Billie Piper at the Gates of Dawn

I've kept away from Doctor Who for long enough this year, but last week's episode was a goad too far; when they start poking about in detective fiction and table-rapping Agatha Christie, then I'm compelled to comment (the same would be true of the Dickens episode a few years ago, except that this site didn't exist then). "The Unicorn and the Wasp" was fairly characteristic of the series so far this year - nothing dreadful, but nothing you'd want to watch twice, either. The first half promised an interesting dialogue between the Christiean world (admittedly, a version of her novels collapsed into three dimensional Cluedo, which is at least two more dimensions than the 1990s televised version) and a huge murdering wasp; the second half, unfortunately, took a banality pill and revealed that the giant wasp was really a shape-shifting alien creature hiding in the guise of a vicar, and that all this craziness was the real reason for Christie disappearing for a while. Add some strange directorial decisions (how best to convey that Christie turned up again as an amnesiac at a hotel in Harrogate? Ah, we could have someone say it, and then cut to Christie looking confused beside a big sign saying THE HARROGATE HOTEL. Whaddya think? Too subtle?) and some rather rushed narrative twists, and the results safely veered away from the potentially fascinating collision of genres so interestingly threatened at the beginning.

I was reminded of two things watching this; firstly, Gerald Heard's 1941 crime novel A Taste for Honey, which I'd just been asked to endorse for a forthcoming reprint. Here the murderer breeds a particularly aggressive type of bees, who fatally attack anyone who comes into contact with a certain substance. On paper (well, on a website) it sounds silly, but the tone is such that the interaction between the almost science-fiction elements and the crime narrative work rather well (as I said, it's a cross between G. K. Chesterton and John Wyndham). This is where "The Unicorn and the Wasp" could have been heading, although the fact that the wasp in question was huge lends the potential of a Magritte-esque surrealism. Instead, the second thing I was reminded of while watching it was Timothy West's performance in Tales of the Unexpected back in the 1980s, where West gradually turns into a bee, complete with interspersed 'buzzes' in the dialogue. It wasn't a particularly effective narrative trick then; the fact that it was reproduced almost exactly in nu-Who doesn't make it any better, no matter how flashy your CGI is.

The Christie book titles crammed into the script didn't help, either. By the end, I wondered why they hadn't included someone called Evans, so he couldn't be asked something, or a classic Doctor Who countdown heading towards zero, or maybe a depressive called Cypress. While we're on the subject, why are Doctor Who's historical celebrities almost always literary figures (except for Queen Victoria in the second series)? I would like to see this as an underlying message of "Hey kids - reading is cool!", but I also suspect there's a hint of "Hey kids - reading is historical!", notwithstanding this episode's revelation that people will be reading Christie well into the year five million (and still with the freaky 1970s book covers, too). Perhaps next series, we could see Jimi Hendrix defeat Cybermen at Woodstock, or perhaps Syd Barrett and daleks. Actually, anything Doctor Who can come up with is probably fairly pedestrian compared to the kind of things that were running through Syd Barrett's head. But it would allow for an episode crammed full of Pink Floyd references: "You people are animals!" "We're on the dark side of the moon", "go at 'em, hearty mother!" It would be better than all the sinister corporations and gas creatures we're getting week after week, anyway.