The British actress Jenna Coleman had volunteered the revelation that Clara Oswald, her character in Doctor Who, is "totally in love" with the doctor, played by Peter Capaldi.

When Capaldi took on the role last year, he said there would be no sexual tension between his doctor and Clara, the travelling companion. Capaldi is 57, playing a Time Lord who is 909 years old. Coleman is 29, and since 2012 has been playing a schoolteacher who may be 29 or who might have been born in 1886.

So you wouldn't expect any hint of hanky-panky in the season of Doctor Who that starts tonight on ABC1. But then again, when asked to preview the story arc, Coleman said: "It's about the glory days of Clara and the doctor. They're kind of freed of their issues and in a wonderful place together.

"In the last series, she was trying to keep him under control, while in this series, the two of them are going, 'Come on, let's jump, let's do it', egging each other on really, and being more and more reckless."

This is promising.

I'd started with the observation that Clara Oswald could not be more different from Coleman's other recent role – Lydia Bennet/Wickham, one of the most annoying characters in all of English literature. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia is the stupidest of the Bennet sisters and runs away with a sleazy soldier. Coleman played her earlier this year in the TV sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley. She was delighted Australians had seen her in that role.

"I love those kind of contrasts," she said.

"I haven't played another character for a long time so it was quite liberating to step into another part, something that's so different.

"Once you've played a certain character for a certain length of time, you kind of always crave an antidote to that. Playing Lydia Wickham, you don't have very many bounds, you can be hysterical and ridiculous. I found myself asking the director all the time, 'Too far? Too much?'. I had so much fun playing with being totally hysterical, really."

One difficulty for viewers of Doctor Who in recent seasons has been that Clara seems to be several different people, with new revelations about her backstories almost every week. Presumably there is some core of the character that the actress holds on to, through all the changes…

"That's very interesting, actually," Coleman said.

"I've never heard anybody say that before. At heart, she's an adventurer and she's a romantic.

"She doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. She keeps it quite tightly to her chest. She's an only child, she's solitary, she's grown up with her head in books, in the clouds, really, and I think she's living her dream right now, travelling with the doctor.

"Her doctor relationship, especially with number 12, is more about what's unsaid than said. It's between the lines, really.

"It's very rare for them to tell each other they love each other. It's more in a kind of backwards look; more under the surface, I suppose."

Question: Did you just say they love each other? Is Clara in love with the Doctor? Coleman: "She's totally in love with him, always has been."

Q: What does that mean? Coleman: "It's its own kind of love. He is her hero, but she would be very reluctant to tell him that. It's a doctor-and-companion love, and there's nothing else like it, really. The relationship is: he is her father, he is her alien best friend, he is her annoying child sometimes that has, like, no social skills. It's kind of an unquantifiable love, I think."

Q: As I understand it, Clara becomes like the doctor in this season? Coleman: "They're total partners and equals. I think gradually she's becoming more and more independent, more and more like him, her confidence is maybe getting greater. Her risk-taking is getting heightened all the time, because at the end of the day he always saves her.

"She thinks she can put herself on a cliff and jump off, because there's always a way to fix it."

Q: That sounds ominous. So do you have any idea what the writer, Steven Moffat, plans to do with Clara next?

Coleman: "Me and Steven have had chats. For me, it's always been I want to tell the best story, and I'm kind of flexible and I will stay for as long as it's the way to tell the best story, until it sort of feels like the right place to end."

Doctor Who airs Sunday, September 20, at 7.40pm on ABC1. It airs at 5.30am on iview and can be viewed all day.

The man most likely?

All the filming has finished on The Bachelorette, the "reality" show in which Sam Frost (the jilted winner of last year's The Bachelor) has to choose her favourite among 14 applicants. None of the eligible gentlemen know who won. But if disarming frankness were the criterion in choosing the winner, the prize would have to go to Alex, a 35-year-old financial consultant who was born in Borneo.

