Smallscreen

What's the connection between Richard Dawkins, the world's 19th most important public intellectual according to readers of this magazine, and Doctor Who, the universe's top intergalactic time traveller? Hardened atheists and fervent Doctor Who fans will already know. But for everyone else, let me reveal that Dawkins's wife is the actress Lalla Ward, who once played the Doctor's female assistant. And it is with the assistant in the current series of Doctor Who that I am concerned. Whereas Dawkins poses questions such as "Is there a God?" and "Why is mankind superstitious?" I want to debate something much more important: was comedienne Catherine Tate miscast as Doctor Who's companion in the latest series?

To go back to the beginning: when the head of drama at the BBC, Jane Tranter, discovered that screenwriter Russell T Davies was a fan of BBC1's Doctor Who and asked him to revive the series, it was a moment of pure serendipity. Davies is probably the finest television screenwriter in Britain today. He accepted, and his first series went out in 2005. This was, by chance, the point at which computer-generated imagery (CGI) first became affordable for British television programmes. Up until then, CGI had been the preserve of movieland, employed to re-create ancient Rome, flood New York and launch flying saucers. Davies's Doctor Who has been spectacular and convincing in a way that was not possible before. Some episodes have cost more than £1m, making it the most expensive British-funded drama on television. As in so many areas, the BBC now has more to spend than its commercial rivals, a gap which will widen with the anticipated decline in advertising revenues caused by our current financial nervous breakdown.

Doctor Who started in 1963, when television drama direction was dominated by earnest greybeards who had begun in the theatre. They treated television as though they were simply poking their cameras through a proscenium arch to record a live performance on a stage. In Doctor Who, the set would wobble with each Cyberman's entrance or exit. The show then became the victim of self-reverential humour and sterile sci-fi tricks. During the 1980s it was written by male trainspotters for male trainspotters (sadly, even Douglas Adams, who was briefly a script editor for the programme, fell prey to this syndrome). What Davies has effected is nothing short of a revolution. Doctor Who is now sexy, rather than a pantomime clown. He has emotional relationships with girls. The other human characters resonate too—they've got mums and granddads who worry about them and, in the case of Captain Jack Harkness, boyfriends as well. And it's witty. I liked the exchange in the first programme of the current series, between Doctor Who and the Observer's "science correspondent": "What's happening?" "Are you a journalist?" "Yes." "Well, make it up."

But throughout these very contemporary romps, Davies and his co-writers have brought back all the classic foes. Davies's final series has just culminated in a two-part struggle with those pesky Daleks. They'd been rounding up all humankind for their own diabolical purposes: we saw them on the continent, very thoughtfully speaking German, like android versions of the SS. They were assisted by a biped rhinoceros and an alien woman with a Harpo Marx hairdo. And the entire, evil plot was driven by a giggling octopus and Dalek Kahn, a wizened genius resembling a mildly decomposed WH Auden. Eventually the Doctor triumphs and the Tardis tows planet earth back into orbit. His companion, Donna Noble, becomes a temporary Timelord—sort of on work experience—but has to have her memory wiped so she can return safely to her suburban life ("I'm a temp from Chiswick," as she puts it). Which brings us back to Catherine Tate (pictured, right, with David Tennant), for it is she.

This two-parter was Davies's sign-off as series executive producer, and he made it like the final number of the Royal Variety Show, where all the acts come on stage at once. A general conscription of all the main characters of the past few years was required to defeat the Daleks' grande armée. And this included the Doctor's previous two companions, Rose and Martha. It may seem churlish to observe this after she saved the world, but Catherine Tate's Donna suffered by comparison. Too often she reverted to some of the stock Cockney caricatures which sit brilliantly in her sketch show but don't belong here. At moments of high emotion she was never quite convincing. And—do I dare point this out?—she may even be a few months too old to be the Doctor's companion; someone who is meant to be the fresh-faced, naive foil to the Doctor's age-old sagacity. The BBC disagrees, pointing out that for the finale, viewing figures reached 10m. And the appreciation index (the measure with which broadcasters gauge viewers' enjoyment of a programme by asking them to fill out surveys) reached 91—the highest figure the series has ever had.

Russell T Davies will be replaced by Steven Moffat. He is responsible for some of the darker Doctor Who scripts of recent years and has an obsession with zombies in masks. It was he who put brainwashed children into second world war gas masks, intoning chillingly: "Are you my mummy?" More recently he had skeletons in spacesuits repeating: "Hey, who turned out the lights?" What next? Perhaps zomboid doctors in surgical masks whispering, "You won't feel a thing." We look forward to it.

I read in the Guardian that adults who go on about Doctor Who are pathetic. Well, I'm one of them and I've decided to come out. I'm glad to be Gallifrey.