I was going to start this miscellaneous little piece by speculating on how long it was since Doctor Who was front page news- but then I noticed the date on the front of the yellowing Yorkshire Post which I put on top of the microwave and somehow never quite found space for anywhere else. 27th September 2003- almost exactly a year to the day. Before that, unless anybody knows any better, I’d hazard a guess at 1985.

The reason, for the benefit of anybody who didn’t pop into their local newsagents today, is that Who gets seriously namechecked in some of the Sunday tabloids as a result of the marital misfortunes of Billie Piper. Apparently while Billie is filming on location in Sospan Fach, Chris Evans is pottering around one of his Surrey mansions like somebody who doesn’t actually have to earn money any more- and of course the press report this like it’s the first time that a married couple have fallen out. I really can’t do celebrity gossip, but casting Piper is inadvertently looking like a stroke of genius on Russell T Davies’s part. Everybody but everybody who reads the scandal rags now knows that Who is coming back, and the names of Piper and Eccleston are slowly but surely being drummed into the consciousness of the Great British Public. Somewhere JNT is looking down and smiling.

I’ve been quiet on the subject of Billie (although I’m amazed that nobody has yet done the obvious joke with the stock shot of William Hartnell smoking a pipe), if only for the reason that she was cast while I was on my travels- in fact I think the first I knew about it was when the cuttings my dad sent me arrived where I was staying in the suburbs of Melbourne, and confirmed by the international edition of the Telegraph which I found in Queenstown, New Zealand. But there’s absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t do well- she’s spent most of the last decade in the public eye and had to develop a thick skin quickly. Given that most Who companions are female, from the South of England and aged 18-25, she’s pretty much qualified for the role by being all the above and really quite engaging with it. There’s also the fact that I suspect the Eccleston Doctor will lean towards the dark side quite a bit, and it’s good to have someone slightly frothy to counteract that.

Looking forward to the new season, it’s encouraging that such a large block has been commissioned- thirteen episodes is a big commitment for the BBC these days, and particularly for one of the regions. It’s perhaps sobering that in one fell swoop, Christopher Eccleston will be recording almost two-thirds as much as Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy did in their respective tenures- almost as much as an old 26-episode season. But it’s as near as a British production can come these days to the 22-24 episode runs of American drama that we’re used to watching nowadays, and as far as overseas sales are concerned, that means it’ll fit nicely into a similar kind of slot and will be attractive not just to the likes of the US Sci-Fi Channel but to ABC and TVNZ who are used to importing drama in that kind of package.

From the publicity- official and unofficial- which has come out so far, it’s clear that the new production team have been very much inspired by ‘Spearhead from Space’ for the relaunch, which really isn’t a bad idea. It’s the one time that the old series consciously relaunched itself, forgot about baggage and did its level best to be accessible. I’ve often thought that the best way for the series to start again would be for the new Doctor to just walk out of the Ship and be the Doctor, rather than go through all the regeneration stuff just when newcomers want things to be happening. And it seems as if we will have Daleks after all, although I’m less sure about the wisdom of this- I have a theory that mediocre Dalek stories are one of the crosses that we have to bear as fans, because successive production teams think people want Dalek stories and then they turn off after an episode or two because they’re boring. The challenge for the production team is going to be making them effective again, after all the Kit-Kat adverts and jokes about stairs. But otherwise, I suppose it’d be like one of the periodic revivals of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ if Nicholas Lyndhurst decided he’d had enough and they made it without him.