The Doctor and Amy and Van Gogh's paintings.

The acting is perfect and the script coherent, rarities in the show pre Moffat and Smith’s tenure.

The ending speech given by the Doctor to explain to Amy why Vincent still ended up committing suicide, despite there seemingly having cheered him up is particularly touching.

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.

What’s more this episode in particular deals with tremendously hard topics – depression and suicide – with compassion and understanding that – given that it’s a Saturday tea-time kid’s show – beggars belief.

Not only does the episode deal with these difficult topics, it manages to do so without becoming weighed down by them. At times it’s light and airy – Amy’s heavy handed gift of sunflowers – and at times deeply comic – - it never strays too far from it’s roots though.

The Doctor, Amy and Vincent.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

With his sensitive handling the show communicated a very strong message about the difficulty of dealing with depression in others and it did so in such a perfectly balanced manner it threw into sharp relief Russell T Davies’ handling of gay rights issue which – whilst laudable – were amateurish and heavy handed.

Despite still having overall misgivings about the over reliance on time-travel gotchas in Moffat’s Doctor Who, episodes like this give me hope that we will see more well written episodes in the future.

With his latest outpouring on Bad Wilf though it appears that, unsurprisingly, the decision was all about to politics and disagreements with the senior team. We all know what senior team means though, right? Wink, wink.

Have a read of what he says and then we’ll go through and let you know what we think.

I left Doctor Who because I could not get along with the senior people. I left because of politics. I did not see eye-to-eye with them. I didn’t agree with the way things were being run. I didn’t like the culture that had grown up, around the series. So I left, I felt, over a principle.

I thought to remain, which would have made me a lot of money and given me huge visibility, the price I would have had to pay was to eat a lot of shit. I’m not being funny about that. I didn’t want to do that and it comes to the art of it, in a way. I feel that if you run your career and– we are vulnerable as actors and we are constantly humiliating ourselves auditioning. But if you allow that to go on, on a grand scale you will lose whatever it is about you and it will be present in your work.

If you allow your desire to be successful and visible and financially secure – if you allow that to make you throw shades on your parents, on your upbringing, then you’re knackered. You’ve got to keep something back, for yourself, because it’ll be present in your work. A purity or an idealism is essential or you’ll become– you’ve got to have standards, no matter how hard work that is. So it makes it a hard road, really.

You know, it’s easy to find a job when you’ve got no morals, you’ve got nothing to be compromised, you can go, ‘Yeah, yeah. That doesn’t matter. That director can bully that prop man and I won’t say anything about it’. But then when that director comes to you and says ‘I think you should play it like this’ you’ve surely got to go ‘How can I respect you, when you behave like that?’

So, that’s why I left. My face didn’t fit and I’m sure they were glad to see the back of me. The important thing is that I succeeded. It was a great part. I loved playing him. I loved connecting with that audience. Because I’ve always acted for adults and then suddenly you’re acting for children, who are far more tasteful; they will not be bullshitted. It’s either good, or it’s bad. They don’t schmooze at after-show parties, with cocktails.

Pretty frank, huh?

Clearly Eccleston, as an actor of some great repute, felt that the process of making Doctor Who and the personalities involved made his job as an actor, less than fulfilling.

It’s telling that the actor that replaced him – David Tennant, lest we forget – was a virtual unknown at the time but, and this is important, had worked with Russell T Davies previously, in the execrable Casanova.

So his status as a willing malleable puppet was assured.

Eccleston – an established actor – would have required from the role a degree of freedom, the ability to shape the Doctor as he saw fit. As a good actor, this is to be expected. Watch any of Christopher Walken’s performances to see just how effective a policy that can be.

However it’s doubtful that Russell T Davies and his team of highly skilled supplicants would have wanted anything to detract from his grand vision of a regenerated Doctor.

Eccleston’s desire to inhabit the role and actually be an actor would have been very much at odds with the one-dimensional, Davies lead, Doctor that we saw Tennant become. For Eccleston’s Doctor there was to be no gurning, brainy specs, over-acting reaction shots or cries of allons-y.

Eccleston’s take on the Doctor focussed on the other-worldly aspects of the character and had little truck with sexual politics or fart gags, and it is probably his resistance to the many, many ideas and ilconceived notions that Davies and his team were foisting upon the character that saw him leave.

It looks like it’s going to be pretty special too, with the first location filming for Doctor Who since City Of Death back in 1979! We’ll gloss over the Canadian shot TV movie…

So what do we know – or think we know – about The Impossible Astronaut so far then?

Season 6 - The gang's all here.

Well lets see…

• The Silence feature
• A lead character will die within the first 10 minutes
• We find out that River Song is from Earth
• The Silence might be related to the Cybermen
• The Stetson wearing Doctor in the trailer is from the future
• It’s a two-parter

So we don’t know much then really. Oh well, our opinion will be posted here shortly after…

Sarah Jane Smith and the eleventh Doctor

Sarah Jane Smith was a companion without compare, following Jo Grant’s departure to marry a long haired hippy in The Green Death, she joined the third Doctor on his adventures in the 1973 serial The Time Warrior and then – post regeneration – the fourth Doctor, before finally parting company in 1976′s The Hand of Fear.

