Doctor Who: Top Secret. Source Omega Eyes Only

Universal Exclusive. Forget "Doctor Who Confidential" - tonight, this blog reveals for the first time the casting secret behind the new series. I have been handed a secret dossier by my inside source, whom I will call simply "Omega", that contains a transcript of Matt Smith's audition. It's surprisingly short:

Steven Moffat: Matt, thanks for coming in today, and sorry for all the secrecy. I guess you know how big a deal it would be if this got out too early.

Matt Smith: No, no, it's fine. I understand completely.

SM: Before you read for it, there is one question I've wanted to ask. You're a very fine actor and I've always enjoyed your work, but you're also, well, very young, and worse, you're part of that lost generation that grew up without Doctor Who. Why do you feel that you've got what it takes?

MS: Well, I've made no secret of the fact that I've never really watched the series, and to be honest, I've always thought that the premise was a bit, well, preposterous.

SM: So why are you here?

MS: It's just that, well...

SM: Well?

MS: ...It sounds so silly. You promise you won't laugh?

SM: I've seen the scripts for "The End of Time".

MS: Ok. Out with it: I have these dreams.

SM: Dreams?

MS: Dreams of impossible things. Other times, alien planets, quarries. And in them, I always seem to be battling monsters, or at least overgrown condiment sets. And there's this blue box...

SM: Do you by any chance own a fob watch?

MS: Funny you should ask. I've had it as long as I can remember. Some sort of heirloom.

SM: Right. Look, Matt, I'm not going to beat around the bush here. You've got the part. Just don't tell anyone, ok?

MS: Uh, sure. Gosh. I mean, I thought you'd want me to do screen tests, or at least read for it.

SM: I don't think that'll be necessary. But Matt...

MS: Yes?

SM: Could you bring that watch to the first read-through?

OK, you've got me. I made that up. But how else do we explain Matt Smith's frankly astonishing affinity for the role? Last night's "The Beast Below" was only his second episode, but it's already clear that he and Steven Moffat have both a clear vision of who the 11th Doctor is, and the ability to execute on it.

Last week was a promising beginning. This week, we saw enough to suggest that we are at the start of something a bit special. The ease with which Smith handles the various demands of playing the Doctor bears comparison with Christopher Reeve's Superman. Both actors stepped into a role heavy with the baggage of expectations, and wore it lightly.

I've been trying to avoid making a comparison with David Tennant's Doctor. He was the best Doctor since Tom Baker, perhaps the best ever, and deserves a big share of the credit for securing the series's future. Two weeks ago, I'd have said it was unfair to compare Smith to Tennant until he'd had time to get into his stride. Not necessary. The boot, I'm afraid, is now on the other foot.

The Doctor's best moments are often the smallest. My favourite of recent times was the moment in "Tooth and Claw" when the Doctor first sees the werewolf and can't help but declare "Aren't you wonderful?", even when he should be running. It's a line that encapsulates the essential otherness of the Doctor: he doesn't see the world like us, and he shouldn't, because he's an alien.

What Moffat and Smith have done is to build, as near as possible, the whole performance out of moments like that, and with admirable economy. The climactic lines in this week's episode - in which the Doctor is faced with doing something so against his nature that he would no longer be the same person afterwards - were delivered in a manner that was almost throwaway, and were all the more effective for it.

It helps a lot that Matt Smith is physically a bit odd. He wears his own body like it's new to him and doesn't quite fit, and his distinctive face is capable of looking weird when shot and lit from the right angles - used to great effect in the extreme close-up reaction shot at the end of the episode when he understands where he's gone wrong and Amy Pond's got it right.

Because, even better, he's fallible. Karen Gillan's Amy had much more to do this week, and one of those things was to out-think the Doctor. It was an important marker for both characters and for the whole series; Gillan nailed it, and the script very nearly did. This is a woman who's spent half her life obsessed by the Doctor. Right at this moment she knows this new incarnation almost better than he does, because she's experienced all but a few minutes of his timeline, and had years to think about who he is - much longer than he has himself. Gillan made it show, but the script could have done with giving her more time to put it on screen. The full impact didn't hit me until a while after the episode ended.

