Spoiler alert: this blog contains details of the Doctor Who Christmas special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

‘Mrs Lombard, there are some situations which are too stupid to be allowed to continue.’

“Doctor Who does superheroes.” As elevator pitches go, it’s easy to see why this one stuck around in Steven Moffat’s mind-elevator. (Oh, and merry Christmas!) There was a worry that the lack of a Doctor Who series this year might leave us bereft. In the event, there was so much else to get upset about that this was a trauma that barely touched the sides. But if 2016 left us both needing a Doctor and holding out for a hero, the helpful show-runner has provided us with both.

After 12 years as a BBC1 cornerstone, Christmas Doctor Who has become a genre all of its own, and a tricky thing to get right. My personal favourites – The Christmas Invasion and Last Christmas – put the festivities front and centre. But you can’t do that every year. As such, there are only scant, functional references to Christmas in The Return of Doctor Mysterio. Rather, it channels the classic 3.10pm movie of yore – specifically, the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman films. And for that, it ranks in my personal top five of Christmas Doctor Whos.

Moffat has said in pre-publicity interviews that the hero is not in fact Superman, but Clark Kent – or in this case, the hero is not The Ghost but Grant. It’s a neat bit of writing that superheroes actually don’t exist in the Whoniverse, but superhero comic books do. So young Grant (with echoes of young Amelia Pond) is accidentally gifted with superpowers thanks to a spot of “classic Doctor” clumsiness, and an obsession with comic books.

And so the Doctor once again takes a backseat in his own story, making way for proxy-companions Grant and Lucy. This, in turn, gives Moffat a chance to flex the muscle that was his strongest before Time Lords came along – the romcom with a twist. Comparisons with his sitcom Coupling are inevitable when we reach the farcical centrepiece, in which the two-way love triangle between Grant/Lucy/The Ghost plays out. “You’re jealous of you,” the Doctor tells Grant. “Technically she’s jealous of her,” he retorts, quite accurately. Moffat is unafraid to play on quite how crappy a disguise it is simply to wear glasses – even the Doctor finds this a ridiculous situation. And Lucy’s interrogation of the Doctor and torture of Mr Huffle is a thing of exquisite cruelty. This is more romcom than superhero caper, and no worse for it.

‘Everything ends, and it’s always sad. But everything begins again too, and that’s always happy.’

A bonus new companion! The other issue of note in this special is the return of Matt Lucas as android-butler Nardole. I wasn’t the only one to lament the casting of a talent like Lucas in such a minor role last year. Moff and co clearly felt the same, so Nardole – the show’s new comic relief – returns not only here, but for a good chunk of the forthcoming series. Taking the companion role for Christmas, Nardole gets to play more than the only-idiot-robot-in-the-village. He has insight and empathy and knows how to fly the Tardis, and he also made a decent fist of ruling “firmly but wisely” in 12th-century Constantinople (a comic strip or audio play of this off-screen storyline, please).

Meanwhile, the difficult, obstinate 12th Doctor that Clara first got freaked out by is a distant memory. Having settled into the role, Capaldi’s Doctor is as reliably daft as the brush the actor’s hair resembles. Amen to that.

Fear factor

Keen viewers will remember the returning monsters from … the very last episode. (There’s probably a statistic somewhere regarding the speed of baddies returning.) The creatures with the diagonally-opening-skulls were last seen in The Husbands of River Song as the Shoals of the Winter Harmony, conquered in that story by King Hydroflax. It’s not a bad idea – those chilling zip-heads deserve more than one outing. But, it has to be said, their plan to entrap all world leaders in New York by means of their inherent selfishness was ridiculously convoluted.

Christmas continuity

It may have been a year, but Moffat was careful to join the dots. Nardole’s resurrection got explained in a roundabout way. The Doctor’s antics in 1992 New York represent a bid to remedy the damage done to the city in The Angels Take Manhattan (potentially an attempt to find the Pond-Williams’, now he’s on his own again?). But with his memory of Clara still erased (and her still presumably hurtling round the universe with Maisie Williams), the big emotional thump comes from the memory of River. It’s made pretty clear that these events come directly after that final, 24-year dinner at the Singing Towers – and that’s what makes him sad. Too much backstory for Christmas Day? You decide.

Deeper into the vortex

• “Brains with minds of their own? No one’ll believe that – this is America!”

• The Angels Take Manhattan episode was filmed in the actual New York, but this time, the cast were shipped to Bulgaria’s Nu Boyana backlot recreation of the city.

