Who dares and wins

Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday) has been particularly brilliant of late and I think Spectator readers should know. There were moments in the first two new series where one might reasonably have gone, ‘Yeah, but it’s still not a patch on the original.’ But as series three draws to an end, I don’t think there can be any more doubt: the new Doctor Who is the greatest British TV sci-fi series since Quatermass.

Where did it go so incredibly right? My personal theory on this — based on wishful thinking, mainly — is that it has to do with the episode in the first series called ‘The Empty Child’. If you saw it, you’ll never forget it. It’s the one with the spooky child wearing the gasmask who goes round saying, ‘Are you my mummy?’ And if he touches you, you’re done for: you turn into one of the gasmask-wearing living dead.

Now what was so important about that episode is that it largely dispensed with time travel and aliens, going instead for a specific British historical period (London during the Blitz) and a very particular mood — cold, clammy creepiness rather than full-on extraterrestrial monster horror.

The difference is quite key, I think. With the alien monster episodes — and that includes the Dalek and Cybermen ones — what you see is what you get: the creatures are grotesque and ugly; the special effects as they devastate our planet are impressive. But they never quite haunt your dreams in the same way as the ones set, say, in a picturesque little English village where something seems to have gone ever so slightly awry.

Children, being connoisseurs of fear, can appreciate the difference. I know I did. When I think back to the Doctor Whos that truly spooked me as a child, it’s not so much the monsters I remember as the moods and settings.