Bannakaffalatta

 Photo courtesy of the BBC

I have to mention this little guy.  He is amongst the favourites in our house.  He was only ever in one episode.  A Christmas special, which for reasons best kept to myself I didn’t actually get to watch until the following summer on a very sweaty noisy seven hour train journey,  I watched on my phone, even on this tiny screen I loved it, it’s Who, what’s not to love.  I have since of course watched on a larger screen many times with my children or indeed without, I’m not fussy. 

Bannakaffalatta, a Zocci was a tiny spikey red dude in a tuxedo from the planet Sto,  who many years ago had suffered an accident, the details of which we are never made privy too.  Due to the injuries he suffered he was in fact mostly cyborg, a fact he kept hidden because of the terrible shame he felt.  Cyborgs were discriminated against on his home planet.  Now I’m not going to give a run down of the episode, I simply want to tell you of the wonderful Bannakaffalatta and how his selflessness saved the day.  Bannakaffalatta had a crush on Astrid and because of how he felt for her was able to open up to her at a crucial moment about his cyborgness. The monsters in this episode were ‘The Heavenly Host’   robotic servants programmed by Max Capricorn to kill everyone aboard the Starliner, Titanic.  Bannakaffalatta was able to use his cyborg make-up and the very core of his being, an electromagnetic power source to destroy The Heavenly Host thus saving others but sacrificing himself.   This self sacrifice is a running theme with Who and one I’m grateful for, we should have more of this in our world.  It's a credit to the writers that they manage to get this message of selflessness over to the viewers without it ever appearing syrupy.  However, I’m not so grateful to the writers for being turned into a human sniffing, bubbling snot ball on a train, but this is Who we are talking about and not an episode goes by where I am not laughing one minute and crying the next.    I love it, I love every single drop of emotion that is eeked out of me by the script writers.

 Bannakaffalatta I salute you.