• The Doctor eats sushi now. It’s hardly jelly babies, but these are health-conscious times. Sushi at Christmas though? Wrong.

• “You’re kind of wet.” “I prefer mild-mannered.” I do hope Mr Huffle remains a companion in his own right.

• Another alias! To add to John Smith, Merlin and Doctor Disco, the Doctor now has Dan Dangerous from Scotland Yard, Scotland in his arsenal of pseudonyms.

Next time!

And what about that trailer for the next series? The first big take-away is that Pearl Mackie’s Bill works in a chippy – something Clara Oswald would surely have turned her nose up at. Not long now, folks. Happy new year!

I’ve been away for a while,” announced the Doctor, addressing viewers as much as villains. “But now I’m back.” The Time Lord has been off our screens for exactly a year but swaggered back in style for the Doctor Who Christmas special – a romp with a classic feel and cross-generational appeal. All the better to aid turkey digestion.

A neatly knockabout opening sequence saw the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) dangling upside down outside a schoolboy’s bedroom window on the 60th floor of a New York apartment block. Naturally, eight-year-old Grant assumed the eccentric “old guy” coming a-calling on Christmas Eve was Santa Claus, rather than a time-traveller with angry eyebrows, a Scottish accent and an infectious sense of mischief.

Soon realising this wasn’t Saint Nick after all, young Grant dubbed him “Doctor Mysterio” (a knowing nod to the Doctor’s name in Mexico) before accidentally swallowing a precious gemstone that gave him powers of super-strength, super-speed, bulletproof skin, levitation and X-ray vision. You know, one of those gemstones.

Flash forward 24 years and Grant had become a nanny by day and a masked vigilante called The Shadow by night. He and his old friend teamed up with hapless human Nardole (Matt Lucas), rescued from last year’s Christmas special, and reporter Lucy (Charity Wakefield), to foil an invasion by brain-snatching aliens who unzipped their heads in enjoyably gruesome fashion and, as aliens invariably do, had a fiendish plan to conquer the planet.

Capaldi was charismatically mercurial, switching between silliness and sadness. Nardole, who could have been a mere stop-gap until new companion Bill (Pearl Mackie) arrives next year, worked well as an affable comic stooge – with the added ability to put his finger on the painful truth of the Doctor’s loneliness and grief at the loss of his wife River Song last time out.

However, as Capaldi eventually concluded: “Everything ends and it’s always sad. But everything begins again and it’s always happy. Be happy.” How’s that for a Christmas message?

Doctor Who | Who is Nardole?

• Home planet: Unknown
• Species: Human
• First appearance: The Husbands of River Song
• Played by: Matt Lucas
• In the 2015 Christmas special, Nardole was an employee of the Doctor’s wife, River Song.
• Nardole is a serial maker of mistakes. By the end of his last appearance he was little more than a severed head.
• After being decapitated, Nardole became one of two heads living in the torso of an enormous robot, while working as the “head waiter” at a swanky restaurant.

A Clark Kent-and-Lois Lane-style romantic sub-plot between intrepid investigative reporter Lucy (Charity Wakefield, aka Wolf Hall’s Mary Boleyn) and Grant/The Ghost (Canadian actor Justin Chatwin) was sweetly done with lovely moments of screwball comedy.

Showrunner Steven Moffat’s script was packed with playful postmodern touches. His Manhattan was the one from the movies – all yellow cabs, shiny skyscrapers and steaming drain covers. Superhero comics were affectionately parodied. He even threw in a sinister, scar-faced German scientist, just for those of us who like war films – plus a Pokémon Go gag for the kids (and overgrown kids).

There was serious intent too, with plenty of parallels to the 9/11 terror attacks. Did I also detect a sly dig at the US electorate with the line: “Brains with minds of their own? Nobody will believe that. This is America”?

Wonderfully witty, just festive enough and perfectly pitched between spills, thrills and scares, this was the time-travelling franchise’s best and most family-friendly Christmas special for five years.

Welcome back, Doctor. Merry Tardismas and a Happy Who Year.

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★★★★★  2016 is going down in the annals as a horrible year. What we need at its close is a little light. We need heroes. And we need the Doctor.

The Time Lord has cruelly abandoned us during our annus horribilis so it’s a relief that he is home in time for Christmas – with a beautifully packaged hour of uplifting escapism.

