The Watcher Cat

The Watcher Cat

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Your Plastic Planty Pal Who's Fun to be With

You would think that the combination of Doctor Who and the Plantagenets would be a thing of beauty--a good old-fashioned historical, with the Doctor sagely commenting on a key turning point in British history. Imagine William Hartnell, for example, flirting with an aged but still spritely Eleanor of Aquitane.

No, really, he could, dammit; here he is in The Aztecs, striking up a relationship:



Or Troughton, debating Henry II on a fine point of canon law, having been mistaken for Thomas Becket?

No; we get the Fifth Doctor and a suspiciously Monty Python-esque knight duelling for the amusement of a saturnine King John:



Admittedly this bit of dialogue is pretty nifty:

Sir Ranulf Fitzwilliam: "He is said to be the best swordsman in France."
Doctor: "Well, fortunately we are in England."

However, all is not lost; the King (in fact a shape-shifting robot, playing at being a Plantagenet) has a mean way with a lute about him, leading to this little earworm:



(Oh, did I mention that the Doctor--Hartnell again--did meet Richard I in The Crusade? Well, he did, but not as amusing as Gerald Flood singing. Sorry.)