Dr Who

Saturday was an odd day for me. I got up very late and very hung over after a work night out on Friday. After watching my mates play some football I watched the FA Cup final and decided to watch the Eurovision Song Contest with my friends. Top night in eh? Seriously though, the Eurovision can be quite entertaining once you accept that the music will be dross and put away all the patriotic bullshit. Laughing at Europop with your chums is no bad way to spend an unplanned Saturday night.

Trouble was though, with the cup finishing at ~5:30 and the Eurovision starting at 8, what to do in the interim? Well, turns out that my friends watch Dr Who - so I joined them. It's a long time since I watched Dr Who, even longer since I watched any kind of mainstream Saturday night TV. As a huge SciFi fan I loved the old Dr Who, but was largely unmoved by the 2004 reboot in which Christopher Eccleston took on the role. I watched the first series, but then gave up and never saw any of the series stuff with David Tennant and now Matt Smith.

Saturday night was a revelation.

The episode I watched was titled 'The Dr's Wife' - a stand-alone episode in which the TARDIS exits the universe and for reasons it would be pointless to go into here has its matrix (soul) transferred into the body of a dying woman. Suzanne Jones plays the role of the woman-now- TARDIS, a role which required the meshing of a number of science fiction themes (the machine that's suddenly human, the being that can perceive all time as present, the alien that can't understand humanity) as she portrayed this machine able to speak for the first time. Matt Smith portrays the doctor is an unhinged genius - which of course all actors have tried to do. Smith looked like he was in control of the role though, like the way that Tom Baker always was.

The programme was a love story between a man and his machine - now a woman in the flesh. A story nearly 50 years in the making which incorporated humour, love and horror into a brilliant steam punk setting which (I'm reliably told) moved the series plot arc on at the same time. This is not the stuff of the bad old days of rubber monster suits and female companions screaming, this is the stuff of the modern age of superbly-plotted television drama a la HBO. It probably helps that the BBC have allowed the writer to reign supreme here, Neil Gaiman (yep - the Neil Gaiman) wrote the episode.

Whatever the BBC have done in the intervening years between the Ecclestone reboot and 2011, they've done it right. For anyone out there who thinks like I did, that either Dr Who is a kids show or that the new stuff just isn't as good as what came before, I implore you to think again. That 40 minutes of television on Saturday night was probably the best BBC production I've seen in years. I've seen the light and am converted - bring on the DVDs!