Vincent and the Doctor: The Good Things and the Bad Things

I don’t think this show has ever done anything quite like “Vincent and the Doctor.” It has an invisible monster in it, and a chase, and a sonic screwdriver, and none of that is remotely what it’s about. Richard Curtis has written an episode about depression, and about what art is for, and about the limits of what even a man with a time machine can fix, and for me Vincent and the Doctor is by some distance the best hour of Series 5 so far. It went out on BBC One on 5 June and I’ve been chewing on it ever since, which is not something I can say about every episode this year.

A face in a window

It opens in the Musée d’Orsay, where the Doctor has brought Amy to cheer her up (she doesn’t know she needs cheering up, which matters later), and where a marvellously fussy curator, Bill Nighy, uncredited and clearly having the time of his life, is talking about Van Gogh. He and Matt Smith compare bow ties, which is about as much fun as two actors can have in thirty seconds. And in the window of The Church at Auvers, painted in 1890, there is a face. Something with teeth, looking out. It’s a lovely hook, a monster hiding inside a real painting you can go and look at, and it gets them to Auvers-sur-Oise in the summer of 1890 without any throat-clearing at all.

Vincent van Gogh, when they find him, is broke, filthy, mocked by the village, and can’t give a painting away. He tries to pay for a drink with a canvas and gets turned down, and the café owner would quite like him to leave. Tony Curran plays him with a Scottish burr and an enormous, exhausting warmth, funny and generous one minute, hollowed out and unreachable the next. The show has done the famous-person historical plenty of times now, Dickens in Cardiff in The Unquiet Dead being the one I always think of, where the Doctor more or less tells Dickens his books will last forever and sends him off happy. This one starts from the same place, a great artist who doesn’t know he’s great, but it’s nowhere near as interested in giving him a nice send-off.

An illness, not a monster

The thing it gets most right is that it refuses to make his illness a mystery to be solved. He isn’t sad because of the alien. He isn’t cursed, or possessed, or being drained by something with tentacles. He has an illness, it comes and goes on its own schedule, and no amount of time travel touches it. There’s a scene where he simply can’t get out of bed, having been perfectly cheerful the night before, and he’s crying and telling them to leave him alone, and the Doctor and Amy stand in the doorway with absolutely nothing useful to offer. That’s an extraordinarily honest thing to put in a Saturday teatime drama, and it’s a surprisingly sensitive script from a writer I mostly know for Four Weddings and Blackadder and the Vicar of Dibley, though maybe that’s not such a surprise when you think how sad half of Blackadder Goes Forth turned out to be.

What Vincent does have is the ability to see what nobody else can, and the episode ties that to the painting rather than the illness, which I thought was a really kind choice. The sequence where he lies in the grass outside with the Doctor and Amy, holding their hands, and describes the night sky, and the sky above them slowly swirls into The Starry Night, is the most beautiful thing this programme has ever put on screen. I’m not exaggerating. Jonny Campbell’s direction is gorgeous all the way through, the café and the bedroom and the wheat fields all look like they’ve stepped out of the paintings, and they shot it in the sunshine somewhere that actually looks like the south of France instead of a quarry in Wales.

The relationship between him and Amy is the quiet engine underneath all of it. He’s immediately and uncomplicatedly taken with her, and she, grieving something she can’t name, is unusually gentle with him back. Karen Gillan gets to play somebody being kind here instead of somebody being clever, and it suits her. There’s a moment where he tells her, more or less in one breath, that she’s beautiful and that she’s terribly sad, and she has no idea how he could possibly know the second half of that. Neither do we, really, not until the end.

The Krafayis

The monster is deliberately the least interesting element, and I think the episode knows it. The Krafayis is an invisible beast that only Vincent can see, left behind by its own pack because it was blind and they had no use for it, blundering about a French village lashing out at anything that comes near. It’s a decent monster with a very neat mirror built into it, a creature nobody else can perceive, alone and frightened and violent because of it, hunted by a man who understands all three of those things intimately. The Doctor’s gadget for seeing it is a daft contraption that shows him his own reflection at one point, and the bit with the three of them peering over a table in the dark is genuinely tense.

When Vincent kills it, by accident, defending them in the church, he doesn’t celebrate. He kneels next to it while it dies and grieves for it, because he knows exactly what it was. I’ll be honest, when you do finally get a proper look at the thing it’s a bit of a big CGI space chicken, and I can see why some people found the action scenes the weakest part. You could also argue the monster and the illness pull the script in two directions at once. But I don’t mind any of that, because the Krafayis works precisely because it’s disposable: it’s the thing the Doctor can kill, standing next to the thing he can’t.

The museum, and what doesn’t change

Then the episode does the thing everyone’s talking about. The Doctor takes Vincent forward in time to the Musée d’Orsay and walks him into a gallery full of his own paintings, rooms of them, packed with people who’ve come from all over the world just to stand in front of his work, with Athlete’s “Chances” playing over the top. And then he asks the curator, in Vincent’s hearing, where he’d rank Van Gogh. Bill Nighy says the greatest painter of them all, and one of the greatest men who ever lived. Tony Curran plays it almost silently, and it wrecked me. A man who couldn’t sell a canvas, who’s been told his whole life he’s a failure and a burden, standing in a room being told the truth about himself by a stranger who has no reason to lie. It’s the kindest thing I’ve seen the Doctor do, and it costs him nothing.

And then it does something genuinely brave and won’t let that be enough. They take him home. Amy, who has been glowing all the way back and is sure they’ve fixed it, runs into the gallery expecting rooms of new paintings, decades of work, a long happy life. There’s nothing. The exhibition is exactly the same size it was, and Vincent van Gogh still died a few weeks after they left him, by his own hand, at thirty-seven. Rob Buckley called that very bleak for family TV in his review, and he’s right, it is, and that’s exactly why I love it. The Doctor’s answer is the best speech of the series so far: the good things don’t always soften the bad things, but the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. A lesser episode saves him. This one gives him one perfect afternoon and admits it wasn’t enough, and that it mattered anyway.

There is one change, and it’s small enough to be almost unbearable. Sunflowers now carries a dedication. For Amy. And Amy, all through this, has been crying without knowing why, because Rory was wiped out of existence by the crack in Cold Blood and took the memory of himself with him. She drove a van into a wall for him in Amy’s Choice barely a month ago, and she can’t now remember he existed. Vincent noticed it the first time he saw her, and the episode never spells it out, which I think is the right call.

Matt Smith is very good across that last stretch as well. His Doctor spends most of the hour being fractionally too brisk with Vincent, impatient and over-cheerful, treating a man’s despair like a problem with an answer somewhere at the bottom of it, and by the end he’s visibly learned something he didn’t know at the start. The man who a few weeks ago would have insisted on fixing this stands in a gallery full of sunflowers and quietly admits that he couldn’t, and that admission is the most Doctor-ish thing he does all episode.

Rating: 5/5. Beautiful, humane and quietly devastating, with a central performance from Tony Curran that deserves every award going, and the monster is beside the point in a way that doesn’t bother me at all. Essential.