Six Reasons Why I Love Wolfblood

Wolfblood is currently experiencing its third series run on CBBC and I think it's one of the best dramas on TV, genuinely doing solid and extraordinary things, full stop. I've written about it before on this blog, but two years on, it's clear to see why it's ahead of the opposition:

1. It's a serial show. With Wolfblood you get more out of it if you started watching from the start, discovering the main characters' special abilities in the first episode (super-powered werewolf-like humans), and the gradual layering of new characters and events. More than that, the characters properly develop and show new sides, almost every week too. I was genuinely surprised in the first series how much they probed into the character's lives - Maddy's best mate Shannon's monster-spotting obsession being properly addressed, or later on with the slow and subtle romantic and non-romantic friendships between characters. Plotlines have been introduced that pay off later on, and plot elements that have proved useful before are taken for granted.

2. It's a fast show. Big things happen every week - big for the young characters and audience, like falling out with friends. And more importantly, it doesn't patronise its audience by undoing things after each episode. The secret of Wolfbloods living among us must be kept secret, and that's always a danger. Those high-stakes moments - at the series finales, or the threat of doctors running tests - feel like the whole thing could suddenly come crashing down.

3. It's not a scary show, it's not horror. The creator, Debbie Moon, envisaged her "werewolves" as normal people with superpowers - superpowered hearing, smell, the ability to run really fast and dealing with becoming a wolf at every full moon. That's particularly present in the most recent two-parter when one of the characters gets to experience what it's like as a Wolfblood. Stripped from the horror tropes, it becomes pure character drama with cool fantasy moments. And whilst there's sometimes big angry wolves, the scariness comes from characters messing up or getting found out, rather than death or getting attacked.

4. It's a realistic show, even with the fantasy elements (no, especially because of the fantasy elements, because without them you wouldn't be able to broach some of the subjects so easily). Whilst a lot of children's telly has a school setting, this really feels like the characters go to school - they get told off for skipping lessons, they have parents, they hang out at school at lunch break or in the toilets. Perhaps in another show the mundanity of French class and school assemblies would ground the rest of the fantasy and provide a safe haven before they go out to fight monsters. In this show, the monsters come from inside you, and school life provides enough drama for some episodes. As it's telly, we only see one class of course (well it's a tiny rural village!), but all of British school life is represented here: the sporty boys, the mean girls, the geeks, the loners, and the people who fall into the gaps. And the teacher Mr Jeffries is a real teacher too - like all the other (often more wolflike!) antagonists, he's not evil, he has interests and humour and warmth. That's what I've liked about the wild Wolfbloods and urban Wolfbloods introduced in series 2 and 3 - whilst they pose a threat to our main characters, they're always painted in shades of grey. No out-and-out evil villainy, that wouldn't be interesting enough.

5. It's a funny show, especially as the writers and actors have stretched their wings as they've gone on. The supporting cast of fellow school pupils might on the surface be a bunch of archetypes, but the strong polarised characters allows for some amazing moments and realistically snarky remarks. Recently the girl gang of The Three Ks have had some brilliant hilarious scenes (plus some brilliant drama), the writing and acting now honed over the three series to pitch perfect levels. There's variety in the humour too (bad dad jokes and insults to slapstick and farce) and a lot of it is refreshingly honest and grown-up for a show like this.

6. It's an amazing looking show, with a visual style and sound that's unlike anything on CBBC or elsewhere, and feels very assured from the first episode. The music has a wild folky quality (topped off by the theme song), even if ultra-modern chart music sometimes intrudes. There's bright yellow eyes, a wild muddy forest, slow-mo and stunts and night shoots. It's very impressive work all round - this series there's been seriously impressive closeups, drone shots, split-screen, the works. All this and CGI wolves! Rightly, this looks and feels like shows that have ten times its budget.

And these are just the shots that stood out!

So there's six reasons - and to be honest, I could easily come up with six more delving into the characters and the positive storylines. It's thrilling, it's fun, it's addictive to watch each week - I hope this has whetted your appetite if you haven't discovered it yet.

