I do think that the big difference between Empire of Death and most of his first set of finales is on that failure of structure - he's leaned on airy logic and magic to pull us through before, but those earlier stories at least felt like they were clicking through the gears properly.

(Which is not to say that they shouldn't have properly used the Daleks by this point - it's frankly hubristic that they haven't).

That's fair! It's another recent example of Davies's gifts for structuring an episode of TV failing him - see also the Empire of Death cliffhanger happening ten minutes too early.

I've got to be honest, of all the (justified) mud to throw at this most recent era, I don't have a problem with the attempts to bring back more obscure villains - I don't think the Rani or Omega particularly worked, but the Toymaker and Sutekh did. You can't JUST lean on the Daleks forever!

In fairness, I do think that trying to get the same sort of heft out of the return of the Rani as he got out of the return of the Master is absolutely doomed to fail, and Davies was frankly sensible to try and dodge the comparison.

That's also the key difference between Clarkson and Trump, by the by - Clarkson loves being laughed at, and Trump simply cannot stand it.

That factor is so key to so many of 21st Century British TV's biggest successes - The Inbetweeners, Gavin & Stacey, etc. People love being able to relate to people who are different to them (it's also a worthwhile comparison because Top Gear was mostly, structurally speaking, a sitcom).

For all that Clarkson is very adept at playing the bloviating right-wing ignoramus, there's enough of a nod and a wink there that I would suspect that he'd be able to bring people along in a way that basically no other public figure would.

And, to bring this back round to the original point, that's a big part of why Clarkson's the obvious answer to the original question in this thread - Top Gear had, and has, an ENORMOUS following, and a huge chunk of that was made up of people who disagreed with it intellectually and politically.

It's 21-century TV's biggest catch of lightning in a bottle - you'd never expect the results that putting that team of people together brought in a million years, and the rest of television's been scrambling for years to recapture it to absolutely no avail.

It divides up pretty neatly - the studio stuff and anything where it's just one presenter have aged pretty poorly in the same way that a lot of 00s stuff has, but get multiple presenters out doing something daft and it absolutely sings, even to this day.

Yeah, I can buy that totally - I didn't guess that May would have made his way all the way over to Labour (even New Labour), but he's pretty palpably more that way inclined than I think anyone wanted to let on to the Top Gear audience.

To be fair, it can be difficult to tell on something so stagey as Top Gear (and the Mexican stuff hitting the air is an indictment of the whole production, not just Hammond), but I can only go on vibes, and Hammond feels like WAY more of a true believer than Clarkson does to me.

Ah, now that's the sort of man who makes this country what it is at its best. That's genuinely delightful to hear.

I'm glad to hear it, and unsurprised - always seemed a nice sort of bloke, and also CLEARLY bad enough at acting that the moments that he tried to put a persona out stuck out like a sore thumb.

If your only point of reference for Clarkson's work was the big Top Gear specials where they go on road trips abroad and absolutely nothing else, you'd basically think he was a yobbish Anthony Bourdain.

It's always been the great cognitive dissonance in his work, really - audiences have seen Clarkson travel the world and speak glowingly about the places he's been to and the people that he's met, and none of it informs his work elsewhere at all.

Go back to any of those shows, and try and look past the personas that the presenters put on, and I think it's under-appreciated but true - Hammond is the furthest right of the three, and all three of them are less right-wing than the shows they presented.

As opposed to, say, James May, who has always been pretty firmly Lib Dem and, post Top Gear/The Grand Tour, can barely be bothered to pretend otherwise any more.

Suggests to me that you might get CGI landscapes and spaceships that can be generated ahead of shooting, but maybe fewer CG assets that actors will actually need to interact with. IIRC Planet of the Dead still has the shortest filming-to-broadcast turnaround in the modern era for that reason.

To be fair, it's also broadly similar to the timeframe they shot The Husbands of River Song in, and that's way less visually "shitshitshit we have no money at all" than Eve was.

To be fair, they could have just done with her what they did with Jamie post-Faceless Ones and stripped any of the specifics of her backstory out of anything more than passing comments, but that would have clanged far harder than that, and I'm not sure the raw material's there to make it worthwhile.

As it stands, you don't empathise with her or root for her - you end up just feeling sorry for her for being dropped into situations where she's utterly unequipped to deal with basically anything she's confronted with.

Not without a pretty massive reconceptualisation, I don't think. She's all at sea way too much of the time, doesn't have Leela's self-sufficiency, and frankly she seems like a bit of a liability.

See the absolute glut of movies that shamelessly rip off its screenplay - you lose count of big action movies where they capture the villain halfway through before they turn the tables from captivity (The Avengers and Skyfall jump readily to mind without more than a second's thought).

I don't know, I still think The Dark Knight cast an oversized shadow - it's not quite as obvious as the 2010s land grab for cinematic universes, but the populist blockbusters of that decade generally owe it a huge debt.

I just don't particularly think it can reasonably be interpreted as that, personally - if you see "I think of this as quite a gay show" as "go away straight people", I don't think that's a reasonable step to take.

It's not like what he's describing is some unknown or radical way of engaging with the show either - "Doctor Who as Gay Show" FAR pre-dates his involvement with it.

I don't really think it's a particularly wise thing for the showrunner to say, but I don't really buy this either, any more than anyone who considers Doctor Who a kids show is telling adults to sod off.

Ah, I see, apologies.

I don't think that's right about Gatwa's contracts, though - my understanding is that Sex Education would have had first refusal on him for the duration of their shoot, regardless of how long it took.