Along with all the usual Christmas stuff, we couldn’t help watching the Christmas Doctor Who special—The Christmas Invasion. I loved Christopher Eccleston so much in the role (and the chemistry that he and Billie Piper generated), that I watched the programme with a mixture of hope and dread. (Warning: some spoilers ahead.)

I think that my brief verdict is that it could have been a lot worse. The sharp, witty writing is still there. At one point, The Doctor starts saying something that sounds rather pompous and portentous, then looks puzzled for a moment and stops—“No, wait, that’s The Lion King”. There was also a nice running gag from the previous series, in which Harriet Jones kept holding up her ID badge and introducing herself as “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister”, whereupon the person she was addressing would say, “Yes, I know”. It doesn’t sound that hilarious, I know, but the finale of the joke when she used the same line on the aliens, and her ‘right hand man’ read out the aliens’ translated reply on his handheld (YES. WE KNOW.) was pretty good.

There were also the requisite child-terrifying moments, and full marks to the writers for planting the seeds of potential Christmas phobias in the kiddies with the flame-throwing Santa band and the buzz-saw Christmas tree. I also felt that this particular episode was rather a good political satire. Harriet Jones’s robust response to the un-named US President had us punching the air, yelling “YES!”, and wishing that she was our real Prime Minister. We were still thinking that right up until the point when she had her ‘Torchwood’ moment and started acting like the genuine article.

Now for the downside. When I went to start my car on Christmas day so that we could go and visit Mr. Bsag’s folks, I turned the key in the ignition and…nothing. No spark. Lifeless. That was more or less how I felt about David Tennant’s Doctor. It wasn’t that his acting was bad (though his accent veered annoyingly between Mockney and vaguely South East England-ish), but it just didn’t have any life to it. Near the beginning, Rose wondered if this was her Doctor, then near the end she had supposedly decided that he was, but I wasn’t convinced that she was convinced, if you see what I mean.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. He did spend more than half the show unconscious in his jim-jams, with glowing ectoplasm coming out of his mouth (something that left limited scope for demonstrating his acting abilities), and it does sometimes take a while for a new Doctor to establish himself, but I was convinced from Eccleston’s first line that he was the real Doctor.