Last Christmas

I think it’s safe to say that my children have now all stopped believing in Santa Claus. The youngest has pretty much worked out what is going on and, even if she can’t quite fathom out how the sleight of hand is done, she does appreciate that the magic is all done by Mum and Dad. It’s inevitable, I suppose, but in a way it’s rather sad that we are now past that point. Having said that, even the eldest (now almost 13) likes to play along with the pretence and have a stocking of goodies to sort through on Christmas morning although this year I forgot to buy the tangerines in.

In fact, it wasn’t just the tangerines. I also forgot to buy in white wine for Christmas dinner as well as milk and margarine. In addition I didn’t get around to doing any of the ironing so I was down to wearing my Doctor Who T-shirt. Never mind, I wasn’t planning on going out anywhere – except to the local convenience store to buy the wine and milk. It’s fortunate that he was open on Christmas Day and he seemed quite pleased to see me – quite bemused, in fact, as I had rather forgotten that I looked like this:

Our other Christmas traditions are all going strong from choosing and decorating the tree, through to eating far too much and collapsing in front of the TV for the Queen’s speech. In true Royle Family style, lying around in front of the telly seems to be a tradition in itself whether this is watching just about the only new Top Of The Pops of the year (which gives me my only excuse to grump about how rubbish modern music is), seeing the animated movie or what has now been a tradition for the last 10 years and watching the festive edition of Doctor Who.

I normally give the Christmas Who a little leeway as, unless they are trying to introduce a new character or write out an old one, the episodes follow the format of a seasonal “romp” and tend to be much better enjoyed when not taken too seriously. Given that Last Christmas was to be The Doctor meeting Santa Claus I wasn’t expecting too much. What we actually got was both far darker than I could have imagined and far more like serious Sci-Fi than I could have hoped for. The basic premise of not being able to determine the difference between dreams and reality was fantastically done with the actual real world not entirely clear until the final scenes . This reminded me a little of the film Inception but I think Doctor Who pulled this off more effectively as the claustrophobic sets allowed for a closer examination of the characters unlike the film which became swamped by its own cinematography.

I’m interested to see where the character of Clara is going to go now. I had expected her to leave as her story arc was seemingly at an end (in fact she has had two arcs already) but I’m pleased that Jenna Coleman is staying as she works well with Capaldi. We’ll have to see where this goes in Series 9. I felt that Matt Smith did one series too few (which rather accounted for last Christmas’s episode feeling like it has a full series worth of plot crammed into 60 minutes) so I’m just hoping that Jenna isn’t making one series too many.