Delta and the Bannermen

"Delta" is a little secret. A king in sheep's clothing, if you will. Because, as anyone with an open mind will know, it's rather wonderful. If you haven't got an open mind, or if you can't see past a children's programme about a space-traveling bus and find something innocent, fun-loving and intelligent, then you really ought to question why you like Doctor Who at all. Yes, it's that good.

All the signs point to "Delta" continuing in the tentative footsteps of "Time and the Rani" and "Paradise Towers" - it's every inch Season 24 and it can offer up a million reasons for you to hate it if you aren't prepared to get to know it. There's those vivacious new titles for one. And Bonnie Langford. And Stubby Kaye. And a cheaply realised alien race. All that and we didn't even mention Ken Dodd. Yet "Delta" is bursting with magical moments that make it more Doctor Who-ish than anything for an least ten years before - there's the Doctor for one, urgent, quirky, clownish, quick-witted and accident-prone. Don Henderson's genuinely brutish performance adds the menace, then there's the incongruous, vibrant holiday-camp setting. Very Doctor Who-ish indeed. I'm sorry, but if you're one of these people who "doesn't count" this story, then you're going to have to let "The Macra Terror" go as well. "Delta" has its heart in the same place, yet still manages to be a hundred times more original.

Doctor Who fans sounded terribly serious in the eighties. Almost as if they were championing some hard sci-fi series (if you wanted that, you should have switched your allegiances to "Blake's 7"). But wasn't Doctor Who the series that gave us adventures with Gulliver and Rapunzel? Flights of fantasy like steel skies and acid seas? A hero that roamed the Universe with a robot dog? For too many years in the mid-eighties Doctor Who forgot to be fun; doggedly intent on digging up its own fondly remembered myth in order to remember how to be as good. Ironically, the answer lay not in the quality of foes like Sea Devils and Cybermen, but in the nonchalant spark of nerve and imagination that allowed them to come into being. A police box flying through space, how absurd is that? And would Star Trek have ever sent anyone through time armed with something as trivial and funny as jelly babies? "Delta" is suddenly fun again in the same way - using bees to repel its nasties and a strange crystal to power a bus full of touring aliens.

It's touching too. You might think the ending is all a bit gay, with Billy and Delta riding off into the sunset while "Here's to the Future" plays away, but it also provides a lovely closure to the story. Doctor Who stories often finish, but it's all too infrequently that they actually end, and end happily. Only the destruction of the bus at the hands of the Bannermen feels out of place here, the one moment where the story misses its mark. I don't know why, but it feels oddly unsporting (it's Bonnie's defining moment however - watch her go!). In the end, you can only mock someone for so long before they stop caring. "Delta" doesn't care. Just as it only needs three episodes to have as much fun as an old four-parter, it's joyful, mysterious and curiously like you feel Doctor Who should always have been. If you can't see past its place in the grand running order, at exactly the point where you're told the worst stories ever sit, then you'd better go and watch "The Visitation" again and pretend that's what Doctor Who should be like. The rest of us will carry on loving "Delta" to bits until you come round.