View source for Woo-oo, wooo-ooo

{{article
| publication = The Sunday Telegraph (England)
| file = 2005-03-27 Sunday Telegraph p8.jpg
| px = 450
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| date = 2005-03-27
| author = John Preston
| pages = 8
| language = English 
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Although I do not regard myself as a terrible Doctor Who bore, you, of course, may disagree - X especially after reading the next two sentences. This latest manifestation of the Doctor's exploits (last night, BBC1) included mention of the fact that he had been spotted in the crowd at the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those readers of a somewhat recondite kidney will instantly recall that this is a reference to the fact that the [[broadwcast:An Unearthly Child|first-ever episode]] of Doctor Who in November 1963 was delayed by 17 minutes by the death of JFK.

After this brief stop-over on Planet Nerd, the Tardis sped us through time and space to present day London where the Doctor's new assistant, Rose (Billie Piper), was first seen stepping off another time machine - namely, a double-decker bus of the type recently exterminated by the evil Master, Ken Livingstone.

Cleverly, the opening episode kept the focus on Rose throughout, thus allowing the Doctor himself to retain an aptly enigmatic swirl. From what we did see of him, Christopher Eccleston looks set to be a playful sort of Timelord; fallible but not too humbly, and possessed of rather more sexual potency than his seven predecessors put together.

At the same time, he proved himself capable of delivering lines such as "Am I addressing the Nesting Consciousness?" with admirable conviction and just the flicker of a wink. Russell T. Davies, the scriptwriter, had steered a similarly adroit course - ensuring the tone wasn't too self-conscious or camp, serving up some genuine thrills and yet not completely forgoing the essential tackiness: one character was devoured by a flesh-eating wheelie-bin.

The theme music has been modernised - but not too much. The Tardis still sounds like a roomful of regurgitating Scotsmen whenever it appears, or disappears, and my only real quibble came with the interior decor of the Tardis, which seems to have been festooned with strings of gilded mucus. This, though, is but one dropped stitch in the woolly scarf of time. Above all, the new Doctor Who succeeded in establishing its own reality: skewed, sprightly and assured, without ever taking its audience's attention, or goodwill, for granted.


Caption: Fallible, not too bumbly The new Dr Who

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