Sunday 25 December 2005

The Christmas Invasion

Just nine months after Doctor Who’s twenty-first century iteration burst triumphantly onto our screens, we all get together with Steven B to watch as the BBC’s flagship drama introduces its exciting new lead to nearly 10 million viewers on Christmas Day on BBC One. It ends up going pretty well.

Notes and links

We were all more or less certain that David Tennant would get the Doctor Who gig on the strength of his charismatic performance in Russell T Davies’s Casanova (2005). It’s worth a look — it definitely feels like an audition piece for Doctor Who.

Christopher Eccleston’s audition piece for Doctor Who was probably not his performance as cat theatre proprietor Dougal Siepp, which you can get a sense of here (if you can tolerate a terrible racial stereotype played by Steve Pemberton). In fact, Eccleston’s real audition piece is role as Steve Baxter in RTD’s The Second Coming (2003), where he plays a 40-year-old man working in a video shop who discovers that he is (really) the Second Coming of Christ.

Here’s the Dead Ringers sketch Christmas at Doctor Who’s (2005).

If you’re not sure what we mean by the Doctor Who theme’s “middle eight”, here’s the description from the TARDIS Fandom site. And here’s what it sounds like in Murray’s first version of the Doctor Who theme.

On 2 May 1982, during the Falklands War, the Argentinian cruiser ARA General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine outside a declared exclusion zone and while Peru was trying to negotiate peace between the two sides. 323 people died.

Flight Through Entirety’s commentary on The Christmas Invasion was Episode 147: The Commentary Invasion.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Steven B is @steedstylin, and Brendan is @brandybongos. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into your house and leave fruit in your bed.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over a week, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We just released Episode 5, in which you can hear us talking about the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we cheered on Star Trek: The Next Generation as it took its first confident steps into its imperial phase, with The Survivors.