Set during the 1953 Coronation, the Doctor and Rose arrive in a Britain gripped by television fever, only to find a predatory alien called the Wire feeding on viewers through their new TV sets. Portrayed by Maureen Lipman as a BBC announcer, the Wire strips faces from its victims while authorities quietly suppress the evidence.
Writer Mark Gatiss layers a second threat into the story through Eddie Connolly, a domestic bully whose intimidation mirrors the alien menace. When Rose is de-faced, the Doctor’s cold fury drives the episode’s resolution: trapping the Wire onto magnetic tape before she can feast on the Coronation’s mass audience.
The Doctor’s aiming for 1950s New York and a night out with Elvis. He lands, as he always does, somewhere else entirely: London, June 1953, days before the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I love this kind of trip, the one where the destination’s wrong but somehow better anyway. “The Idiot’s Lantern,” written by Mark Gatiss, drops the Doctor and Rose into a Britain gripped by Coronation fever and finds something genuinely unpleasant crackling behind the screen of every new telly on the street. It’s a bright, brisk, slightly slight period romp, but there’s a real streak of nastiness running through the middle of it, and after the metal and misery of the Cybermen two-parter I was more than ready for the change of pace.
Coronation Fever
Gatiss and director Euros Lyn nail the period. The whole street’s buying television sets, most of them for the first time, all so they can crowd round and watch the young Queen crowned, and the show gets the bunting and the Brylcreem and the aspirational shine of a shiny new box in the corner of the front room exactly right. With Mickey gone now, having chosen his own road in the parallel world back in The Age of Steel, it’s just the Doctor and Rose again, and I liked watching the two of them roar into 1953 on a borrowed scooter, all quiffs and headscarves, having an absolute ball before anything goes wrong.
But there’s a reason those tellies are so cheap. Lurking in the signal is the Wire, a creature of pure energy, a criminal fugitive from some far-off world who was executed by her own kind but is clinging on as electrical life inside the broadcast. She turns up as a genteel, plummy BBC announcer, played by Maureen Lipman, and I don’t think I’ve seen her have this much fun in a role, purring at her victims through the glass before she strikes. When she feeds, she takes their faces. Literally drains the life and the features clean off them and leaves behind blank, smooth, screaming-less horrors that the authorities are quietly bundling into the backs of police vans and hiding away.
What gets me is how briskly it all gets hushed up. Faceless men and women carted off in the dead of night and locked in a cellar, and the neighbours just look away, because in 1953 you kept your head down, you didn’t ask questions, and you certainly didn’t make a fuss. The Wire picked the perfect hunting ground: a buttoned-up, curtains-twitching Britain that would rather pretend nothing’s wrong than admit the shiny new telly’s gone bad. It’s the kind of detail that sticks with me longer than the alien does.
The Monster in the Living Room
The clever thing Gatiss does here is put a second monster in the story, and this one has a face. The Connolly household is ruled by Eddie Connolly, a puffed-up domestic tyrant who wraps his bullying in flags and patriotism and barks orders at his wife Rita and his son Tommy, turning his home into a small kingdom of fear. When Gran gets de-faced by the Wire, it’s Eddie who informs on his own mother-in-law just to keep the shame off his doorstep. He’s a coward and a bully, and the episode doesn’t pretend otherwise: the alien eating faces on the telly is frightening, sure, but the man ruling his family by intimidation in the front room is the real rot, and I found myself angrier at him than at the Wire for most of the episode.
The Doctor sees it instantly and can’t stand it, and the confrontation that follows, the Doctor and Tommy pushing back against Eddie’s bluster, gives the episode a spine I wasn’t expecting from something billed as a runaround. Tommy finding the nerve to stand up to his father, and Rita finally throwing the tyrant out, felt like a bigger win to me than anything involving the transmitter. It’s a proper Gatiss touch, the same eye for the ugliness lurking under respectable Britain that he brought to the Victorian chill of The Unquiet Dead last year.
And then the episode plays its nastiest card: it takes Rose. She pokes too close to the truth, comes face to face with the Wire, and ends up blank and faceless on a police stretcher, and the shot of the Doctor finding her like that got to me. Tennant flips in an instant from larking about to cold, controlled fury, the temper we’ve been warned about since the Sycorax, and from that moment he is not messing about. Hurt Rose and you’ve made this personal. Up to that point the Doctor’s been a tourist on a lark. The instant Rose is taken, the story finds its urgency, and his quiet, clipped rage is far more frightening to me than any amount of shouting would have been.
Trapping the Wire
The trail leads to Mr Magpie, the browbeaten telly-shop owner the Wire’s enslaved into flogging her cut-price sets across London, and then up to the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter mast, where she means to pull off her masterstroke. The Coronation is going to draw the biggest television audience in history, millions of faces all pointed at their screens at once, and she plans to feast on the lot of them in one go and finally gorge herself back into a physical body. “I will become flesh!”
The climax is a bit of a scramble up a radio mast, I won’t pretend otherwise, but it’s a fun one, and I liked how period-appropriate the Doctor’s solution is. He’s cobbled together a portable recording device, and rather than destroying the Wire he traps her, recording her onto magnetic tape at the moment of her triumph, sealing the screaming announcer into a spool of tape like a genie into a bottle. It’s a wonderfully analogue solution to an analogue-age menace: you beat the creature living in the broadcast by simply recording it, the way you’d tape a programme to watch back later. Gatiss clearly adores this stuff, and the episode’s at its most charming when it’s playing with the technology of the age rather than sending the Doctor scrambling up an aerial for the sake of it.
With the Wire contained, every stolen face comes back. Gran, Rose, all the blank victims suddenly whole again, just in time to catch the Coronation after all. Warm, tidy ending to a story that flirted with real darkness along the way, and I’ll admit I didn’t expect it to pull off both halves as well as it does.
What The Idiot’s Lantern Leaves Us With
So what does a zippy period piece like this actually leave behind, once the runaround plot’s done with you? Quite a bit, honestly. There’s a sly bit of satire humming under the fun: a whole nation gathering to stare, slack-jawed, into a glowing box that’s quietly feeding on them, and whether that lands as 1953 commentary or something closer to home, I’ll let you decide. Eddie Connolly is the episode’s real villain, not the alien, and the show’s clear-eyed that domestic tyranny does more lasting damage than any energy creature ever could. Watching Tommy and Rita break free of him is the true happy ending here, more than the Wire getting trapped on tape.
De-facing Rose is a genuine shock too, and the Doctor’s ice-cold response reminds us just how dangerous this cheerful man gets when someone he loves is threatened. And with Mickey gone, the Doctor and Rose are back to a two-hander, and I think the easy joy they’ve shared since New Earth is what carries the episode through its thinner stretches. Gatiss brings the same knack for horror under the net curtains that made The Unquiet Dead tick, just transplanted here to Formica and Festival-of-Britain optimism instead of Victorian Cardiff. Doctor Who News reviewed the episode at the time and landed in a similar place: hugely entertaining even where it’s borrowing familiar shapes.
Rating: 3.5/5 — stylish, sharply acted, with more going on underneath it than the plot gives it credit for, even if the actual story’s thin and the finale amounts to a man climbing a big aerial. Lipman and the Connolly household drama do most of the heavy lifting here, and they lift it well. Faceless victims, a domineering dad, and a monster that feeds through the telly: “The Idiot’s Lantern” is minor Doctor Who, maybe, but it’s minor Doctor Who done with real wit and real style. Now then, about that trip to see Elvis the Doctor still owes us…