So I watched next Saturday's Doctor Who - postponed from this weekend to make way for Serbia's triumph at Eurovision - before I went to bed last night. Then I had nightmares. Yes, actual nightmares featuring the monsters against which the Doctor and Martha battle. That hasn't happened with a Doctor Who since I was scared witless by the one-eyed green monster thing in the Tom Baker story, City of Death. That was back in 1979.
You might have already seen the monsters that feature in the new Doctor Who episodes, Human Nature and The Family of Blood. They're nasty scarecrows called, I think, jackstraws. (You can insert your own joke about wannabe deputy leaders of the Labour party here.) Silent, lumbering, with claw-like hands and cloth faces scarred with stitching, they are by no means the first examples of scary scarecrows. Another that sticks in the mind is the flesh-eating creeper of Jeepers Creepers. The League of Gentlemen, too, made ingenious use of scarecrows in the punishment of transgressors in Royston Vasey but these were hardly the League's most terrifying creations. That accolade belongs to Papa Lazarou, the blacked-up ringmaster with his cry of "You're my wife now, Dave". He tapped into fears of travelling people abducting women and children with a vampiric efficiency.
But what else is scary? And why? The key, Dr Freud, seems to be either inanimate objects with minds of their own or that which is assumed to be benevolent actually possessed by evil. Thus it will, surely, only be a matter of time until clowns crop up - menacing, malevolent - in the Doctor's universe. (Mannequins already have, of course). And then there are ventriloquists' dummies. Petrifying. Your thoughts, as always, are welcome. Singing Serbians don't count.