If you’ve read this blog before, you may recall I’m usually lukewarm about the Doctor Who Christmas specials. As a long-term fan, I expect to be disappointed at this time of year. It likely stems back to Christmas 1974 and Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot. I didn’t like the story, didn’t like the robot, and did not take to Tom Baker at all. The omens for Christmas 2016 weren’t promising. The clip shown in Children in Need was dispiriting; the slipshod trailer on redial on BBC1 even more so.

In November, I was standing by the bar at the BFI (after the premiere of The Power of the Daleks animation) when a friend who works on Doctor Who came over, raving about the Christmas special. He asserted that, even in its unfinished state, it was his favourite of all time. “But then you hate the Christmas episodes,” he told me. “Do you like superheroes?” he ventured. “Not especially,” I said. “Well, there’s not much hope then, is there…?” he sighed, washing his hands of me.

A few weeks later Steven Moffat gave me an outline of The Return of Doctor Mysterio and, remembering my Yulephobia, slipped in the proviso, “It’ll be a relief to you, it’s got virtually no Christmas in it at all!” Well, he said that last year…

OK, I’m an inveterate grinch, presiding in judgment over seasonal Who like vinegary old Craig Revel Horwood. Crack a smile, dear. But after sitting through the BFI premiere of Doctor Mysterio, I turned to the chap from two paragraphs above, now perched two seats away, and I did the customary Craig RH volte-face, mouthing, “FAB U LOUS! I loved it!”

This came as some surprise to him and to me. In particular, I hadn’t been relishing further exposure to Matt Lucas’s Nardole. Of all the one-off characters who might warrant a recall, this gormless nitwit decapitated and absorbed by a robot last Christmas in The Husbands of River Song, was not among them.

But it’s rather like the Catherine Tate/Donna Noble effect a decade ago. A popular and talented actor known for comedy pops up one Christmas, is annoying as a broadly painted character and you’re relieved when it’s over; then he/she returns a year or so later, subtly recalibrated and is actually rather effective. Who knows how he’ll work out in series ten, but I enjoyed the lightness of touch Matt Lucas brings to this special and the instant rapport he has with Peter Capaldi.

Superhero movies are in vogue and are costlier and gloomier than Doctor Who can stomach. So it’s wise that Steven Moffat has presented a back-to-basics story: boy gains superpowers; grows up into a geek in specs; spin-changes into a superhero; averts disaster in New York; adores a smart woman who, handily, doesn’t realise the dork and the hero are the same man.

If you’re steeped in superhero lore, maybe you’ll be unimpressed by Doctor Who’s naïve presentation, but there’s no doubting the enduring appeal and effectiveness of the genre clichés: secret identity, thwarted romance – what Steven Moffat calls “a love triangle for two”. And Doctor Who has never overtly featured superheroes before – although I cringe at the memory of John Simm’s Master zooming up into the sky a propos of nothing in The End of Time, Christmas 2009.

The scenes between the Doctor and eight-year-old Grant (Logan Hoffman) are delightful, allowing Capaldi to work some grandfatherly charm and tottering eccentricity. Canadian actor Justin Chatwin looks great as both the lackadaisical nanny and rippling Ghost, while Britain’s Charity Wakefield (from Wolf Hall) is lovely as his Lois-Lane-alike, Lucy Fletcher, reporter for the Daily Chronicle. This duo/trio are definitely worth a revisit and, arguably, Steven Moffat has created a minor issue by introducing this superhero.

Why hasn’t the Ghost ever shown up in Doctor Who before when modern-day Manhattan was in dire peril? The logical answer is that we’ve been following the Doctor’s time stream and he hadn’t created the Ghost yet. But henceforward? At the end, Grant claims the Ghost is “laid to rest” and he discards the costume, but surely if any threat to New York arises, or even to the Earth, the Ghost will spring into action and be on the scene long before the Time Lord. It would be a worthier spin-off than Class…

The Return of Doctor Mysterio is a delicious mash-up of Doctor Who, Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, condensed into an hour that never drags. It’s witty and happy to be silly. When young Grant asks, “How do you keep a glass of water in your pockets?”, the Doctor answers simply, “Skills.” Learning that a radioactive spider gave Spider-Man his superpowers, the Doctor says, “What, vomiting, hair loss and death? Fat lot of use.” In the Tokyo HQ of the Harmony Shoal the Doctor has cleverly “created a distraction – I flooded downstairs with Pokémon.” There was a huge laugh at the BFI when Lucy quizzes the Ghost about his love-life. “Boyfriend? Well, there has been speculation – you do fly around New York dressed in rubber with a big G on your chest.”

