KEY POINTS:
The seasonal's timing's a bit off, but if you can't get your head around the concept of time travel, then you're not likely to get Doctor Who in the first place.
When Voyage of the Damned screened rather nearer to a Christmas date in Britain, with Kylie Minogue
as the Doctor's sidekick/love interest, it generated a few shock-horror headlines along the lines of: The Singing Budgie Can Act! Just kidding. Nobody, as far as I can ascertain, got overly excited about Kylie's ability to act.
But it rated its meteorites off. Who wouldn't want to watch Kylie, in a little, sexy French maid's outfit with lace-up boots, save the world by driving a fork lift at a bad man who was mostly a machine with a head?
This - and all the rest of the very attractive, lavish nonsense - made for an entertaining evening in.
If you were really watching for Kylie's acting, you probably thought it really was Christmas Eve last night, and you can get help for that sort of delusion.
I must admit I was really watching for Kylie's acting, but not for the reason that I was suffering under any delusion that she would be any good. Don't invite me to your place to share your Christmas festivities: I'm not a nice person. I hoped she would be abysmal so that I could write sneering things about just how abysmal.
As Astrid, a waitress on a cruiseliner space ship called The Titanic (there were a few shock-horror headlines about that) who wanted to see the stars - nice touch that - she did a perfectly competent job of a deliberately silly role. Silly name too. There's an anagram in there for Doctor Who nuts - Astrid/Tardis, geddit?
She managed to mangle her own Australian accent, which takes some talent, but she was really rather sweet. Yes, she was cheesy, but if anything she wasn't quite cheesy enough. This is Doctor Who and the thing is cheesier than an overly ripe Camembert left outside on a hot summer's day.
Astrid: "You look good for 903."
The Doctor: "You should see me in the morning."
Astrid: "Okay."
Voyage of the Damned was very, very silly. The Titanic was owned by the evil head, Max Capricorn, who was determined the craft would crash into the Earth as some sort of lunatic payback for the members of his board who had given him the boot.
There were a host of Angel hosts who had been programmed to kill all the guests on board so there would be no witnesses to mad Max's scheme. This made no sense whatsoever. If the ship crashed, they'd all die anyway.
But you don't watch Doctor Who in the hope that anything is going to make sense. No, you watch it to see the angel hosts decapitate people with halos. There was a delightful character called Mr Copper who claimed to have a degree in Earthonomics - he got it from, I think, a dry cleaning shop. He was there to provide much merry nonsense about the meaning of Christmas. "Every Christmas the London people go to war ... They then eat the Turkey people." And, "any day now they start boxing".
It was completely bonkers and I loved every minute of it - even Kylie's acting.
