Episode 1
Spyfall Part One
When intelligence agents across the world come under attack from alien forces, MI6 calls in the Doctor… who’s soon drawn into a trap by an old enemy.
PAUL KIRKLEY
BBC One, 1 January 2020
Writer: Chris Chibnall
Director: Jamie Magnus Stone
Guest cast: Sacha Dhawan (O/The Master), Lenny Henry (Daniel Barton), Stephen Fry (C), Shobna Gulati (Najia Khan), Ravin J Ganatra (Hakim Khan), Bhavnisha Parmar (Sonya Khan
Rating: 6.89m (seven-day, all devices)
Appreciation Index: 82
From the Mini to the mini-skirt, Mary Quant to Michael Caine, Biba to The Beatles, the 1960s saw Britain minting fresh new icons seemingly by the hour. In James Bond andDoctor Who, this fertile period gifted us cinema’s longest-running franchise and television’s most enduring sci- fisaga. Each one having had many faces a nd many lives, these twin titans of modern fiction may appear, in a certain light, to be like peas in a pod. So it’s perhaps surprising it took the best part of 60 years forDoctor Who- always a voracious cultural magpie - to give us a full-throttle Bond pastiche in the form ofSpyfall. (Though it has flirted with the idea in the past, of course, most notably with 1967-68’s global spy-ficaperThe Enemy of the World, while David Tennant’s Time Lord was known to rock a tux on occasion.)