User Reviews

The team that made the very funny comedy skit following up on the 'Pyramids of Mars' - 'Oh Mummy: Sutekh's Story', crashed and burned with this awful, unfunny and cringe inducing piece of fan made rubbish.

The impression one is left with is that they had a clear idea of what to do with a follow through on 'Pyramids' but not really on 'City of Death'.

Plus Douglas Adams 'City of Death' was a comedy, so trying to do a comedy skit based on comedy and failing so badly, makes it even worse.

The one and only hope is that they wont be commissioned to make any further items to the Doctor Who DVD range which, by and large, has become a wonderful collection in both re-mastering and interesting documentaries. Skits are best left to the professionals like Mark Gatiss and David Walliams contributions.

This really isn't very good at all. Allowance for the fact that it's a non-professional production can be made, but only up to a point.

Eye on Blatchford is a spoof about a Doctor Who alien trying to cope with mundane everyday life in contemporary Britain and failing miserably. Its producers were also responsible for Oh Mummy, a spoof about a Doctor Who alien trying to cope with mundane everyday life in contemporary Britain and failing miserably.

Oh Mummy was never going to break any new comedy ground, but its saving grace was that it was brief enough not to outstay its welcome. Sadly, Eye on Blatchford is a weak retread of the not-exactly-strong original that doesn't know when to stop.

The production values are poor, but that is somewhat beside the point; EoB is, above all, supposed to be comedy, and that is its greatest failure. It simply isn't anywhere near funny enough to carry its 13 minute running time. The writing is derivative and unoriginal, almost completely free of laughs and contains too many sub-Chris Morris puns. The performances are unexpressive and there is no evidence of the kind of true comic rhythm or timing from either cast, director or editor that could have allowed the piece to rise above its will-this-do scripting.

This is a pitiful waste of time and disc space. The 15 minutes I endured this sad, witless, unfunny, irrelevant, in-joke filled, drivel I will never be able to get back. I am rather resentful of that.

The team that brought us the rather impressive "Oh Mummy!", a Doctor Who fan made comic vignette that had been well received at a convention it was shown at and made it onto the Pyramids of Mars DVD, decided that lightning would strike twice and came up with "Eye on Blatchford". They should not have bothered. Whereas the original "Oh Mummy!" was fresh and comical this was not. It tried too hard and relied on too many similarities to "Oh Mummy!" but it failed to deliver as it simply was not funny.

Pyramids of Mars was low on humour and high on drama, so a comedic extra (Oh Mummy!) worked nicely as a contrast.As has already been mentioned, adding a comedy skit to City of Death is asking for trouble, even if you don't consider the original to be the apex of hilarity.

Unfortunately there is nothing even remotely amusing in this drivel. I felt embarrassed for the cast and writers, then I felt very angry that other people's money had been spent on this ghastly tripe.

A new edition of City of Death should be released with this garbage removed (cf. The Two Doctors / A Fix With Sontarans). And then we can pretend it never happened.

Charlie Chaplin's philosophy was that comedy is born out of sympathy and pathos. Of course Chaplin never made films about one-eyed spaghetti-headed aliens, but it's a lesson which Rob Hammond has taken to heart well. Sardoth is beyond rubbish - where Scaroth from City Of Death oozes genuine menace and ruthlessness, Sardoth is blissfully naive and childlike - and never actually recognises his own failings nor why he can't fit into small-town human society. Anyone whose sympathies lay with Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf is going to feel right at home.

Admittedly it's a little hard to convey just how funny this sketch is to those who haven't before seen City Of Death (and if not, why not?), but comic highlights which all faux-Whovians will assuredly all giggle at will be the bookshelf belonging to Sardoth's GP ("Where Does This Bit Go"), his dismissal of the art 'treasures' collected by his other selves as 'splinter junk' (including a DVD of the lost Fury From The Deep, complete with authentic BBC cover), and his attempts to raise money via a pub quiz machine with the aid of his splintered selves, none of whom can agree on the answers to the questions. It also has the worst Who-related joke EVER when Sardoth goes to break a five-pound note in the pub, but you'll have to have seen Julian Glover's own performance in the original story for it to make sense.

Even if most of the Doctor Who jokes go over your head, you can't fail to be amused by the sketch's dead-on sense of total self-assurance, mixed with a blithe ignorance of its own utter inconsequence, that genuine regional television programmes from the 70s and 80s would exhibit, as typified by the likes of the drunken snail from Nationwide. In this regard at least, Rob Hammond certainly knows his telly.