Asked if he fell in love with Sam during the course of making the show, Alex told me: "You sound like the producers. That was a question I was asked every day, I think. Look, I'm a reserved character and I don't like to be fully open with everyone else, apart from the person I might be falling for.

"I don't know if it's possible within the amount of time you spend with someone on a show like this to be to be able to fully say you were in love with them. I certainly have strong feelings for Sam."

Tall, bearded Alex was asked to apply by Channel Ten talent scouts who spotted him in the street.

He'd seen last year's The Bachelor, in which Blake Garvey chose Sam Frost but then went off with another contestant, and had thought "it seemed like a pretty rotten thing for that fellow to do to her … a bit weak-willed on his part".

Alex didn't know who was going to be the Bachelorette this year, until after he'd been through the show's rigorous medical and psychological testing.

"I knew they might go for somebody from a previous show, that's kind of how the American model works," he says.

"There were a few people I would have been a little bit less enchanted about trying to seduce, I guess.

"I think Laurina's name was mooted at one point, and she seemed a little bit cray-cray, so I was pretty happy when I found out it was Sam.

"She's positive, she's bubbly and she's not somebody who is going to be hard work to sit down and get a one-on-one connection with."

How did he get on with the other guys?

"We were there in a quite a weird scenario, trying to win the heart of the same girl, and naturally that's going to create some tension.

"Given the circumstances, I think we got on as well as any group of lads could. There were very few people who annoyed me.

"There was probably a couple of names I could mention, but I won't, of people who were starting to fray the nerves by the time they were ready to leave, but what can I say – Sam's got good taste in men.

"The guys who stuck around to the level that I did, I started to really enjoy their company."

There's a clue there, compounded with Alex's admission that he knows "who the last two are", that suggests he got a fair way towards the end of the process. If so, he deserves it.

The Bachelorette starts on Wednesday at 7.30pm and continues on Thursday on Ten.

Meta madness

High camp. Ironic. Self-referential. Postmodern. Words fail us in attempting to convey the level of meta achieved by the new horror comedy series Scream Queens, which starts on Ten this week. As Variety magazine described it: "Take Heathers, sprinkle in some Mean Girls, combine it with Halloween and a liberal dose of Friday the 13th – and you've got the formula for Scream Queens."

To fully appreciate its multilayered appeal, you'll need to hone your pop culture trivia skills.

You should know that it was written by Ryan Murphy, who created Glee and American Horror Story. He told Variety: "When I did Glee, it's because I wanted to watch a musical, and there were no musicals on TV. American Horror Story – I wanted to do something anthological like when I was a kid. All of these shows are created from a very pure place of just wanting the experience, and then by getting to share that with others."

So, to play the queen bitch, he recruited Emma Roberts, who is the niece of Julia. Her character is named Chanel, and her acolytes are named after her. Chanel #5 is played by Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine. Chanel #3 is played by Billie Lourd, the daughter of Carrie Fisher. She wears ear muffs, which seem to be a nod to her mother's hairdo in Star Wars. And one of Chanel's male admirers is played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnie, which should ensure a healthy dose of Terminator jokes.

But Murphy's biggest coup was recruiting Jamie Lee Curtis.

"It is rarefied air to have someone call you up and say, 'I am writing something for you'," Curtis told Variety. Apparently that had only happened to her before, with John Cleese for A Fish Called Wanda and James Cameron for True Lies (which co-starred Patrick Schwarzenegger's father).

Curtis said: "I am not a trained person. I cannot do accents. You're not going to hire me to play Marie Antoinette. I cannot sing. I can dance a little. I don't do impressions … I can tell a joke.

"I'm brave, I'm strong, I'm opinionated. I scare easily. I fight back. If you took every job I've ever done and boil it down, it's going to boil down to be Scream Queens."

Scream Queens starts on Ten at 9pm on Wednesday, then moves to 10pm on Eleven.

For more, go to /entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind