In Lagos, Nigeria, the Doctor’s home away from home is a place for stories to be shared. On this visit though it seems no one will ever leave and the stories will never end…

Last season’s fifth-placed episode Dot and Bubble told a story where the Doctor’s appearance excluded him from the society he was trying to help. Inspired by that story playwright Inua Ellams here takes him somewhere where he feels very much included. The idea that he’s found somewhere to relax and unwind in between adventures is a sweet one, although this particular setting is unique to this particular incarnation. Unseen adventures are something fans have long been used to, unseen chill time not so much.

For this visit though the Doctor finds that his barber friend Omo (Sule Rimi, last seen in this show as an extra in Aliens of London/World War 3 and more recently in Andor) has been supplanted by an unnamed newcomer (Ariyon Bakare, Leandro in The Woman Who Lived). This new barber insists on plenty of new stories being told and the way they are represented visually is very striking, in fact beautiful. Parts of this story come as close to art as anything we’ve seen in Doctor Who, and not just the visuals. There’s something magical going on in the story but it’s felt on screen too. It’s a carefully woven mesh of magic, legend, fantasy and a smidge of science that’s beginning to explain “what the hell is going on here” as our hero famously exclaimed when he first appeared.

You can keep your weeping statues and giant spiders, personally there’s nothing more frightening than a visit to a barber – my utter disinterest in sport and holidays plus my general horror of small talk rendered them petrifying as a younger man. Happily bad hair genes and a pair of clippers solved that problem decades ago so this setting is as unfamiliar to me as the country it’s set in. It’s clear from hearing Ellams talk about it on Doctor Who Unleashed that this is something that’s culturally very important to Nigerian men. There’s something innately intimate about being beautified (his words) by another man especially, and this really can’t be ignored, in a country which has extremely draconian laws about same-sex intimacy. While filming in Lagos was considered (Nigeria’s film industry is second only to India in terms of output), ultimately it was almost all shot in Cardiff, apart from some establishing drone footage, and it would be naive to think that cost was the only reason. There’s no mention of such issues here, despite subtle hints of a couple of same-sex relationships. As I understand it, it is a theme of his play The Barber Shop Chronicles but it’s still a little odd in a show which has long been very LGBTQ+ friendly to not even acknowledge it.

With its confined setting and small cast of characters in search of an exit I initially got strong Twilight Zone vibes from this tale, it has the sort of premise that show did no end of times. It does open up towards the end but the meat of the episode is people in a room talking to each other. It’s something the show doesn’t do very often – it’s hard to pull off without seeming stagey – but it works here rather wonderfully. It’s a very moving tale too with performances to match, Bakare’s rather tragic barber particularly, as well as Michelle Asante’s Abena who seems to have something of a past involving the Doctor.

Plus I learned some stuff. Growing up I always loved the little knowledge tidbits, often from the novelisations – I can’t be alone in remembering where I learned about boiling water at higher altitudes or the (actually incorrect) etymology of the word assassin (both from Marco Polo but you probably knew that). Here I learned an amazing historical fact about black people’s hair that also gets to be a plot point. Doctor Who – teaching me stuff for 50-odd years, thank you.

Verdict: A beautiful bit of television which has had me ordering the author’s best known play to find out more about this world. 9/10

Andy Smith