The Power of Ten

David Tennant, eh? Blink and you'd have still seen him. For ages. Even narcolepsy wouldn't have blanked him out. He's been on TV more than John Barrowman for once, which is in itself a miracle. Still, no-one watched his Hamlet on Boxing Day, so the UK yule wasn't an entirely Tennant-based affair. Five hours of Shakespeare was probably not ideal viewing in the family-wrecked aftermath of Christmas.

And there was the little matter of Doctor Who, regenerating from Tennant to Matt Smith on New Years Day after a Christmas Day special. This would have been an unfathomable piece of scheduling for the series in any era other than the Dalek mania of 1964-66, and attests to a transformation in the fortunes of this series, from the cult hit of the seventies to the incongruous mess of the eighties, and then its miraculous mainstream rebirth in 2005. Naturally, Doctor Who fans being what they are, they all love it so much they hate it, but their small-minded whinnying can't diminish the amazing feat this has been and Russell T. Davies's overwhelming success at achieving the impossible: resurrecting a much-loved but dead series, reworking the emphasis so that it worked in a more human and mainstream way (if only his old companions had anywhere near the journey of Rose or Donna I doubt it would have been cancelled in the first place...) and making the most of the budget to create the best visuals they could afford. Anyone who thinks this was easy or that anyone could have done it better are either hopelessly naive or pointlessly cruel. Moffat is, of course, the flavour of the month with the fans (till his series starts, and then all the grumbling begins again) but he's hardly had an illustrious history of TV success behind him, and though he is brilliant and I am terribly excited by his arrival as show-runner, he's lead a lot of series to cancellation down the years.

I have to say, I wasn't mad about the Christmas episode, it felt unstructured and lacked a compulsive narrative. I've not been keen on the fancy-gizmo-on-Earth stories (be it Sontarans, Cybermen or bad CGI Mark Gatiss) and this just felt like another of those. Yet the second episode was tremendous, most particularly for the performances by Bernard Cribbins and Tennant. I loved all the nods to previous regenerations (Davisons's crashing spaceship, Pertwee's radiation sickness, Tom Baker's Watcher, Troughton's trial by Time Lords), the 'fuck it' moment when he resigns himself to dying and goes and breaks the laws of time in small ways to say goodbye to all of his friends, and the lump-in-throat moment when he shut the Tardis door behind him and was all alone. And I got very excited to see Matt Smith, who just looks the part.

Davies has given us five years of brilliantly fun, exciting, entertaining and sometimes extremely moving TV in a format (saturday night family telly) and show everyone thought was dead. It could have missed the point, like the terrible McGann TV Movie, and turned Doctor Who into yet another witless sci-fi series, but instead it's returned with all of the charm, fun and excitement of the old series, and a whole load of new emotional, human stories to ground the entire thing, which it had really needed all along. And now onto Steven Moffat, who might turn out to be the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes from Tom Baker's gothic, horrifying early years, to Davies's Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks from Jon Pertwee's earth-bound era. Or he might just be Al Gore to Davies's Clinton... I'm hoping the former. I think the next season is going to be really special.