Stephen Fry and Bipolar Disorder

Saw a very moving and frank TV documentary by Stephen Fry last night, going through his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. You couldn't help admiring the bloke for being so up-front about the terrible situations that the illness has gotten him into, including imprisonment for credit card fraud on one occasion.

It could have been a classic celebrity fess-up, but to his credit Fry also talked to ordinary people who had to live as best they could with a horrible illness. Which made the whole thing much more powerful. And I admired him for discussing the reasons why he'd rather not take medication.

I don't suffer from full-blown BPD myself but I do have what the diagnosis-happy Americans would describe as cyclothymia, which is a milder version. One problem with it, which is getting worse as the menopause kicks in, is that it's very tricky indeed to get the meds right. I noticed a while back that I was sleeping badly, also that I was writing a lot more. People, family especially, were commenting on my embarrassing behaviour, the jokes that only I laughed at, etc. I was going over the edge. Cut down the meds and I became more normal. But I missed the writing.

If you are a famous, creative person, moving in circles where cocaine use is affordable and endemic, where you can pick and choose your hours and frankly, you are expected to be a bit odd, you are going to calculate rather differently from someone who has to keep an everyday family show on the road. And Fry was very honest about this, it seemed to me.

I'm looking forward to the next installment.

The son of Doctor Who

This business of the Doctor having a son fascinates me. I must have read hundreds of forum posts on it and not one has nailed the problem as I see it, or why I'm predicting it will turn out to be true.

Most posters assume it's the regeneration issue; the argument goes that you can easily get around the twelve lives problem, ergo there will be no son. It's the classic example of fandom imposing their own little skewed vision of a situation onto the world as a whole.

Talk to anyone who actually watched "Doomsday" (well, anyone female and over 25) and they won't know or care. But they will care a lot about whether he gets back with Rose.

And therein lies the problem. You can't have a Doctor and Wife series, because the chemistry between the couple will change every time one of them leaves - ie, with almost every new series. And besides marriage is BORING isn't it? (Which really pisses me, BTW. Why would they need a mortgage? Why do you have to stop killing Daleks and settle down in Surbiton just because you are married?)

So we have to have the poor old Doctor as Tragic Hero and milk it for all it's worth. Now I wept over Lyra and Will in HDM but at the same time totally accepted the rightness of them being apart for ever more. It just felt consistent with the narrative thrust of the story. The only tear I shed over Doomsday was when Jackie saw Pete again, but I felt that the tragic ending had been totally tacked on, and that in fact the whole of Series two had built towards an outcome which felt emotionally false.

Watching the last of Series One, followed by the Christmas Invasion consolidated these feelings - they just brought up too many serious, fascinating issues and then threw them all out of the window without a word of explanation. One minute we had a heroine who'd become divine to save her lover, the next she was was a vapid teenager mooning over her boyfriend. And he was even worse. He's a Time Lord, for Rassilon's sake. I'm not blaming Tennant, I think it's the scripts. I suspect that between filming the Christmas special and New Earth it became clear to all concerned that as a couple, he and Billie simply didn't gel on screen.

RTD is trying to spin it as a hubris narrative but that credits it with a seriousness the scripts don't match. Even if he had that in mind all along, it's a totally different direction to take from the seriousness of Series One.

The Doctor I know and love, and which I think is inside DT screaming to get out, would have woken up on Boxing Day feeling he'd been an arrogant prat. He'd have got Rose straight into the Tardis's MRI scanner and made sure the Vortex hadn't done her permanent damage. He'd have hired Sarah Jane to handle his publicity and save Jackie and Micky the misery of "I was an alien's sex slave" headlines (Okay, maybe SJ would have had to turn up and point out that might not be a bad idea). And he might even have called the PM and apologised.

That's the story I'm interested in. And it would make terrible TV. But RTD is smart enough to figure out how to have the cake and eat it. So when DT hangs up the Tardis keys, we'll get a big revelation that there's a Boy Who out there who can take over all the stuff kids and fans get off on, and in a final scene watched by millions, Tennant can get back to Billie Piper and they can settle into a contented retirement punctuated only by occasional Bank Holiday specials.

Oh, I do hope I'm right. But if I'm not, there is always fan fiction.