During that time she met Sontarans, Daleks, Cybermen, even Davros himself.

Although only in the show – initially at least – for three years, she became popular with the fans and it is this popularity that lead to her later appearances.

She first returned to the role in a pilot for K-9 And Company which although unsuccessful at the time would be reborn decades later in a much more successful format.

Her proper return to Doctor Who though, took place in 1983′s The Five Doctors, where she joined a number of other companions and the first five Doctors in playing the deadly Game Of Rassilon.

This wasn’t the end for Sarah Jane Smith though, it would be a while before she would return again to the role of Sarah Jane Smith but when she did it was explosive.

Riding high on the success of his rejuvenation of Doctor Who and its popularity with a new generation of kids, Russell T Davies brought back Sarah Jane – still an investigative journalist – in the tenth Doctor’s 2006 adventure School Reunion. It was this reintroduction of Sarah Jane that lead to the best kid’s science fiction show ever; The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Elisabeth Sladen played Sarah Jane with conviction and sincerity, without her the character wouldn’t have been as strong and believable. She will be greatly missed.

Not only that but some of the ideas it contains, and the implementation of those ideas, are beyond ridicule. Enough of all this spiel, let’s get on with the curious case of Void material…

In Doomsday we discover that anyone that’s been in the Void gets covered in Void Material. The longer you’re in, the more gets stuck to you. Simple. How do you detect if you have any of this Void material on you though?

Gosh, isn't he so whacky and out there!

Well the only way to detect Void material is by the use of a complex series of detectors that unravel all the tightly knotted dimensions of space that surround the target and count the number of positive hits from the particles of Void material as they struggle to return to their own dimension.

Either that or just put on a pair of cheap 3D glasses.

This is yet another example of Davies’ piss-poor writing for Doctor Who and his lack of imagination. He just goes for a very cheap and unsatisfying gimmick that runs the length of the show until the disappointing reveal at the end.

It’s as if we’re supposed to sit there watching the Doctor running about in 3D specs and think that it’s just The Doctor being all whacky and out-there.

The problem with that is that we always know that if the Doctor is doing something whacky and out-there, sooner or later it’s going to become a plot point. It never actually is The Doctor being a little eccentric, every time he does it, it’s being done with a higher – albeit entirely unfathomable – purpose.

Jelly Baby?

Remember when he used to eat Jelly Babies? There was no particular reason for that other than plain old eccentricity. Davies just can’t help himself though, he has top go for some goofy nonsense that he thinks is funny over something that just might possibly have some basis in actual science. Why do we let him away with this shit?

This isn’t the only issue we have with the concept of Void material. The very mention of Void material makes us cringe, it makes absolutely no sense! Void – when used as a noun, as it is in this case – means an empty space, material is the substance or substances of which a thing is made or composed. Consequently Void material is an oxymoron.

We have to doubt that Davies intended for it to be an amusing oxymoronic pun – like, pretty ugly or organised chaos – he just used it because – undoubtedly in his usual over enthusiastic, adjective strewn manner – he thought it was clever, witty, dangerous, imaginative, sexy, mysterious, etc. etc.

To make matters worse though the Doctor calls Void material; Void stuff. It’s the usual terrible inverted snobbery that is often displayed in these situations; when Davies is trying to present a piss-poor idea as a high brow scientific notion. If the Doctor needs to simplify it for us; it must be complex!

After a perfunctory and deeply unsatisfying explanation of what Void material is, we are then told that anything that travels through the Void becomes tainted with Void material – in this case that’s the Daleks, Cybermen, Rose and the Doctor – and that this Void material acts as a magnet drawing everything covered in it back to the Void, should the void become exposed through a rift or some such.

Which as luck would have it they have the technology to create. All of which ultimately means that there’s a very simple way to rid the Earth of the Cybermen and Daleks! Open the rift and Bob’s your uncle back to the Void the Daleks and Cybermen go. Huzzah!

Unfortunately in order to create tension where none exists, there has to be a catch. In this case it’s that Rose and The Doctor are also covered in Void stuff! Oh no. What will happen when they open the rift? Well, as ever, Russell T Davies has stitched it all up in a tight, well written bundle, so you needn’t worry about it.

They used two mega-strong magnetic clamps – that just happened to be lying around – to anchor themselves to the walls. Deus ex machina for the win!

Which, coincidentally, as if to prove the lack of recognition given to Doctor Who by the BBC, has gone by at least three different names. Originally the serial was called The Mutants, then it was briefly known as The Dead Planet, before finally coming to be known as The Daleks. It makes sense that the BBC would want it known as The Daleks given their cash cow status.

This underlines the way the Daleks have come to be used, an entire serial can have its name changed to highlight their part in it. Forget the plot, forget The Doctor, forget anything to do with exciting storytelling, no, just slap the word Dalek in the title and the kids will come running.

Nowhere has this tired use of IP been more obvious than in the revived Doctor Who, I had hoped that Moffat would have moved away from the crass recycling of the Daleks perpetrated by Davies before him. Sadly, like Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant before him, it didn’t take Matt Smith’s Doctor long to meet the Daleks.

