BUCKINGHAM Palace is bombed from deep space – by the Titanic – and the rest of London disappears in a puff of smoke. Who can help us – America? Nope, 60 million Yanks have dissolved into fat. The strongest people left standing are two women – Catheri
ne Tate, the rudest on all TV, and Billie Piper, who was pretty rude herself in Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. Last night's Doctor Who was the third-last in what fans, millions of years from now, will refer to as The Russell T Davies Age (Our Saviour! He Will Never Die!), and the man himself was having a ball.
It began with a simple premise – what if Donna Noble (Tate) had turned right at a T-junction instead of left? Rather than the Doctor's Girl Saturday she would have become a photocopier firm's PA, soon to be sacked. She would have survived the radiation storm and been evacuated to Leeds, but the Doctor would have been killed. Piper, returning as Rose Tyler, grabbed the headlines for this episode but Tate was the star of an exciting tale about turning back time to save the universe for another week.
Davies had a lot of fun with his apocalypse as France was first to close its borders to refugees. In scenes evoking the Blitz, people who regarded themselves as true Brits got a taste of what life is like currently for some members of the immigrant community. But hey-ho, mustn't grumble. If December 24 ever turns out as hellish as this, it's reassuring to know that Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everybody' will still be on the soundtrack.
This demonstration of Girl Power at the week's end made quite a contrast with How TV Changed Britain at the beginning. The third in the goggle-box history series concerned the small screen's attitude to women and concluded that in 60 years it had gone from Marguerite Patten's bossy lectures on "homemaking" in a bool-in-mooth accent to Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife.
How were wifies right back where they started? Top wifies such as Joan Bakewell were baffled that the strides made by Elsie Tanner, The Liver Birds and DCI Jane Tennison had produced nothing more empowering than a gunky blocked plughole of makeover programmes where women were characterised as being too fat, too lazy or too out of control – all of them completely useless without instruction from Gok Wan, Nicky Hambleton-Jones and that ninny who turned her own wedding into "Flake-gate". "It's very difficult to judge where women are right now," said Bakewell, who may live up to her name and be able to bake well, but she didn't become the thinking man's crumpet by chaining herself to a stove.
Sass Willis started out on Tribal Wives somewhere in the middle. Her life was hectic but empty. On top of her local government job in Oxford she piled voluntary work and early-morning starts as an amateur rower. She stayed busy to stop thinking about failed relationships (with men and her own mother). The professional masked the personal. So the BBC acted like the Auntie it is and packed her off to a remote island in the hope the experience would be life-changing.
I can't remember whether the voiceover mentioned the dread words "... and go on a journey", but I was still bothered by the well-thumbed copy of The Da Vinci Code on Sass's bookcase when the 34-year-old flip-flopped onto Niadup, off the coast of Panama – home to the Kuna Indians.
Reservations disappeared as soon as we entered the reservation. The Kuna tribe lead deeply spiritual lives and made fascinating subjects. Ana Lida, 55, saw through Sass's happy act straight away. Absolutely dedicated to the principles of family like all her people, she became a surrogate mum and promised their house-guest: "If you stayed I would find you an excellent man." Sass left without one but seemed happy – proper happy. Yes, she'd "found herself".
Tribal Wives wasn't my usual thing but the long nights can be grim ones for the sofa spud. The same evening should go down in infamy for Coldplay At The BBC (BBC2), an extended commercial by the state broadcaster for the new elpee by the bedwetter-rock millionaires. Coldplay base their songs round the kind of slogans rejected by staff in the Mind, Body & Soul sections of all major bookshops for being too generic and trite. There was more genuine emotion on display during Harold Bishop's farewell to Neighbours (Five) earlier in the day. These are slim pickings, indeed, for those of us thirled to the box, so thank goodness for Slim Pickens.
The old cowboy actor turned up in How The West Was Lost, a rootin', tootin' history of the western by the comedian Rich Hall which was also a history of the United States. The genre may have declined since being sent up by Blazing Saddles but that hasn't stopped successive US presidents believing, at key moments, that they were in a western of their own imagining, with their role being played by Gary Cooper.
Hall used the White House's sitting sheriff and his attitude to those mean varmints in the Middle East as the most obvious example of this, but I've always liked the story of Ronald Reagan from between his presidencies when political rival John Glenn, the ex-astronaut, received a boost in the polls from the space-race flick The Right Stuff.
Reagan dismissed Glenn as "just a celluloid hero" until it was pointed out that the latter's big-screen heroics were real and entirely attributable to him. B-movie shoot-'em-up lunk Reagan never actually killed an injun, then blew smoke from the barrel-hole of his gun in the time-honoured way.
Why did cowboys do that? Hall was keen to find out. And in the theme park that's grown up around the fabled town of Tombstone – where daily re-enactments of the Gunfight at the OK Corral last four hours instead of the mere minutes in reality, and where you can buy Earpburgers for $10 – he found his answer: because it looked good.
