Other Doctor Lives: Twenty Twelve: Series 1, Episode 1: “Countdown” (2011)

I’ve reviewed actors’ performances for narration before, but I think this will be my first time covering such a lengthy project in that capacity. David Tennant was the narrator, not just for both seasons of this show, but for all three seasons of the spinoff that followed it. We’ll see how much I wind up having to say about his performance here. However, Joel Fry is going to show up as a recurring character in both series, so some of these reviews will wind up doubling as Joel Fry-days posts. (And yes, that is of course the reason I decided to start watching it now!)

Twenty Twelve is a mockumentary following the Olympics Deliverance Commission as they prepare for the London Olympics. On the cusp of reaching the “1,000 Days to Go” mark, the commission gets ready to kick things off with a bang. Siobhan has commissioned an artist to create a giant countdown clock and has her team designing the London Olympics website. Graham is testing a new system to improve traffic in London ahead of the Games, while Kay is on a mission to line up uses for the various Olympic arenas after the Games are over. They’re led by Ian, who’s doing his best to steer a fairly rudderless ship.

Since we’ll be here a while across two shows, I’ll throw in a character-of-the-week thing so we can get to know the non-David Tennant and non-Joel Fry participants here. Naturally, we’ll start with head of deliverance Ian Fletcher, played by Hugh Bonneville. Ian is a pretty quintessential British manager type, and Bonneville can do a role like this in his sleep. He’s diligent and thoughtful but also nebbish and a bit feckless. He can barely keep their morning meetings on track, so at the moment, managing the Olympics feels like a stretch.

It’s the pilot, so we’re mainly getting to know the characters and establishing the premise here. While the episode starts a little dry, I got into the humor more as it went on. So far, Siobhan’s dialogue is way overseasoned with fillers, a la, “Okay, cool,” “Right, so like…”, and, “So the thing about…” I get that she’s supposed to be grating, but it’s too over-the-top for me, and I hope they turn it down a bit in future episodes. I’m entertained by Graham. As Ian instructs him to deal with the traffic issue, he keeps shifting between looking absolutely bewildered at the thought of getting anything accomplished by Friday and blandly assuring him that Friday is no problem. Hee!

As I said, David Tennant is the show’s narrator. Like with the episode itself, the narration starts a little dry but reveals more of its humor in time. The narrator describes the artist who creates the clock as someone “who’s probably been best known up to now for gaining a reputation,” and as we see a stressed-out Ian arrive at the office, wrestling with his bike and talking on the phone, I enjoy the solemn, “It’s recently become increasingly clear to him that he’s going to have a weekend away with his wife in Barcelona.”

First impressions:

Accent Watch

Scottish.

Recommend?

In General – Too early to say. I enjoyed this first episode, but I’m not hooked yet.

David Tennant – Again, it’s too early. I’m not sure whether a narrator role will ultimately warrant a recommendation purely for Tennant’s performance. We’ll see.

Warnings

Language and a jumpscare involving a J.K. Rowling reference (her name comes up when they’re batting around “British icons” to serve as potential torchbearers.) 

F1: The Movie (2025, PG-13)

As I said in my response to this year’s Oscar nominations, F1 struck me as the “dad movie” Best Picture nominee, and now that I’ve seen it, I think that assessment was pretty accurate. From a filmmaking standpoint, it’s well made, and it has qualities that I enjoyed more than I expected, but on the whole, this one isn’t really for me.

Back in the 90s, Sonny Hayes was a promising Formula One driver, but a traumatic accident derailed his career. These days, he drives anywhere people will take him in between indulging his gambling addiction. Then his old racing buddy Ruben comes to him with a proposition: Ruben owns a Formula One team now, and while his number-one driver is solid, he needs a strong number-two to bring the team to the next level.

This is the sort of nominee that’s up for Best Picture, a few technical awards (editing, sound, visual effects,) and nothing else, which always makes the “Best Picture” part feel like a bit of a headscratcher. The thing is, F1 is put together quite well. It looks good, there’s a talented cast, and I’d say it’s mostly effective in dramatizing the races in a cinematic way. But while the story has its moments, that’s the main area where the film falls flat. In particular, it’s the lead character who isn’t working for me, which isn’t an ideal spot to be in.

Yeah, I’m not all that interested in Sonny. He’s a “maverick” type—he gains advantages on the track for the team by pulling cheap tricks, and for a good chunk of the film, this includes disregarding everything the mission control people are telling him to do and not telling anyone on the team what he’s up to. He brushes off crashing two cars as incidental, and he seems to delight in infuriating everyone on the team Just ‘Cause. It’s the epitome of “we let him get away with being an asshole because he gets results.” While Sonny eventually becomes a bit more of a team player, it’s only after most of the people on the team come around to his way of thinking and follow his lead.

The person who gets the worst of this blowback is Joshua Pearce, the team’s number-one driver. Joshua is young and talented but has been struggling to really stand out from the pack. Getting paired with a showboating wildcard, in his estimation, makes the team look like a joke and means he gets lost in the background behind Sonny’s antics. His distrust and resentment is understandable, but by and large, the narrative frames this as a Joshua problem, that he’s the one who has to get with the program.

Not much to say about Brad Pitt as Sonny. While he delivers what the role is supposed to be, it kind of feels like the sort of thing he could sleepwalk through. I’m not familiar with Damson Idris, but I enjoy his performance as Joshua, although the role is a bit thankless. Javier Bardem is effective as Ruben, and I like Kerry Condon as Kate, the engineer who designs and makes modifications to the car. Some other familiar faces here as well, including Tobias Menzies (I know he had a recurring role on Game of Thrones, but I remember him best as William Elliot in the Sally Hawkins Persuasion,) Kim Bodnia (Konstantin from Killing Eve,) and Will Merrick (Alo from Skins.) I was most excited to see a few of the actors in Joshua’s side of the story. Sarah Niles (Dr. Sharon from Ted Lasso) plays his mom, while Samson Kayo (Oluwande!!!) plays his manager. Are either of these roles very demanding? No, but it’s still nice to see them.

