Doctor Who series 6 (Matt Smith)

(Amazon UK link)

We finished watching Doctor Who series 5 at the end of last year. We had become familiar with Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, and with Amy Pond, portrayed by Karen Gillen, as his companion. At the end of the fifth series, Amy married Rory (Arthur Darvill), and both had decided to keep travelling with the Doctor. 

Series 6 opens with a Christmas special entitled ‘A Christmas carol’. It was a good one to see towards the end of the Christmas period; it was first broadcast on Christmas Day 2010. We first saw it in September 2013 and had entirely forgotten the story. It features a very Scrooge-like character, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Gambon, who refuses to allow a spaceship to arrive. Rory and Amy are in it, on their honeymoon, and send out an SOS to the Doctor. 

The writing is clever, with more than a nod to Dickens; and we liked the resulting softening of the character. There are several Christmas carols featured in the background, too, and some amazing singing. It’s all very well done, we thought, with some tension and mildly scary effects - but overall, an excellent Christmas special. It’s an hour long, and then there’s an ‘extra’ on the same DVD, a Doctor Who ‘confidential’, which gives a lot of background to the episode. There are also a couple of brief ‘extra’ episodes filmed for Comic Relief. 

Little women (Winona Ryder)

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We have two DVDs with films based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel ‘Little Women’. We watched the 2019 version - updated for a modern audience - in 2020, and I liked it much more than I had expected to. But it was over twenty years since we watched the 1994 version which is rather closer to the original. So we decided to see it again. I am very familiar with the story, my husband much less so as he has never read the books.

On the whole, this is quite true to the original, although inevitably a lot has been cut out. The four March sisters are realistically portrayed: Trini Alvarado is the responsible Meg, and Winona Ryder is the impetuous Jo, who never quite manages to look tidy, and who spends most of her time writing. I thought Beth (Claire Danes) was the least believable of the four; but a lot of her story is removed from the film. Kirsten Dunst is an excellent young Amy; she’s the only sister who has a different actress (Samantha Mathis) playing her as an adult. But then Meg and Jo were older teenagers anyway at the start of the story.

Nim's Island (Abigail Breslin)

(Amazon UK link)

We’ve picked up a lot of DVDs over the years, many of them second-hand. Since we have regularly had young friends coming to watch a DVD, we made sure that there was a good collection with U rating for them to select from when they were small. There were some which we were familiar with, of course; I bought quite a few children’s classics when our own sons were younger. But others were completely new to us. 

Recently I thought it would be a good idea for us to watch some of them - not the 3d animated ones which I dislike intently, but the ones with real people. Last night we decided to watch ‘Nim’s Island’.  I had no idea what it was about, but I know our young friends quite liked it a few years ago. 

The star of this film is Abigail Breslin, who is perfectly cast as 11-year-old Nim. She narrates the start of the story, illustrated with cartoons, showing how her mother was eaten by a whale when Nim was three. So she lives with her father, Jack (Gerard Butler). They went around the world a couple of times on his boat, as he’s a marine scientist, always looking for new forms of microscopic life.  And now they have settled on a tiny island which doesn’t have any other human inhabitants.