10 Lessons Doctor Who Teaches Us About Christmas

2. Be Very Afraid If You Hear Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody

Doctor Who Nick Frost Peter Capaldi
BBC

In a universe full of the most extraordinary coincidences, on a land in which it never rains but it pours, the fact that bad things are often foreshadowed by this festive song shouldn’t exactly surprise us. It’s on multiple radio stations at least twelve times a day from mid-November right through to Christmas, as well as being on a constant loop in countless shopping malls.

Nevertheless, be warned, because the next time you hear Noddy Holder scream ‘it’s Christmasssss!’, there could be trouble ahead. The anthem has featured on no less than six occasions in the series.

Mickey hears it on the radio just before the TARDIS crashes on the Powell Estate; Donna unwisely plays it at her wedding reception; her mother Sylvia opens a musical Christmas card shortly before everybody is turned into the Master race; it’s on the hospital radio at Rory’s work, when mysterious cubes start causing heart attacks across the globe; and Shona sings and dances to the song in an effort to avoid seeing the dream crabs. There really is no escape from the invading Slade, for sure enough it even turns up in the parallel world of Turn Left.

If that wasn’t reason enough to block your ears, well, just think on this - it could be a harbinger of an even scarier proposition. Noddy Holder has intimated that he’d rather like to be the Doctor one day, adding that he already looks the part. It might be an idea to set up an amnesty to dispose of every single copy in existence.

Contributor
Contributor

Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.