Warnings

Violent car crashes, language, drinking/smoking, sexual content, and thematic elements.

Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Rocky (Yesterday)

*Rocky-related spoilers.*

When the actor playing Frenchie looked familiar to me after season 1 of Our Flag Means Death, I looked him up and realized that I recognized Joel Fry from this movie, where he played the main character’s quirky buddy. Back in 2019, I’d been really excited for Yesterday, but unfortunately, the movie didn’t fully pan out for me. In my review at the time, I praised Himesh Patel’s strong performance but disliked the super clunky romantic storyline and lamented that the cool premise wasn’t executed very well.

Watching it again for Joel Fry-days, my overall impressions of the movie are much the same. Himesh Patel’s acting and singing are both terrific, I like Jack’s imperfect recall of the Beatles’ catalog—a la his ongoing struggle to remember the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby”—and it cracks me up that Ed Sheeran’s ringtone is “Shape of You.” But the story is still a letdown, and I get aggravated that Richard Curtis’s singular plot device for the film is “character gets repeatedly interrupted by meaningless stuff when they’re trying to share something important.” Seriously, it happens even more often than I’d recalled!

Since I’ve already reviewed Yesterday, I wanted to write something different for today’s post, so it’s time for another Neurodivergent Alley! Before we get into it, here’s my Joel Fry-days addendum to my original review:

Accent Watch

Southern British English, maybe a bit London.

Recommend?

In General – A soft maybe. The parts I like, I like a lot, but there’s a lot of fat surrounding it.

Joel Fry – It’s another yes from me. Look, it’s still relatively early days for Joel Fry-days, so I might just be in the “I love everything!” phase. But I really, really like Fry’s performance as Rocky, which is goofy and fun with moments of unexpected sweetness.

To me, Rocky reads as maybe AuDHD. He’s viewed by others as a terminally unemployable screwup that you can’t depend on. Sadly, even Rocky’s friends see him this way. When Jack runs into him working at a musical festival, Jack remarks, “So everyone who said you were a lazy, useless, drug-taking drunk who’d never get a job were wrong.” Rocky affirms that they were wrong about him, except he’s fired later that day and winds up couch surfing with another friend of theirs. When Jack hears about this, he commiserates with the friend, calling it “a disaster” and warning that it “could last forever.”

To be fair, Rocky struggles with executive function stuff, and he makes easy mistakes when he’s distracted, dropping the ball on important things. He’s also blunt in ways that most people don’t appreciate, and he doesn’t care much about social hierarchies. When Jack gets the chance to open for Ed Sheeran—bringing Rocky as his roadie, as a last resort—Rocky has no problem telling the pop star to his face that it “sounds a bit crap” when he tries to rap. It’s not the only moment where, in Jack’s view, Rocky says something embarrassing or inappropriate in front of someone important.

A key part of Rocky’s bluntness, though, is that he’s not great with social cues. After accompanying Jack on his frantic race to the train station in Liverpool to meet Ellie, Rocky sits down beside them as they prepare to have a serious talk about their relationship. Jack has to tell him, “Rocky, this is completely not a conversation you’re part of.” And later on, when Ellie tells Jack she’s started seeing someone, Rocky can’t figure out why Jack never dated her. Which leads us to this exchange:

ROCKY: “If I had been you, twice a day, I would have loved her up like a lusty lion.” 

JACK: “Rocky, if I ask you to just shut up—really, really, really shut up—would that be okay?” 

ROCKY: “...Right. Can I just start again and say, isn’t it wonderful news? And I hope they’ll be very happy together and have gorgeous kids! Is that better?” 

JACK: “No, it’s worse.” 

ROCKY: “I have got a third option, but—”

And that’s the point where Jack cuts him off. Lots of comedies have the inappropriate friend who says horny things or inadvertently makes the hero feel like crap when they’re down. But I don’t often see this dynamic, where it’s clear that the friend realizes they said the wrong thing and tries to course-correct, only they’re not sure how. Rocky asking permission to start again, wondering “is that better?” once he does, and then offering to try a third time? All of that screams, Oh wait, social interaction fumbled—how do I fix this?

Similarly, when the distracted mistakes happen and Rocky screws things up, he’s not just the happy-go-lucky guy who brushes everything off. When he gets fired near the start of the film, he says, “Fair dues,” admitting his fault in it, then sheepishly shakes his head at Jack as he has to admit he’s just lost another job. He does try, and he wants to do well, and it bothers him when he doesn’t. That’s another thing that a lot of movies wouldn’t do with the funny wildcard friend who causes comedic mishaps and makes the hero’s life more difficult. Generally, you’re not “supposed to” empathize with this guy when his own best friend thinks he’s not good for anything, but I do.

For me, a lot of that comes down to how Joel Fry plays Rocky. He brings out the earnestness amid the goofiness and the chaos, making Rocky feel more like a genuine person instead of a caricature. I feel it in those moments where Rocky realizes he’s miscalibrated a social cue, or where he shows that he’s not immune to the perception of him as a hopeless screwup.  Best of all, Fry does this while still filling the “goofy chaotic friend” role to a tee—he has some great line deliveries and reaction shots, and I love a moment where it’s revealed that Rocky slept on the couch in his own hotel room, with his jacket, shoes, and sunglasses still on. Hee!