David Tennant has featured in both the most impressive and most disappointing things I have watched on television.
The BBC/RSC adaptation of Hamlet, featuring the RSC cast from their recent production, was extremely enjoyable. Patrick Stewart was outstanding, as was the whole cast, including David Tennant in the title role – he played it very hyper/manic and some similarities to his part in Doctor Who were noticeable at times. I’d still consider his portrayal a success. Mariah Gale also impressed as Ophelia, in fact the entire cast was impressive to some degree or other.
I really wish I had made it to Stratford-upon-avon to see this on the stage as I was hoping. I am very tempted to make a point of going to see the RSC production of Romeo and Juliet, starring Mariah Gale, next year. It has been some considerable time since I saw Shakespeare on stage.
The first part of David Tennant’s final Doctor Who story was far less impressive. After Waters of Mars I was expecting an amazing end but Russell T Davies has, yet again, ruined everything it would appear. I really hope that the second part is a huge improvement, it would be disappointing if David Tennant shuffled out of the role in a disappointing non-story composed of half-formed ideas in the can’t-write-science-fiction head of Russell T Davies.
I’ll give Russell T Davies due credit, he has been a very good show runner and updated and reinvented Doctor Who but as an actual writer of Doctor Who stories he is severely lacking. I wish he had just had a role as Executive Producer / Script Editor and let more capable people write the actual stories. People such as Steven Moffat, who is taking over his job for the fifth series – but I am only cautiously optimistic about Moffat taking on the job, as a ’show runner’ his previous examples seem a bit messy and unfocussed – Jekyll for example.
Other fun Christmas TV moments including catching the 1970s Johnny Cash Christmas specials on SkyArts again, watching the Elfen Lied DVD set I was given and an extremely epic new Poirot story on ITV.
This blog has no defined purpose other than to exist as a, mostly ignored, corner of the internet where things that I do can conjeal into a sticky mess and fester. I am twenty-eleven years old, single, I live in Nottingham, UK, I sit at a desk prodding data all day and in the evenings I study Art History, usually without any trousers on.