But I can forgive that, because I suspect there will be more to come. I can also forgive a script that didn't quite hang together. I've struggled to put a finger on quite what was missing. The plot was a collection of familiar elements (my wife, among others, spotted similarities to a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin) but it served the character moments (which mattered more), it was pleasingly balanced (no real black or white, even if the grey was a bit uniform), and in the end no-one had to die (and to those who want more terror, I say - phooey. This is family viewing, and the level of terror was just right for my five and two year olds). The dialogue was crisp and had a lot of delightful grace notes, but we should expect nothing less from the man who wrote Coupling.

The problem, it strikes me, is the world-building. The society depicted in the episode, three quarters of the UK crammed together on a single spaceship, was atmospheric, but would it actually hang together under closer scrutiny? I'm not sure. This is always a problem for sci-fi series, especially the ones that need to visit new cultures on a regular basis. A series like Doctor Who, with a lot of episodes to turn out in a compressed shooting schedule, can't realistically hope to reach the coherence of something like Pixar's Monsters, Inc, but I can't help feel that a bit more attention to how this society works, beyond what you see on screen, would have paid dividends.

Nevertheless, looking back at my wishlist for the new series, I have high hopes that most of them will be granted. Except for the one about the theme music, but I guess I could just turn the sound down on the titles and download the original to play instead.

Doctor Who: A Manifesto

My son loves Doctor Who. Perhaps not quite as much as he loves Ben 10, but enough that he identified the Doctor's space suit in tonight's the Waters of Mars as being the one he wore in the Satan Pit.

I am pleased to say that, in keeping with the great traditions of Doctor Who watching, he has spontaneously gravitated to watching the scary bits from behind the sofa. (I'm less pleased to say that, being the child he is, his approaches to getting behind said sofa are often more appropriate to stuntmen or a kind of clumsy Cirque du Soleil than a 4 year old, but he won't be told.)

Anyway, that's beside today's point. This is kind of off-topic, but with the impending regime change (new Doctor, new showrunner, new Tardis, new companion), I thought it was the right sort of time to put down a few thoughts on how Doctor Who could be improved.

Is that heresy? Russell T. Davies has done a fantastic job of resurrecting a show that died through becoming an irrelevant parody of itself. He's made Doctor Who matter again, turned it into a mini-TV empire with its spin-offs, secured its future and established the principle of credible production values. He has even, and I speak as a child of the Tom Baker years, given us the best Doctor so far.

And yet... I am sure I am not the only person who watches the programme with a mixture of admiration and frustration. There is so much that is right about the current incarnation, but it has some persistent flaws that hold it back from true greatness. It's like putting the wrong tyres on an Aston Martin: a subtle mistake, but all the more frustrating for the fact that it could so easily be fixed.

Ironically, these are thrown into sharper relief because of another sci-fi reboot and close contemporary. Battlestar Galactica started with less promising source material and achieved more. Not only was it compelling entertainment, it is arguably one of the best television shows ever made and asked some very serious questions about what happens to a society engaged in a conflict with an enemy that has a very different ideology. Of course, Battlestar did not set out to be family entertainment, which removes some constraints, but it tackled its brief with a rigorous intellectual and emotional honesty. The situations and resolutions had an internal consistency; the characters behaved in ways that made sense both in the broader context of the series and the immediate demands of the episode. All of which meant that we were more prepared to swallow the big things we had to swallow (Baltar's visions of Six; Six's visions of Baltar; how on earth the Cylon Earth fitted into the continuity - still wondering about that one).

To pull that off, you have to be tough on your scripts and on your characters. There have to be hard choices for both the characters and the script writers. Quite often, the character's flaws have to come to the fore, quite often - regardless of how much you love them - they have to suffer. You can't easily cheat a big character moment. It has to be earned.

Of course, the Doctor is different. He's not human, and as the last timelord he's got different hangups and a lot of power. Who's to say that he wouldn't behave the way he behaves? Still, my feeling is that a few too many shortcuts are taken.

So, here are my suggestions as to how to improve Doctor Who. I make them in the full knowledge that Stephen Moffat has already made his choices, established his milieu and put his own stamp on Doctor Who. We just haven't seen them yet. So maybe it's more of a wishlist. Or a kind of Gallifreyan bingo card: if you like my points, watch the new series with the list to hand, and if you collect the set you are fully entitled to jump up and down like you've won the jackpot, because you will be watching a very special piece of television.