Steven Moffat has written a heart-warming drama, free of schmaltz and sentiment, seasoned with action, romance and mildly icky gore, and with a linear plot that is perfectly digestible for a family audience on Christmas Day. Awash with CGI and under the direction of Ed Bazalgette, it looks gorgeous, cinematically and technically proficient. I hope he returns to the Who fold soon, although he’s not booked in yet for any 2017 episodes.

To cap it all, Capaldi. He’s brilliant. Long may he remain the Doctor.

In short, an unmitigated rave from me this year. The Return of Doctor Mysterio easily garners five stars – in my book the first five-star Christmas Who since The Christmas Invasion, David Tennant’s debut in 2005.

If I have one fleeting regret, it’s that they missed a trick in not finding a way to pay homage to David Bowie, the Man Who Fell to Earth and made New York his home for 20 years. Lifelong fan Capaldi wrote in the Christmas Radio Times: “I can’t believe he’s gone. A genius.” I’d have loved it had the Doctor pulled out his guitar and strummed a few chords of classic Bowie. It should, of course, have been Heroes.

Peter Capaldi will return for 12 new Doctor Who episodes in the spring…

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On a cold, drizzly September day I joined a group of journalists on the set of the Doctor Who Christmas special in the BBC’s big Cardiff studios.

We had to sign a huge confidentiality agreement. I was literally not allowed to reverse-engineer any of the software I found inside television’s most famous time machine.

Which, unfortunately, means I can’t go back in time and fix it.

We were invited to play with the knobs on the console. We fiddled with the clockwork bit, the squidgy alien bit. I found a chunky switch that made a dial flick right, then left. Dial goes right. Dial goes left.

If the Christmas special is about the Doctor trying to fix a small but vital switch on the Tardis, you know who to blame.

Except it’s not, because it’s about superheroes.

“I think the Christmas special… which is the only [Doctor Who episode] this year… I think is one of [head writer] Steve [Moffat]’s best ever scripts, absolutely beautiful,” Moffat’s occasional collaborator Mark Gatiss said in September.

“It made me cry.”

Moffat jokes: “I think he got his finger trapped in a door”.

But when Moffat’s wife read the script – his seventh Doctor Who Christmas special – she also cried. He was more than a little surprised.

“I just thought it was rather good fun,” he said. “She said it was so sweet and lovely, I said ‘what are you talking about?’ It’s very emotional, apparently.

“There’s always a love story at the heart of a good superhero story. It’s always a love triangle for two, isn’t it? I love that. The only superhero thing I ever want to write is the Clark Kent Lois Lane story, when you can’t own up to being the man she’s in love with.”

He laughs.

Minor spoiler alert: the Doctor arrives in New York on Christmas Eve, accidentally confers superpowers on a comic book loving child, then many years later has to deal with the result: a man who’s “putting on the rubber and flying around”.

“The best thing about superheroes is not the superhero, it’s the guy he pretends to be the rest of the time,” says Moffat. “It’s the secret identity… Clark Kent is actually the main character. Lois Lane is the other main character and Superman just does the second unit stuff.

“More or less any tall handsome man can play [Superman] if they’re prepared to fold their arms long enough. It’s playing Clark Kent that’s the key. You love Clark Kent because he has to pretend he’s not a God all the time.”

Moffat says Doctor Who is definitely not a superhero.

“A lot of the fun of writing the Doctor is that really he’s a sort of charlatan. He pretends to be much more powerful than he is and bluffs his way around the universe… but we all know he can’t even drive his own time machine properly. He’s your crazy uncle who’s got his own time machine and a lot of cheek.”

Speaking of which, Peter Capaldi is having a great time.

The Doctor Who Christmas episodes have a “responsibility to be festive”, Capaldi says – and this year’s fulfils the brief. “It’s full of very ironic gags and comic book gags,” he says. “It’s very enjoyable.”

It’s been too long between Whos, he says. He wrecked his knee chasing Zygons in the last series and needed an operation. But he had to finish the series first, literally limping to the finish line.

He leans back, like an eccentric, genial Scottish uncle, with a cheeky, toothy smile.

“The doctors always say ‘oh you’ll be running around in two weeks’ but you never are,” he says. “It was about four, five weeks before I could hobble around on a stick – which I loved. It was rather theatrical. My wife had to stop me buying one with a gold demon’s head.”

