Day 720: Love and Monsters

Love and Monsters is a fairly divisive episode. Some say that it's awful because it doesn't properly function as a Doctor Who story, given that the Doctor is only in it for 5 minutes, as well as insulting Doctor Who fans. Others like it for daring to do something different, as well as being affectionate to most Doctor Who fans, and only insulting a certain sect of fans such as one big name fan who had served on the programme as a continuity advisor. As for myself, I'm a bit 'meh' on this episode. I appreciate what it's trying to do, and I love that the story focuses itself on Doctor Who fans, but the story drags in certain places and the ending doesn't quite work in my opinion, notwithstanding the 'love life' joke which is amazing.

But ruminating on whether this story is any good or not doesn't feel particularly interesting to me, so I'll take a slightly different tack. Over the past couple of months, I've been catching up on some DVDs that I had lying around, including the complete set of a British comedy series called I'm Alan Partridge. It's very funny, with some excellent characters, including Michael, a fairly dimwitted and entertaining Geordie. What I wasn't quite expecting was to see the actor who plays Michael, Simon Greenall, pop up in Love and Monsters, playing an entirely different character, which distracted me slightly from the main event.

It's a common problem that I face, encountering actors across various TV series playing vastly different characters. I rushed through The Thick of It a couple of months ago, because I wanted to get it done before the new series of Doctor Who, lest the character of Malcolm Tucker would stick too clearly in the mind whilst watching Peter Capaldi's Doctor. Similarly, I'm holding back on watching the new Jessica Jones series, because David Tennant plays the villain and, whilst delivering an amazing performance, I'm afraid that all I'll see him as is the Doctor. And, of course, I can never forget seeing Guy Siner, the actor who played Lieutenant Gruber in 'Allo 'Allo, pop up in Genesis of the Daleks as one of the Kaleds, an entirely different Nazi analogue. It is for him that I name this problem, Gruber's Syndrome, where you see an actor appear in something that you recognise from somewhere else, and you can't quite disassociate yourself from the role that they previously portrayed. It's annoying, but I've learnt to live with it, and at the very least, it's meant that I have been able to develop a frighteningly large encyclopaedia of actors in my mind, just through seeing them in things elsewhere.