1) If you're going to throw a big emotional punch, don't pull it. Shoving Rose into a different dimension, making Donna forget everything. These are cop outs for us and the Doctor. And it's more of a cop out if you bring them back. It even undermines future episodes because you know that the production team don't necessarily mean it.

And yet the same team are capable of getting it spectacularly right when they work it through properly: look at the emotional debris from John Smith's decision to open the watch in the Family of Blood.

2) Intellectual Honesty: no easy get outs. The Doctor is a timelord. He has knowledge we can't dream of and a ship that does stuff so far beyond our comprehension that it's not even remotely possible according to our physics. He can also make mobile phones work anywhere in space (and, remarkably, know when to place a call. Anyone else wonder how Rose's phone knows how to call the 20th Century from The End of the World?). He has a sonic screwdriver that can do all sorts of wonderful things.

We understand, accept and embrace this stuff when it's there so that the plot doesn't have to get hung up on basic technical problems. We delight in when it's done properly, with wit and common sense (for instance, when the psychic paper doesn't work or, better, works as an Oyster card).

But if you're going to make the technology a big part of the plot, you should invest the effort to ensure it makes sense. One of the worst examples is the end of the first series. Rose absorbs the power of the Tardis (eh?). With which she writes the words Bad Wolf all over the place (eh? why? why not something useful?), blows up a load of Daleks (fair enough), and makes Captain Jack immortal (eh?). But the power of the Tardis is too much for a human to carry, so the Doctor snogs her to get it back (eh? So there's no radiation damage from carrying it around for half an episode? So all this energy can just be packaged up and passed between people in a kiss? And once the Doctor's regenerated, where did all that energy go?). Looks to me like they got so caught up in the big idea of Rose saving the Doctor that they forgot to make it make any sense.

For that matter, why does the Face of Boe just tell the Doctor "You are not alone" when (assuming he is the eventual end state of Captain Jack) he could have told him something useful and saved them all a lot of pain? And why does the Master's chameleon arch helpfully choose a name that hints to the Doctor (and only the Doctor) who he really is (albeit in a pretty daft way)?

The good news is that one of the episodes that really nailed the logic of what it was doing (and didn't cheat or take an easy way out) was Blink. Writer? Stephen Moffat.

3) Know when to stop. Making the Doctor old with a laser screwdriver? Neat. Like it. Plenty of pathos there. Turning him into Dobby? Stop it. It's getting silly. Where's Graham Chapman when you need him?

4) Don't over-explain. One of the reasons Blink worked was that it didn't try to explain too much. The idea of quantum locking was a neat plot device, but doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny and I'm pretty sure is out of whack with current interpretations of quantum theory. But it didn't matter, because it wasn't laboured in the dialogue.

5) Use the Tardis intelligently. Maybe it's just me, but I find it very silly that the wooden box bit of the Tardis physically travels through the time vortex (with or without Captain Jack holding onto the outside). I always thought the outside was just a convenient way of accessing the Tardis from wherever you chose to park it. So the Tardis dragging spaceships behind it (as in the Satan Pit) just looks wrong.

Worse, to do so misses out on some great dramatic possibilities. Imagine it: Rose has finally understood that the spacecraft has lost its battle with gravity and will fall into the black hole. Then everything goes black and very quiet. Gradually the crew realise that they aren't being ripped apart by tidal forces, and that there seems to be air outside. Nervously, they crack the airlock and step out to find that they are in a huge room. Which is, of course, inside the Tardis. The Doctor has materialised on top of them. Much better than "we invented gravity" (and it's a measure of how good David Tennant is that he just about gets away with that line).

And again, Blink used the Tardis intelligently to resolve the plot.

You can't make the Tardis a plot device every week, because we'd end up with a desperate effort to think of new ways to use it (think Asimov and the laws of robotics). Fortunately, you don't have to. But when it is a plot device, you have to use it logically and creatively.

6) Do the math on Daleks. More accurately: the stats. It's important to understand the correlation between the number of Daleks in an episode and the quality of that episode. Hint: the slope is negative.

The same general rule applies to a number of other features of Doctor Who, to wit:
a) the number of villainous races in the season finale
b) the preposterousness of the final plot
c) the amount of backstory attributed to the principal villain
d) the number of heavy handed hints dropped about what's going to happen.

