A tendency for Tennant

Pardon me for the tardiness of this entry, but unlike people who work in banks, I have not had a holiday. I worked, in the sitcom-writing office, all day Friday, then put in a shift on Saturday and Sunday morning, before going to work at 6 Music on both days. It has not been a relaxing Easter - barely time to consider the real reason why we celebrate it. However, there was a resurrection at Saturday teatime (may I call it that? - teatime?): the full-time return of Doctor Who. First episode, second series: New Earth. There are some reviews already up on Outpost Gallifrey, the first stop for anyone more than interested in Doctor Who. Most are positive, with caveats, and, at time of writing, only one really laid into it. Graham Kibble-White's review, lukewarm, is at Off The Telly. I think my views fall somewhere in between.

How well I remember the first episode of the new Doctor Who last year, when Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, under the guiding hand of Russell T Davis, reenergised entire generations of old fans, and sucked in a new one. And as the Autons first attacked, we had a ghostly visitation from a hapless Graham Norton, talking to his director and still miked up from Strictly Dance Fever, which had gone out before. A techinical hitch that should have ruined this momentous occasion, but kind of didn't. It made it all the more exciting.History was made.

The handover from Eccleston to David Tennant seemed so natural and preordained (as in: who better?), it was less of a jolt than it ought to have been to see his debut in the Christmas Invasion special. As such, despite the groaning weight of Radio Times-sponsored hype, seeing him take up his rightful place alongside Rose in the Tardis on Saturday was not so earth-shattering. David Tennant, in a pinstriped suit and long coat: of course. His relationship with Rose was heady from the start - none of the lecturing and doubt that characterised her early days with Eccleston. Indeed, they were like two young lovers when they touched down in the year Something Or Other With A Lot Of Noughts, lazing on the grass, windswept and with the sap rising. When Rose subsequently found her body taken over by the Lady Cassandra (voiced again by Zoe Wannamaker) and proceeded to snog the Doctor, it was a blessed relief. Get a room.

So we like the new Doctor, we like the fizz his arrival has put into Rose, but do we like the story? It was all too reminiscent of previous episode The End Of The World from the last series - deliberately so, of course - where we first met Cassandra and the big old face in the jar (who also made a reappearance in New World, his departure giving Tennant the arch line, "Textbook enigmatic!"). I could have done with something a bit wilder and more original for episode one. (RTD, as we call him, defended this in Confidential on BBC3 - one I didn't make an appearance in - saying he wanted to reassure viewers by putting in recurring characters to counterbalance the shock of a new Doctor. I didn't buy this. What are we, babies?) Too much was crammed in and, due to the one-story-per-episode format of the new Who, it was all too conveniently dispatched and tied up at the end. Compare and contrast with the wham-bang jeopardy-and-rescue climax of the first episode of the last series, featuring the Nestene Consciousness under the London Eye. Doesn't compare. This episode frankly lurched: it looked both stunning (the vast pod chamber housing the human guinea pigs) and cheap (the hospital sets), and was both frightening (the release of the zombie-like guinea pigs) and daft (the multi-coloured vaccines). I accept the new emphasis on camp and comedy, but for my money, it leaned too much on Crackerjack style verbals and shoehorned-in modern references, like the word "Chav", which I doubt will survive that many billion years into the future.

At the end of the episode, I still liked Tennant, and I still like Doctor Who - to which I'll be tuning in, same time, next Saturday - but for a series opener, it was a bit silly, and a bit reliant on past glories. Next week's - Queen Victoria, werewolves - looks a whole lot better.