London 1923 – and an alien race has the audacity to invade a gentlemen’s club…

James Kettle pens the middle story of this box set, giving us a historically-set story that plays very much into the milieu of PG Wodehouse and his fellows – with the Doctor playing a cosmic (and sometimes comic) Jeeves. (There’s a quite on the nose early scene for the Time Lord that makes the story’s literary debts very obvious.) There’s also some crossdressing – with a secondary plotline that goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to, down to the last line – and a rather weird break in the action that reminded me of the scene in Class where two of the protagonists decided to stop and have a chat about things right in the middle of a frantic chase.

As with the Wodehouse tales to which it’s playing homage, you need to take things with a pinch of salt here – this is a very heightened reality version of London, even for Doctor Who – and everyone plays it as straight as the dialogue will allow.

Verdict: A lighter story than many others, which allows Eccleston’s Doctor to react against everything around him. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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