David tennant

The new Doctor in Doctor Who has blond hair, blue eyes and a firm handshake, dresses in a splendid red coat and has an exciting catchphrase: ‘Hounds are running! Tally ho!’ No, not really. The new Doctor is so very much what you’d expect the new Doctor to be like that you can guess without my telling you. And it’s not that I think that Ncuti Gatwa is going to be bad as the Doctor. On the contrary, from what little I’ve glimpsed of him so far, he seems charismatic, energetic, and fun. But I do wish the BBC commissars responsible for the series would try to make their social

Good, starring David Tennant, needs more dosh spent on it. The former Doctor Who plays John, a literary academic living in Germany in 1933, whose cosy life is disrupted by troublesome females. His mum is a cranky basket case dying in hospital and his wife is a manic depressive who can’t look after their kids. Both women speak with Scottish accents. John has a fling with a third Scotswoman who studies Goethe at his university. Weirdly, all three women – mum, wife and girlfriend – are played by the same actress. Couldn’t the producers fork out for a proper cast? They certainly didn’t spend more than a fiver on the

All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts, of course. Lowe’s ‘luck’ is that he happens to be friends, neighbours, or have starred, with everyone he interviews Let’s start with Literally! With Rob Lowe. An hour-long conversation between the most swoonable actor in the world who we’ve all forgotten, and everyone he knows and likes, from Alec Baldwin and Oprah Winfrey to St Elmo’s Fire co-star Demi Moore. It’s a wonderful and eye-opening listen. Lowe combines the enthusiasm and curiosity of the best interviewers with a knowledge and experience that makes conversation flow until the cup spilleth over.

The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode was terrific at demonstrating how persistent certain characters and ideas in his chosen genre have proved to be. He traced the theme of ‘the little man’ from George Formby and Norman Wisdom to Paddington Bear, paying due attention to its origins in Britain’s most successful early film export, Charlie Chaplin. Moving on to the subset of little men who think they’re bigger than they are, his judiciously chosen clips revealed how much Captain Mainwaring owes to Captain Waggett in 1949’s Whisky Galore! whom we even saw uttering the phrase ‘I