Don’t get me wrong – the current episodes of Doctor Who (Human Nature) are just the best ever, and I think David Tennant is the best Doctor ever. But in Doctor Who Confidential over on BBC Three, David Tennant says that scarecrows are such an obvious idea that it’s odd they’ve not been used before for their spooky potential.
Well they have – take for example The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. The screen-grab here is from episode three, in which the young Philip Marlowe sees a scarecrow from a train, waving at him in exactly the same way the scarecrow waved in part one of Human Nature. Hard to imagine they weren’t influenced by it.
I knew there was more to this than the scarecrows – Gerard Horan played the father of the Family of Blood in these two episodes of Doctor Who – and he was also in The Singing Detective; he played Reginald, one of Marlow’s fellow patients on the ward.