Nostalgia is not what it used to be, but then in television it rarely is. For example, Dr Who (BBC1, Saturday) is back with David Tennant as the 10th full-time doctor and Billie Piper as his 21st female assistant. The show was first screened the day after JFK was assassinated.
Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, a risk I am generally prepared to take, a large part of the appeal of the old Doctors was the cheap, sticky-tape-and-string nature of the sets and the villains. Children might have needed to watch the Daleks through threaded fingers from behind the sofa, but they still looked like dustbins festooned with egg boxes and sink plungers. Nor were the Cybermen or the Ice Monsters more convincing. Much of the outside material was shot in a gravel pit. The interiors were in a studio, which, like most planets in the known universe, had flat floors. As in Star Trek, the atmosphere was always the same as Earth’s, and the inhabitants spoke English, even if the Daleks sounded like angry dwarves on helium.
Naturally, you couldn’t do that now. Computer games have images 20 times better than those ancient programmes. You could no more ask a child to enjoy them than swap his mobile phone for two cocoa tins and a length of string. So the sets are stunning, vast, vivid, three-dimensional. The Doctor still enters the police box (when did you last see one of those?) but emerges into a fabulous, towering, terrifying, futuristic world.
Which is fine, except that science fiction demands, first of all, internal consistency. The total freedom the writer enjoys comes at a price: he has to stick to the rules he has invented and the worlds he has created.
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