For a while on Saturday, I felt a bit like a kid again. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with tales of how the "indefinable childlike magic" of Doctor Who came rushing back, what I mean is, I felt I viewed "Daleks in Manhattan" (dreadful, contrived title! What next, "A Daleks Christmas Carol"?) as a child, in that the Daleks were the bit that excited me and everything else was a bit superfluous. So in that respect, it's a good job Terry Nation wasn't at the helm and they didn't wait until the cliffhanger to unveil them. And can't you just sympathise now with the 1964 audience that watched "World's End" and only got a few seconds of Daleks for their money? It's no wonder people complained - imagine a "Daleks in Manhattan" with no Daleks in!

Perhaps impatience comes with being a spoilt rotten, modern-day Doctor Who fan. I'm sure it does, because I frequently sit through dross like "Emmerdale" because there's nothing else on without feeling the need to get up and do something creative. Yet these days whenever Doctor Who strays from its core values of scaring you with monsters or showing the Doctor and Martha getting into some bother, I don't know, my mind just wanders! I start thinking about other things. It's absurd! It's almost like Doctor Who is so precious that I'm immediately irritated by any of it that wastes that potential. Thus all the stuff with a highly unconvincing Central Park and a ranting desperado in Hooverville bored me a bit, wanting as I did to get down to the business of Daleks exterminating people. Except they never did of course, not in this episode, it being one of the few to date in which no-one got exterminated and the word "Exterminate" wasn't even uttered.

I do believe, in this respect, that this could have worked better as a single episode story, and one of the motivations for not making it so was probably to stretch the impact and publicity of having the Daleks in it for a fortnight. But that didn't necessarily help make the story any more capable of running to twice as long as usual. It was also a mistake to unveil the Human-Dalek in advance on a splendid "Radio Times" cover, spoiling the ultimate cliffhanger. In short, the episode seems to have been greatly compromised for the sake of publicity that was more than cancelled out by showing the episode an hour earlier than last week - all this sacrifice, and we lost two million viewers in seven days!

But there was also much to applaud about the episode. Many have complained about the Pig Men, but I thought they looked rather grand when backing up their masters. The Daleks themselves were shot splendidly, mostly from above so you could appreciate the fully chunkiness of their movie-style headlamps and stout pepperpot forms. As with all two-parters, the overall verdict will depend on the resolution, but the idea of the half-human Dalek is an excellent one; the sort of inspirational flash that Doctor Who always used to have, whether it be someone deciding to reunite past and present Doctors or have a Sontaran stranded in middle-England... it's just we live with those ideas as always having been part of established history. Once, they must have seemed as marvellous and inventive as having a one-eyed, wavy-tentacled Dalek man! In fact, only now does the whole concept of having the Daleks reduced to three in number start maturing - it's like the days of "Power of the Daleks" or "Death to the Daleks", when the creatures are even more deadly because they are small in number and consequently vulnerable (an observation even made in the trailer for next weeks conclusion). I'm sure the budget didn't grumble either.

There have been many worse Dalek stories than "Daleks in Manhattan" (and on the plus side, this really was a true Dalek story, not a season finale or an 'introduction' or a 'Daleks vs Cybermen', just an everyday, good old fashioned, Dalek tale). But all of them, as with this one, would have been adored by kids that, like me, probably had moments spent fidgeting during the historical bits rewarded whenever those wonderful being glided onto the screen again. It's what childhood memories are all about.