How ironic...

...that people still think the biggest problem with "old" Dr Who is that the sets were wobbly, when throughout the final episode of the new series of Dr Who all I could think when Daleks lined up to invade the earth was "if only one of them would wobble a bit they might look like real Daleks".

Alas, none of them wobbled and they continued to look as unconvincing as Daleks from the 1990s computer game Dalek Attack as realised on an Amstrad CPC464.

Marianne Levy wonders if the whole episode was "a bit of a let down". Well yes, it was. Not because it wasn't exciting and so on, but the whole revelation about what "bad wolf" was, as an ending to a story arc, frankly rubbish and felt a little bit as though Russell T. Davies hadn't really decided what he wanted it to be in the first place. The weirdo fans who write regular weblog entries about the series had much more exciting ideas.

It has also been accused of being a classic case of deus ex machina, something which I have already commented seems to be a bit of a Russell T hallmark. But in fact, the whole TARDIS magical powers element was based on a deus ex machina from a previous episode, which surely makes it a deus ex deus ex machina. (My Latin grammar may not be entirely correct, so perhaps we should call it a deus ex tardisinia or something.)

More worrying, surely, is the fact that David Tennant delivered his few lines in the same voice as Michael Palin's cockney shop-owner in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. That would indeed make for an irritating characterisation of the Doctor. ("Nah, the Cybermen aren't dead...they're just pining for the fjords....")

Anyway. It was jolly good fun, it just wasn't as good as Tom Bell told me it was. He thought it was worth losing oxygen over, which is funny because as a rule Tom Bell is not easily pleased. He was certainly not pleased when he got locked out of my house last night.

No, I concur with Marianne. Oh, except she says that "the CGI was cool", so obviously she wasn't bothered by the lack of wobbling. I thought it looked kinda naff, personally.

On a completely different subject, has anyone else discovered the Hyperion Records home page? It allows you to download tracks from all of their CDs, so if you have a half-decent broadband connection you can sit at your computer listening to some of the finest recordings currently available to man.