One late Christmas Ever Ebenezeer Scrooge was visited by three spirits who showed him the past, the present and the Yet To Come. This is like that, but with three reviewers & Shiny’s usual pop culture nonsense. Merry Christmas.

‘Doctor Who’ the series, like Doctor Who the character, has a tricky habit of regenerating, with producers and other creative types moving on. The current season, which ends this Saturday, marks the first time the show has made that transition since its 2005 relaunch – and even by the standards of such jumps this was a risky one.

“I hope you’re not expecting modesty. This is too important.” – Russell T. Davies.

Was it me, or was this a fairly quiet Christmas for the BBC?

Over the last few years Doctor Who has built a tradition of ending each season with a multi-part epic where the Doctor confronts a major enemy from his past. For the conclusion of the current season it was the turn of the Doctor’s old nemesis the Master.

‘Utopia’ is low on plot, but high on major developments…

‘Human Nature’ is one of the best bits of television ever broadcast under the label ‘Doctor Who’.

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…

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…

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

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’…

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.

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

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…

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…

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

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…

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….

Quite peculiar watching this light comedy-drama in the knowledge that it comes from the pen of the man who’s doing the new series of ‘Doctor Who’…

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.

Out on a 2-Disc DVD, Russell T Davies’ ‘Bob and Rose’ is a warm, intelligent comedy drama. After a promising start, the series loses its way somewhat in the middle episodes before rallying again for