What a wonderful show - funny, quirky, crazy, highly entertaining - a creative, thrilling joyride, a trip into a beautiful, cute, funny and even sometimes educative fantasy dimension with all these great characters keeping you on the toes all the time if and how the "villains are defeated" and "order is restored" - thank you "Debbeeeehhh" and Elf and all the wonderful others for the fabulous time, a shame that it only lasted three seasons - real quality usually never gets justice!

I'm a fan of the live-action HH series and recently invested in an all-region DVD player so I could treat myself to all the shows by the HH team that aren't currently available in the U.S. (i.e., everything except the first three series of HH.) It occurred to me while watching "Yonderland" the first time through that it succeeds in being what "Doctor Who" fans nostalgically recall and yearn for it to be again, a really fun, ingenious and smart fantasy show that above all is good all the way through, not just the occasional "Heaven Sent" interspersed with "Kill the Moon"s. Of course I'd think that since "Yonderland" is a mashup of just about every fantasy show you can think of, including DW, with Debbie as a combined companion-Doctor and her kitchen cupboard her Tardis.What "Yonderland" has now that Steven Moffat's DW doesn't (and is rare outside of comedy sketch shows) is the consistency that comes with being made by a coordinated creative team that writes and performs its own material. It's also relieved of the exhausting obligation of trying to thrill us with amazing scenarios of heart-stopping action and adventure, since that's what the series is sending up in the first place.

It takes a lot of work to create a good series. The cast is great, but the show is bogged down by several things that Horrible Histories mostly avoided. The first issue is the lack of development of characters. No one changes, no one learns. After watching 12 episodes, very little has happened. I've learned nothing, nor have the characters in the show. The second issue is that Debbie is supposedly super smart and all the male characters are stupid. This makes Debbie quite 1 dimensional (compare to her husband who is just plain stupid and constantly subservient as one example). She comes across as condescending (as another reviewer pointed out). It's a shame because she was far more diverse in Horrible Histories - breaking "modern gender stereotypes" that, surprisingly, this show suffers greatly from (summary: woman perfect, smart: men stupid. Same stereotype for the last 20 years). The show could also benefit from dropping the naked gags (or at least evolving them). One of the few gags that really hit the spot was the references to celebrities in the Sherlock Holmes style episode. The who-dun-nit was the best laugh I'd had in the series. Puppeteering and sets are diverse and look good. Needs to drop the stereotypes/sexism and be a little less condescending and a little more risk taking. If the writers aren't careful, Political Correctness will kill the series, as will the lack of a story arc.

Unfortunately I've been very disappointed by Yonderland. I really enjoyed the cast in Horrible Histories but they just don't seem to have the same spark now it's their own material. For a comedy it only gets a few chuckles from me each week rather than proper laughs (the 'councellor who wants to get naked' joke is wearing really thin), and the few songs are nowhere near as clever as they were in HH. At times it feels a bit like the Mathew Baynton Show (MB seems to play at least 4 parts each week to everyone else's 1-2), while I also think it's confused over the audience it's aiming at. The first episode seemed child-friendly but others have had some very risqué dialogue for its time slot. As for plot, I'm still waiting for something to actually happen. So far 'Debbie' hasn't done very much that I would consider a significant contribution towards the battle against evil, and she spends each week whingeing and flipping her hair, speaking to all in a undeservedly superior tone.I heard the HH team were planning to do a movie about Shakespeare which I had previously been anticipating, but having seen their efforts in Yonderland I'm sad to say I will probably be giving it a miss. Sorry :(