This in film-making is called the "Van Helsing Effect". You know what I mean.

7) Be careful not to burn through good villains. School Reunion was one of my favourite episodes. The plot pretty much held water and it asked some big questions of all of the characters, especially the Doctor (What responsibilities do you take on in having a companion? Do I choose being alone among humanity or a peer among godlike beings?), to which the cast rose splendidly, especially David Tennant. The potentially whimsical return of K-9 was handled with wit and empathy, and earned its payoff.

One niggle I had was that it introduced a memorable villain in Anthony Head's chief krillitane, and then (seemingly) bumped him off. There aren't many actors with the range and lightness of touch to make a really good Doctor Who villain - someone who can hold the screen when pitted against the Doctor (and here's hoping that Matt Smith can reach the bar that David Tennant has set). Don't kill them off lightly.

8) Hire a science consultant. I don't mean someone to make it all scientifically plausible, but someone who is a) scientifically literate, b) science-fictionally literate, c) able to test the logic of what you're doing and d) cares about getting it right but e) has a sense of humour. David Langford would fit the bill very nicely.

9) Remix the theme tune. For me, the orchestral arrangement just doesn't cut it. It's too, well, normal. This is Doctor Who! We need theme music that sounds unearthly. Since the Radiophonic Workshop is no more, you need to find someone who knows how to make those kind of noises without it sounding gimmicky, arch or overblown. My shortlist is, well, short: Radiohead. My wife doesn't think they'd do it, but I think she's softened her stance after half of them recorded a song for Harry Potter.

And there we have it. Actually quite a short list, and not that hard to do. As the examples I've picked show, for every story that's jarred there's almost always another one that has nailed it.

Of course, this is just an overgrown fanboy's wishlist, and I know that not everyone will agree with me (not even my son. He loves the end of Series 3, Dobby and all). But I like to believe that a Doctor Who that adopted these small tweaks would be all the better for it, and I hope one day to find out whether I'm right or not.

For my daughter

After a slightly flippant start to the blog, something a bit more heartfelt. Next month we're holding a naming ceremony (essentially a secular christening) for our daughter. This is a poem I wrote to try to capture what I want to say, with apologies to W.B. Yeats.

If I could spin a thread of hard-won lessons
And stretch them taut on some celestial loom
And weave a weft of hopes and dreams
Knot them with wisdom
Sing the colours of success and happiness
Tie back the loose ends of misfortune
What a rich tapestry it would be
And how it would smother you
So though I spread them before you
A loose skein of experience earned, choices made, of hopes and fears
Do not tread softly, though you tread on my dreams
Test them with the weight of your ambition. Tear them up if you find them wanting
Run roughshod across them towards your own dreams
And if they bring you closer, it will have been enough

Manifest

Shipping contents:

1 (one) blogger
- Male, late 30s, living in South West London
- Atheist, and opinionated about Britain's antediluvian system of religious schools
- Cyclist, oftentimes with one or more offspring on board
- Psychologist by training, if not practice

1 (one) spouse
- Female
- Secular humanist (which apparently is legally more equal than atheist)

1 (one) son
- Male
- 4 going on 17
- Still disappointed that there isn't school at weekends
- Specialist subjects: Pixar, Disney, Doctor Who, Ben 10, Crazy Hair
- Made entirely of elbows

1 (one) daughter
- Female
- 19 months
- Experimental Philologist: Fluent in an obscure language known only to one other child. Systematically testing the boundaries of English
- Specialist subjects: Food, The Application of Biro to All Known Surfaces, Different Ways to Pronounce the Word "No"
- Attends nursery. May believe she teaches nursery.

Two (two) Power Supplies
- For installation in Son and Daughter units
- Marketing blurb: New! An inexhaustible source of energy (TM) for your little darlings
- IMPORTANT NOTICE: Not suitable for adults. Unfortunately.
- Technical Specification (M): Requires one of each design of sock in your house (not supplied). Supplies limitless noise, expense, broken things and general untidiness. May open a permanent wormhole to a dimension where entropy is much higher.
- Technical Specification (F): Magical portal to the home of the Gods of Order. Requires regular sacrifices of food (not supplied. Rice pudding preferred). Generates structure and routine even when you want a lie in. NOTE: May result in large quantities of instructions.

Seventeen (17) Spare Elbows
- In case you run out.