicks admitted to falling back on to pad The War Games out to ten episodes, which is what allowed Benjamin Cook to prune it back to 90 minutes without significant injury. But it’s the clearest expression of the episode’s theme. Sit down. And play a game with someone you like. Amen to that.

Strongly plotted with lots of good twists and turns and a resolution that actually makes sense, it looks gorgeous (even if there wasn’t quite enough cash left for a really good T-Rex) and Alex Sanjiv Pillai keeps it all moving. I was rapt throughout and can’t wait to watch it again.

My eye was caught by the new glossy Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch but I felt the need to watch the earlier versions first. The 1973 original  with Edward Fox is absolutely brilliant, with Fox’s icy charm perfectly evoking Frederick Forsyth’s meticulous assassin. Ranged against him is pretty much every British male character actor who graduated since the turn of the century, and a few European ones as well, notably Michael Lonsdale who’d go on to be one of James Bond’s most impressive opponents (albeit in a film which few people rate highly).

What’s especially fascinating about this version is how stripped down it is. Fox is going to bump off Charles de Gaulle. Lonsdale has to stop him. There are no subplots, there are no detours, and very notably nobody gets in Lonsdale’s way. He gets every scrap of support available to him, through official and unofficial channels, nobody tells him he’s “on thin ice”, or “he’s becoming obsessed” or he’s got “48 hours to wrap this thing up.” And even with that, he only just manages to stop Fox in time – Fox even manages to get a shot off but misses. So far from robbing us of tension, this lean, streamlined approach makes the Jackal seem like a far more formidable foe.

The plot was revisited in 1997 with Michael Caton-Jones behind the camera, replacing Fred Zinnemann, Bruce Willis slightly miscast as the Jackal and Richard Gere hopelessly miscast as ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen. All the hysterical personal dramas I didn’t miss in 1973 are back here and this is pretty much all by-the-numbers nineties thriller cliches which would have gone straight to DVD if it hadn’t been for the star power of the cast. One famous scene in which Willis offs a young Jack Black is the only noteworthy thing. Forsyth hated it and it was just called “The Jackal” to acknowledge that this wasn’t really much to do with his novel.

And now we have a ten part series which moves the action to the present day, moves the target to a Musk style tech billionaire and greatly expands the narrative. Redmayne finds a deep seam of ruthlessness which is rather disturbing and Lynch – who I wasn’t convinced by in No Time to Die but who I thought was amazing in Matilda – is stunning as Bianca, by turns friend to the fallen, hard-bitten meeting room warrior, and bad ass machine gun toting bitch. Expanding such a slender storyline comes with risks, but the 1973 film exemplifies the motto “audiences love how” and the new team, led by showrunner Ronan Bennett have taken that to heart, with a whole other mission for the Jackal which is just as thrilling as the main hit, a subplot which digs into the Jackal’s own emotions without undermining his impact as a force for evil, and a surprisingly open-ended conclusion. Recommended.

Also coming at the tale end of a series of iterations of the same narrative comes Wicked Part One – the musical film of the stage musical of the novel inspired by the musical film of the novel. I adore the 1939 Judy Garland film and sat down to watch the musical with some trepidation, but I greatly appreciated the cleverness of the story as well as the soaring songs. Now Jon M Chu (In the Heights) has directed a movie version which takes about as long as the stage show without the interval to deliver just the fast half of the story – but fuck me I’ve never had 160 minutes whip by so quickly.

All of the the things which are assumed to have taken place off-stage, all the gaps we the audience have to fill in between the songs, all the emotional beats which aren’t quite fully illuminated come into crisp sharp focus here, and those amazing songs land perfectly, thanks to the gorgeous staging, perfect pacing and astonishing lead performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. Shout out too to the hilarious Jonathan Bailey who has a damn good go at stealing a film which the two star already have completely locked down.

And I just have time to mention that I’ve now finished watching the first series of Blake’s 7 thanks to the recently released Blu-ray box set. I have only vague memories of watching this when it was first on, chiefly involving Paul Darrow swaggering around in a slightly absurd fashion. In this first series, his calculating, self-centred Avon makes the perfect foil for Gareth Thomas’s passionate and idealistic Blake, and the best episodes combine wonderful character work with tight plotting and a real attempt to summon up a science fiction world. Yes, there is a lot of plastic and tinfoil in the sets and costumes, no not all the guest cast are up to snuff, but I was absolutely engrossed for all 13 episodes nevertheless.