Telegraph Publish Scathing Piece on Doctor Who, Moffat Speaks on Deep Breath

“Ever since Doctor Who returned in 2005 I have been mystified as to why it is so regularly hailed as a touchstone of British broadcasting. Yet to question Doctor Who’s pre-eminence is a heresy akin to slagging off Julie Walters. The answer to one of television’s most bizarre dogmas lies, I suspect, somewhere between nostalgia and cold, hard cash.”

Wilson is also critical of the show’s writing under the stewardship of Steven Moffat:

“With showrunner Steven Moffat at the reins, Doctor Who is stranded somewhere between complexity and simplicity. It employs some brilliant, grown-up writers who want to thrill and scare and make clever nods to past storylines and Whovian mythology. But ultimately you get a jarring contrast between the banality of the story and the ingenuity of the discourse. At times the dialogue is so pleased with itself that if it were a guest at a dinner party you would stick its face in the soup tureen.”

And believes Peter Capaldi “knows he cannot escape” from the show:

“What of Peter Capaldi, who plays the newly regenerated Doctor? He looked like a very good actor continually surprised to find himself in a children’s programme from which he knows he cannot escape for several years.”

Full Article Here

Steven Moffat meanwhile has spoken on Deep Breath and some of the thoughts behind the episode in a new interview published on sciencefiction.com.

The Moff says:

“I wanted a quite simple menace for the first episode. I didn’t want it to be wildly complicated as it were because obviously the grandstanding at the center of it is a new Doctor and a new relationship with a companion, so you really just want the villains to be lurching around offing people now and then with quite a simple backstory, but I also just quite liked the idea. I think I actually stole this joke from ‘Colombo’ that the doctor’s completely forgotten a previous adventure. Because you would. You just would… We spend a lot of time talking about the character when in fact in the episodes they are so full of incident and drama and adventure that there’s barely any time to talk about the character. We just sort of get on with dealing with whatever threat has to be dealt with, and yet there’s something enigmatic and appealing about the character that makes me want to talk about it all the time.”

You can read the full interview taken during the Doctor Who World Tour Here