10 million people tuned in to watch the new, long awaited series of Doctor Who on Saturday. Of those, only about 6 of us seemed to be ‘bloggers and written a review on their weblog. Sort it out people! You’re geeks - stop trying to have a life and watch some low budget British Sci-Fi for a change.

LivingTV (or UKTV or UKTV Gold or Dr Who TV or one of the 90 billion channels that are now fed into my living room) had a Dr Who retrospective on Saturday. All day. It was interesting to dip in and out of in between whatever other chores I was doing as they showed episodes from nearly all the incarnations from Hartnell through to McCoy. The two things I thought were a) hasn’t Colin Baker aged really badly and b) they were like all BBC sci-fi, not as good as you remembered. Mind you, having met a couple of people who used to be involved in things like Blakes 7 and the like, I can totally understand that. Put it this way, unlike American TV shows where they could get divert budget from one episode to fund another, the Beeb used to say “Here’s your wardrobe and make up budget, all £7.94 of it. Spend it wisely.” Now if you only had 2 people to dress then that’s great - you had nearly £4 per person to spend. But if you had 10 people to spend it on, you didn’t get any more and you only had less than 80p to spend on each actor. BBC Sci-fi was a lesson in making do with what you’ve got and doing epic storylines with no money. Fortunately, in a lot of cases, the writing was good enough to hold it all together.

Now, back on topic. Yes, I watched the 9th reincarnation of Doctor Who. I liked it. It made me laugh and, above all else, entertained me. Christopher Eccleston was charming as the geeky new doctor who might have a relatively normal and trendy dress sense but has a maniacal twist to his alien eccentricity that totally sets him apart from his predecessors. He’s a doctor who actually looks like he’d enjoy a pint down the local (or, judging from the near permanent rictus grin that smacked of drug addled lunacy, down the local nightclub). The script made him laconic and not very prone to tedious exposition. Well let’s face it, apart from his new assistant, who doesn’t know about his Gallifreyan heritage. He was given some cracking dialogue too. The exchange between him and Rose’s mother was brilliant:

Billie Piper’s turn as the Doctor’s new assistant was surprisingly competent and she proved herself capable as an actress and on a par with the experienced Eccleston. Most of the episode focused on us finding out more about her and her motivations (which isn’t surprising considering the episode was titled “Rose”) but her defining moment comes during the rather lacklustre climax to the epsiode as brightened by Rose’s rallying cry as she attempts to save the day:

This is definitely a Doctor Who for the new millenium and it embraces the information age with gusto. It is self referential and witty in the same vein that marked out Buffy The Vampire Slayer from most of it’s ilk (although whether it will retain any of the Pathos which juxtaposed the humour and pop culture in-jokes of Joss Whedon’s creation is yet to be seen.) It still retains the camp and over the top nature of the old series (listen out for the Avengeresque riff during Rose’s heroine dash at the end) and the slightly ludicrous aliens (seeing Rose’s boyfriend getting eaten by a rubbish bin was hysterical) but rather than pretend it’s something it’s not, it embraces it with gusto. In the words of the new Doctor himself, “Fantastic!”