The following article contains spoilers for Tip Toe. You’re not wrong, I chose an interesting time to write an article about Russell T Davies. The man who, in 2005, brought Doctor Who back to life might have turned out to be, in 2025, the man who killed it off again. […]
Pop Culture
Seahorse (Raindance Film Festival 2026) A Compassionate Feature Debut
Having just completed its run at the UK Raindance Film Festival, Seahorse is an affecting and well-intentioned feature debut from Canadian actor & filmmaker Aisha Evelyna. As well as writing and directing the film, Evelyna also takes the lead role of Nola, a Toronto woman seeking stability following a stay […]
Littermates (Dances with Films 2026) A Whimsical, Well‑Crafted British Oddity
Scott Tinkham & Michael Woloson’s feature debut fills me with the best kind of nostalgia. Before the most destructive vote in British political history, independent British cinema was in a far healthier place, to the extent that it felt like there was a genuine breakthrough of a new creative voice […]
Kikuyu Land (Sheffield Doc Fest 2026) A journey into the truths a nation keeps buried
Paraphrasing one of the younger subjects of Andrew H. Brown and Bea Wangondu’s documentary Kikuyu Land (fresh from screening at Sheffield’s DocFest), a young man who has probably seen far too much far too young notes that, like any country, there’s the version the world sees and the version kept […]
Outside the Blue Box: Mark Sheppard in Supernatural (2009-17)
Don’t you just love it when we get a TV crossover? The Jetsons meet The Flintstones, The Simpsons meets Family Guy, Friends meets ER! As Whovians, it’s incredibly rare that we’re treated to such an event, given the Whoniverse is so gigantically huge already, looping in other TV shows feels […]
Doctor Who A-Z #122: Time-Flight (1982)
Time-Flight is one of those Doctor Who stories that people tend to criticise just by saying what happens in it, as though you’ll never come up with a dismissal of it more damning than “this is the one where they thought they could successfully film Concorde crash-landing on prehistoric Earth”. And that’s completely […]
Doctor Who A-Z #121: Earthshock (1982)
Back in the Usenet days of Doctor Who fandom, people used to talk about “frock” versus “gun” episodes of Doctor Who. Some people liked the show for its “frock” elements (camp humour, weird juxtapositions, eccentric characters), some for its “gun” elements (military action, recurring monsters, violent deaths). I was never sure how seriously […]
Doctor Who A-Z #120: Black Orchid (1982)
The decision to spend two episodes of Peter Davison’s debut season trying to revive the “pure historical” – a subgenre of Doctor Who where the Doctor and the TARDIS are the only science-fictional elements, which hasn’t been attempted since Patrick Troughton’s sophomore story – is usually regarded as a baffling […]
Doctor Who A-Z #119: The Visitation (1982)
So here we are, the first serial to bear a screenwriting credit for Eric Saward. To say his rise was meteoric would be an understatement; not yet forty and without a Doctor Who story to his name, he’s already the script editor at this point. The happiest thing to note […]
Doctor Who A-Z #118: Kinda (1982)
Kinda doesn’t make it easy for you. Normally even the most intricately plotted classic-series Doctor Who story will at least work superficially as an adventure story, but – even with a ticking clock, a giant monster and a madman in charge of a colonial base – Kinda is clearly more […]