Albeit in a toy friendly range of colours. Ahem.

When are we going to see some original new creatures? Something with a bit of genuine menace would be nice, please.

Yes, you heard us right.

We love Matt Smith as the Doctor. He’s the best Doctor since Tom Baker. Really, we’re honest.

Of course that’s not to say we don’t think that Doctor Who has a lot of work to do to get to the standard that we’re hoping for, oh no.

Matt Smith may be a phenomenon and we’re going to tell you exactly why, sadly we’re going to tell you exactly why we think the show is still dreadful…

Stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon. We promise.

Come on start talking!

Thanks people!

Karen Gillan: lover of anagrams.

It would appear that the new Doctor Who production team loves anagrams as much as Russell T Davies.

Shit.

BUt we here you ask, how do we know this information? From whence did the revelation come?

Well, blame The Guardian – which it seems is the hot place for Doctor Who info these days – they’ve got an interview with Karen Gillan and in it she describes the audition process and her recall, which is where the anagram nonsense comes to light.

Young Ms Gillan comes clean and reveals just how auditioning for Doctor Who works.

Then I got the recall, the second audition. That was when I started sweating. This huge thing. And it was so secretive I couldn’t even tell BBC reception where I was going, had to pretend it was for something called Panic Moon, which is an anagram of companion.

Panic Moon? Jesus.

Let’s hope it’s just for the audition process and they abandon it in the show, huh?

Still at least a bit of hope comes from the fact that young Gillan admits that she’s not a huge follower of Doctor Who. This can only be a good thing after all who wants her trying to be all cow-eyed like Billie Piper or dim and shouty like Catherine Tate?

As odd as it sounds – coming from us at least – there were a few incidents that reminded us of classic Who and offered a glimmer of hope that things might have gotten better.

They were few and far between but it’s only fair that we list them. This shouldn’t take too long…

Dalek – The Doctor Gets Scared
This was genius! The reintroduction of the Daleks in series one of new Who, needed to tick so many boxes that it was always going to be difficult.

The job of introducing them to a new, younger audience was never going to be straightforward, things have moved on since the sixties. The Daleks seemingly hadn’t though, their design remained resolutely the same as always. Lights on the head, an eye stalk and plungers and egg whisks for weapons.

It was going to be tricky conveying the menace and power a Dalek held, when they still looked like this.

Unchanged in nearly fifty years.

So with an unchanged design what was needed was a bit of the old acting! Which is what Christopher Eccleston gave us. In spades!

Not so cocky now are we?

Thanks to Eccleston’s mad, scrambling fear at coming face to face with just one Dalek, the kids – who, this was all new to remember – were going to be under no illusions; Daleks are evil!

Blink – Easter Eggs!

Brainy specs on!

Everybody loves Blink. Everybody. Ask them their reasons for loving it and we’ve no doubt they’ll say it’s the Weeping Angels.

Now as good a villain as they are, they’re not the reason it rocks so hard. No, it’s the easter eggs that solidify this storyline.

Those easter eggs are so neatly tied together and underpin the episode so well, that – as mad as it might sound – you often don’t really notice their criticality to the plot furthermore, in taking the retrospective lacing of hidden extras into a DVD as a starting point, Moffat managed to subtly introduce the Novikov self-consistency principle into Doctor Who. Good lad!

This girl could go far.

Another reason for the success of Blink is Sally Sparrow (played by Carey Mulligan), she more than makes up for the absence of the Doctor and thanks to her it never feels like we’re being short changed.

You see the reason why the Doctor and Martha appear in it so infrequently is that, in order to save the pennies, this episode was filmed simultaneously with the episode Human Nature. Cutting costs on a flagship show? It could only be the BBC!

Blink won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form and Carey Mulligan received the Constellation Award for Best Female Performance in a 2007 Science Fiction Television Episode. Both awards were thoroughly deserved.

The Doctor’s Daughter – The Seven Day War
Now this was very neat, very neat indeed. Two warring factions engaged in a never ending struggle that neither side can remember the reason for.

The two sides have been going at it for generations and it’s only thanks to Donna’s mathematical genius – which also enabled her to pick up the Dewey Decimal system in two days, ho hum – that the Doctor works out exactly what’s been going on.

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You see this never ending, ever lasting war has in reality – thanks to cloning and accelerated growth – has only been going on for seven days. Brilliant!

Silence In The Library – River Song, Echoes Of The Future
This is River Song, by all accounts you’ll be seeing more of her.

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That little book she’s reading from? That’s her diary, a diary that looks more than a little like the TARDIS. Here’s a closer peek.

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You see the implication here is that River Song has already met the Doctor, although as the Doctor can’t remember this having happened we can only assume that she’s met a future regeneration. How cool is that?

It’s a lovely little twist and we must admit that we’re amazed it hadn’t happened sooner.

Rise Of The Cybermen – Rose Tyler (In A Maid’s Outfit)
Phwoar! We know it’s bringing the tone down but come on. This is fantastic stuff, Rose, dressed like a maid! Knick-knack-noo!

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Let’s leave it there shall we?