The First Five Decades

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is upon us, and it's a good one for anyone who likes numbers. Thousands of fans have scored every story from 1 to 10, and all these have been averaged and totted up to find people's favourite - favourite story ever, favourite Doctor, favourite season, you name it. And there's even the prospect of comparing the results to the last time the poll was done, five years ago! (with a whole load of new stories since)

You can find out more about the issue, with a wonderful fold out cover, here. But I thought, since I entered myself, a short summary of what I voted for as my favourites. I rarely sit down and work out my favourite Doctor or story (there's 241 of them) - and my tastes are no doubt only controversial for how average they are - but it's a good game of numbers. (And maybe I've boosted the Slitheen ones up the chart ever so slightly!)

10s went to: (deep breath) The Tomb of the Cybermen, Inferno, The Green Death, The Time Warrior, Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons, The Brain of Morbius, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, City of Death, Earthshock, The Caves of Androzani, Remembrance of the Daleks, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, The Girl in the Fireplace, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, Human Nature / The Family of Blood, Blink, Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, Midnight, Turn Left, The Waters of Mars, The Eleventh Hour, The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, Vincent and the Doctor, The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, The Doctor’s Wife, Asylum of the Daleks.

9s went to: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Time Meddler, The Mind Robber, The War Games, Spearhead From Space, Pyramids of Mars, The Curse of Fenric, Dalek,
Father’s Day, Tooth and Claw, School Reunion, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, Smith and Jones,
Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, The Unicorn and the Wasp, The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End, Amy’s Choice, The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, The Girl Who Waited,The God Complex, The Angels Take Manhattan, The Snowmen, The Name of the Doctor



There's a list of top 50 stories to watch right there.

(2s and 1s went to: Planet of Giants, The Space Museum, The Krotons, The Time Monster, Timelash, Time and the Rani; Underworld, Meglos, Time-Flight, Terminus, The Twin Dilemma.)


Per Doctor, it works out that Christopher Eccleston's stories work out the most favourable (my first Doctor, even though I put Matt Smith on the poll), followed by David Tennant and then Matt Smith. Out of the older stories - lower on average no doubt due to ropiness, but they're not that much lower - it goes, surprisingly, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker (!), William Hartnell, Paul McGann (his one story), then Colin Baker.

That's stories, not the actors, of course. I tried to keep a wide distribution (or else I'd give them all 9s), and stories I haven't seen (seen, not just heard) are omitted. (This means in DWM, the lesser known 60s stories are voted for by less people... but then most are never going to be front runners, and 'less people' still equates to over a thousand!)

Don't ask me to pick a favourite out of that lot!

The Doctor Who Actor Spotting Game

(Well, nobody's given it a proper name, have they?)

It's one of the most common things people shout at the telly - "oh, what's he/she been in?" And a lot of the time, they've been in Doctor Who. Naturally, it's attracted a whole range of guest stars over its 50 years (well, minus fourteen or so - but who's counting?) - from the likes of Michael Gambon and John Cleese, to Ken Dodd and McFly. People have noticed - I recall Doctor Who Magazine itself asking some pertinent questions a couple of years ago: with alumni popping up seemingly in every show, is there anything with no Doctor Who stars in? Or a series where every actor has appeared in it?

Okay, there's a few rules to this. For starters, it's got to be British - some American telly for instance is connected, but that's just lucky guessing. Secondly, obviously we're only looking at dramas or comedy, not real life stuff. And thirdly, ideally it has to be a series. A one off play with two actors or new and upcoming comedians isn't as interesting as twenty-odd episodes of something.

And only Doctor Who counts - not Torchwood, or Sarah Jane Adventures (sadly - even the latter starred Nigel Havers, Phyllida Law, Miriam Margoyles, Jane Asher, Julie Graham, Eddie Marsan, Ronnie Corbett...). Nor technically the wonderful new An Adventure in Space and Time drama. And no Big Finish, or we'll be here all day listing them.