‘Our Friends in the North’ isn’t just first-class drama, it’s a stunning piece of fictive social history that charts the lives of four friends and their extended networks from 1964 until 1995.

So, ‘The Big Bang’ went off and there’s no more ‘Doctor Who’ until Christmas. Luckily, we’re here with a recommendation list of ten old ‘Who’ stories (well, not exactly ten, but we’ll get to that later) that are worth watching to help the next six months pass a bit quicker.

BBC4’s fatherhood season includes one of the channel’s drama biopics, this time on John Lennon.

Play is the thing.

As 2006 begins, now is the last chance we’ll have to round-up all those things that Shiny Shelf should have reviewed in 2005 but, due to the constraints of time and competence, didn’t get around to. ..

It’s all been a bit of a triumph, hasn’t it?

It shouldn’t actually be surprising to see Russell T Davies confound expectation again with his finale to this season of ‘Doctor Who’…

Although Russell T Davies quite rightly has his mind focussed on the wider reception of this series, it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t chuckling with glee when he imagined the reaction of some fans to this episode…

This episode is very much the calm before the storm, even though there is a whacking great storm in it…

The first two-part story in this series of Doctor Who was called ‘World War Three’, but for the second one we go back to World War Two, for a tale of terrifying children, dashing space captains and the intolerances of wartime society.

This new series of ‘Doctor Who’ is both perfect kids’ entertainment and more grown-up than ‘Doctor Who’ has ever previously been…

This episode falls a little short visually. I imagine that the year 20,000 will be almost unrecognisable from now, so I expect 200,000 to seem as mad as tin pie…

Until now I liked the new ‘Doctor Who’: I liked it very much. But I didn’t really love it. These forty-five minutes have changed all that…

For most of its life ‘Doctor Who’ was an odd fusion of ordinary television and itself. That’s something that we’ve lost sight of in the years it’s been away (even the TV movie was like ‘The X-Files’ ) …

It’s funny – I knew that this new series of ‘Doctor Who’ was going to be aimed squarely at new viewers. Yet I didn’t fully appreciate what this meant in dramatic terms…

‘Rose’, the first episode of the BBC’s much-hyped ‘Doctor Who’ relaunch had to not only bring ‘Doctor Who’ up to date for a 2005 audience, but also re-introduce a genre British TV hasn’t seen for a while…

So, in no particular order, here are twenty great things about ‘The End of the World’.

Probably the biggest problem with this episode is that a large portion of the audience is liable to insist that ‘Doctor Who’ be like this every week…

So, time for the backlash? No, because backlashes are only initiated by the childish and bored. It just happens that ‘Aliens of London’ is the weakest New Who episode thus far…

The Slitheen invasion gets serious – sort of.

Well, there’s some good news and some bad news….

So Steven Baxter is not so much God made man as post modernity made flesh in the concluding part of Russell T Davies ‘The Second Coming’. Davies’ script explicitly rattles Nietzsche’s cage for us…

The title gives you a pretty good idea of what the concept behind Russell T Davies’ superbly realised ITV mini-series is, and it’s a production which combines magic realism, wit, out-and-out-camp and manic pacing in roughly equal measure.

Hyperbole? No. Believe it.

The creative partnership of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland is renewed with ‘28 Days Later…’

Have you seen this yet? You haven’t? Well, grab a copy and watch it smartish, before somebody gives away the ending.