Because of his knee he couldn’t work, not even a play to fill in the time between series. “I was going stir crazy,” he says. “And the gap kept opening up, we were supposed to come back much earlier but for whatever reason it got bigger and bigger. I was dying to get back again.”

He was half-hoping the long pause would give him some respite from fans.

“The funny thing is I seem to be recognised more now even though the show’s not on – I can’t figure out how that works,” he says. “Some days you’d like to just quietly pop to the shops and not have conversations with people.

“Doctor Who’s exciting but I’m not, so I get into a panic because I think I mustn’t disappoint them – but I don’t know what to do.”

He hasn’t decided whether the 2017 series will be his last.

It’s not that he dislikes being an “ambassador” for the series. But it weighs on him.

“I had my 25th wedding anniversary this year and we had a party, and I had a band, and I suddenly realised: I danced. I think it was the first time I’ve danced in years because I knew the party was just full of my friends who don’t care how Doctor Who dances.”

On the other hand he loves the escapism of the series, the immediate fairytale element. “There is something potent about the death motif in it,” he says. “People get very fascinated by the fact that the Doctor can be extinguished. They bond with him, then he has to go through this (regeneration). There’s something deeper in this.”

WHAT Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio

WHEN ABC, Monday, December 26, 7.30pm

Some Who Christmas facts

– One of the show’s producers – Peter Bennett – oversaw Christopher Reeve’s flying scenes in Superman.

– Some of the episode was shot in Bulgaria, where a film set contains a replica of two New York blocks.

– The Tardis hasn’t been completely renovated, but it does have a new “flight” mode with extra flashing lights.

– Judging by the books on the shelves inside the Tardis, Doctor Who (or one of his companions) is a Robert Harris fan.

– The Doctor’s new companion, played by Pearl Mackie, is not introduced in the Christmas special. The new series begins next year: Moffat says the first episode is a “big family friendly action-based spectacular… it’s a reboot to Doctor Who at its simplest purest form”.

– 2017 will be Steven Moffat’s last as head writer – he’s handing over to Chris Chibnall, who has worked on Who, Torchwood (as head writer) and created the hit detective series Broadchurch.

And yes, some of the effects in ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’ are a bit ropey. And no, the episode’s not entirely free of other inconsistencies in character (Would Grant, for all his mild manners, really refer to a woman he’s known for 24 years as “Mrs Lombard”?) or plot (Harmony Shoal’s evil scheme to annihilate capital cities and wait for world leaders to come running is absurdly flimsy).

But you’ll be inclined to forgive the episode its flaws, because Doctor Who’s 2016 Christmas special, its first outing for a whole 12 months, is simply an enormous amount of fun.

It’s one of the most richly comic episodes in recent memory, employing witty wordplay (“You’re kinda wet.” “I prefer mild-mannered.”), great sight gags (Grant’s rapid-fire replacement of his mask) and even a joke about Pokémon Go.

But, and this is crucial, it’s not a parody of superhero movies, or comic books. Sure, it has a little fun with some of the tropes of the genre, but most of its jabs are in good humour (even if a joke about a radioactive spider bite causing “vomiting, hair loss and death” goes too far).

Largely, this is a pretty uncynical tribute to those types of films and stories, from the opening shot that renders events of the episode as an actual comic strip – echoing one of the better ideas in Ang Lee’s ambitious but misjudged Hulk – to a rooftop interview / date scene deliberately cribbed straight from the ’78 Superman.

‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’ wears its affection on its sleeve too, wisely not dancing around its similarities to the Superman story but instead addressing them, head-on, from the off.

As Doctor Who’s very own man of steel and his plucky love interest, Justin Chatwin and Charity Wakefield are absolutely co-leads, with as much screentime as Peter Capaldi. Happily, both are more than up to the task, delivering slightly heightened performances that chime perfectly with the episode’s frothier tone.

Wakefield in particular is on sparkling form as Lucy Fletcher – charming, funny and striking up a winning chemistry with Capaldi. She even sells one of the episode’s sillier gags, turning the extended “Mr Huffle” exposition sequence into one of the episode’s best.

In fact, while we’d hate to break up this happy couple, it’s almost a pity that Lucy couldn’t leap aboard the TARDIS for more adventures.

Speaking of companions, let’s address the Nardole in the room. Of all the supporting characters you could’ve chosen to elevate to companion status, Matt Lucas’s bumbling clown from ‘The Husbands of River Song’ was certainly a… left-field choice.