Oh, come on, I’m a man: yes, it’s taken me 15 years to admit I was stupidly wrong about something, but you know men who will never admit it under any circumstances. Man, wrong, admitting it, that’s a Dear Diary moment for anyone.
Although now I’m clearly just putting this off.
Okay.
Earlier this week I rewatched a 2008 episode of “Doctor Who” called “Midnight”. There was no reason, I just flicked past it in the lists, fancied it, watched it, and afterwards was still so wide-eyed into it that I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t just think, you know, “cor” or something intelligent.
I had to go say so online. Please explain to me why. I know you know because you’ve done it too, you’ve raced to enthuse about something but I’m not sure why we do it. When you’re a professional reviewer, sure, you want people to watch this wonderful thing you’ve just seen, especially if it’s not something they might watch anyway, but –
Oh.
Speaking of being a professional reviewer…
After I’d blathered away about how great this was, I still couldn’t sit still, so I read all I could about the episode online and unfortunately that included Wikipedia. It’s unfortunate because to my utter astonishment, Wikipedia quotes me.
God, it would be wonderful if I opened Wikipedia to see the exact tweet I had just sent about how fantastic “Midnight” is. That would be full-on timey-wimey stuff. Instead, it was part-on timey-wimey, because it was quoting me from 2008 and words I’m sure are mine, but which I cannot recall writing.
“William Gallagher of Radio Times was generally positive about the episode,” says whoever edits Wikipedia, “but he said he would have ‘liked just a beat’ more, just a tiny further step before the resolution; can’t even tell you what was missing but I needed one more stage in the journey”.
Clearly, I’ve just changed my mind since then and I shouldn’t really say that this means I was wrong then, or that I am therefore right now. But, truly, no messing, what I wrote back then was more than a different opinion, more than just a bit wrong, it was entirely and fully bullshit.
“Midnight” is perfect and I can only wish I wrote scripts that well.
What apparently seemed to me then to be fractionally too rushed an ending now seems like a brilliant deflating of the tension, and all the more brilliant because it does not forgive its characters for what they’ve done.
It did that on a primetime terrestrial broadcast series that’s ostensibly aimed at families. It did it in an episode of a show that’s run for literally hundreds of episodes yet it took us somewhere new.
I re-read the script by Russell T Davies this morning. Even on the page, even as the page has to list deeply complicated overlapping dialogue, it is mesmerising.