The 1930s are inescapably associated with a certain kind of straightforward adventure story…

If you’ve spent any time in the last two years in the festering cesspool that is ‘Doctor Who’ fandom, then you’ll know there have been two distinct reactions to Russell T Davies’ reinvention…

The second episode of the new series of ‘Doctor Who’ takes the Doctor and Martha Jones into an immaculately staged 1590s London and a meeting with the man the Doctor describes as both ‘the genius’ and ‘the most human human’ of all; William Shakespeare.

To have lost both of your original leads by the third season of a series may be considered careless, but on balance it doesn’t seem to have done ‘Doctor Who’ any real harm…

No bite, but plenty of suck.

Sometimes different versions of a text can complement each other, but this is a case where experiencing one first is pretty much guaranteed to spoil the other…

You could be forgiven for thinking that Sydney Newman’s forty year old creation had taken over Xmas 2006 entirely.

Forty One years ago ‘Doctor Who’ aired its first Xmas special. It was rubbish.

For me there’s only one annual Xmas ‘must watch’ and it’s the 1984 BBC TV adaptation of former poet laureate John Masefield’s utterly peculiar seasonal children’s novella ‘The Box of Delights’.

A fondly remembered BBC tradition, it was always a mystery through the 1980s and 90s as to why exactly the BBC never revived the ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ series of literary chillers…

“Cor blimey, isn’t life amazing and stuff, yeah right? Cos even if you’re a dull stereotype like me, you can still get an entire episode of ‘Torchwood’ devoted to you. And that’s, like, so amazing, yeah!”

The BBC may have caused a bit of noise this year with its decision to cancel ‘Top of the Pops’ but it has, very quietly, kept the show ticking over…

Given that ‘Only Fools and Horses’ has had about three episodes designed to stand as its definitive finale, it’s hard to imagine a time when the BBC wasn’t bothered about giving closure to its sitcoms…

We’re now more than half way through the first season of Torchwood and despite some shaky moments, it’s shaping up to be a bold, confident, crazy and clever show…

The tradition of the Christmas Special is embedded in British culture…

If you go down to the woods today…

Low budgets and high camp in cosmic Cardiff…

The next wave of Russell T Davies’ ‘Doctor Who’ based takeover of the BBC is here, with his first ‘Who’ spin-off ‘Torchwood’…

This is the first of 2entertain’s budget-priced ‘Doctor Who’ releases, and it has raised the odd complaint from fans…

Surprisingly restrained in its use of graphic violence the first episode of BBC One’s drama-documentary series ‘Ancient Rome – The Rise and Fall of an Empire’ boasted outstanding production values and an extraordinary central turn from Michael Sheen.

‘That Mitchell and Webb Look’ is a TV version of the radio sketch comedy series from the team behind Channel 4’s skin-crawlingly excellent ‘Peep Show’.

‘Blackbeard’ is a quintessentially BBC response to the ongoing pirate craze…

‘The Mark of the Rani’ is one of the strongest stories from the mid-eighties (lets say 85 – 87) drought that ‘Doctor Who” suffered.

It was fundamentally wrong-headed for TOTP’s final edition to be an exercise in nostalgia: a compendium of material from the past, linked by ancient DJs…

It was always going to be difficult to live up to ‘The Parting of the Ways’, so people were expecting great things from the conclusion to the second season of Russell T Davies’ ‘Doctor Who’…

Belated Billie bye-bye.

It’s perhaps unfortunate that ‘Fear Her’ comes straight after ‘Love & Monsters’ in this season, because after an episode in the company of Elton, stuck on ‘the slow path’, what we could really do with is a big old cosmic epic…

Traditionally, ‘Doctor Who’ has often managed to make a virtue of necessity…

To the Doctor, a devil.

Mark Gatiss’ previous ‘Doctor Who’ episode, ‘The Unquiet Dead’, attracted some criticisms of playing to the gallery…

For once we’ve been able to peep at an advance copy of this week’s ‘Doctor Who’: however, you’ll find no spoilers here…

Considering it’s one of the most shopworn sci-fi clichés in circulation, ‘Doctor Who’ has done surprisingly few alternative universe stories…

Steven Moffat’s ‘The Empty Child’ was one of the highlights of last year’s series of ‘Doctor Who’: funny, scary, romantic and ingenious. With ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, Moffat has done it again – this is as good as ‘Doctor Who’ gets…

The Doctor Who New Adventures were a series of novels published during the 1990s that bridged the gap between the old and new series of the television show. ‘School Reunion’ shows that the thinking behind those books was way ahead of its time…

‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’ comes from a period where ‘Doctor Who’ was tired. Mired in formula, it was flagging badly and ended up reiterating the same plot week after week after week.

There’s something inherently mid-to-late Nineteenth century about ‘Doctor Who’.

For those of us who retained a keen interest in ‘Doctor Who’ when it was a fusty old dead thing, it’s still difficult to get used to it being something that comes and goes like any other TV programme…

With only one day to go to the new series of ‘Doctor Who’, time to reflect on how far the series has come in a year…

If ‘Snuff Box’, the brilliant new semi-narrative sketch show from Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, had a high concept it would be something along the lines of ‘What if The Persuaders were a pair of depraved hangmen?’

Between them these two CDs release into the wild the last episodes of twentieth century ‘Doctor Who’ never made available to the general public in a mass market edition.

‘The Beginning’ is a handy box set which contains the first thirteen episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ plus two separate versions of the series unbroadcast (indeed judged ‘unboradcastable’) pilot episode and assorted extras.

Weapons Grade Cheese. Do Not Handle Without Proper Protection…

Okay, it’s ‘nail your colours to the mast by typing out your stupid theory’ time.

There are some things about ‘Hyperdrive’ that are rather objectionable…

Time-travel is the new reality TV…

Even by BBC4 standards, Andrew Graham-Dixon’s ‘I, Samurai’ is self indulgent…

The beginning of a new series of ‘Just A Minute’ is always a cause for small celebrations.

Yes, we should have reviewed this earlier but frankly who has their best critical faculties working on Christmas Day?

Another in our series of end-of-year reports on the state of British TV at the end of 2005…

‘The Seeds of Death’ hails from the second half of the 60s, from when ‘Doctor Who’ was genuinely the favourite TV show of the children of the British nation.