Everybody sat round, and a hush descended. Doctor Who was on. Everybody loved it. Life rolled on. But for me, something was amiss.

It wasn't that there had been anything especially wrong with the episode. It had certainly looked lavish enough, although like its cousin, last years "The Shakespeare Code", there was a distinct sense that they'd blown half the seasons budget on the location only to wind up with something only slightly more impressive than the Ealing bits of "The Visitation". Would it have mattered if the streets had been filmed in a studio? That was always kind of the charm of the classic series historicals. They were almost obliged to look cheap because the dialogue and the period feel were the stars of the show. It wasn't that I felt like Cliff Richard at a wifeswapping party when everyone else roared with laughter at the 'beetle clasp' gag (my non-love of "The Romans" at last comes back to deal out its comeuppance on me). It wasn't the plot, which was perfectly serviceable with some excellently rendered monsters thrown in. Ah, monsters. Surely it's not a "historical" after all then, but that old genre 'the pseudo-historical', that immediately evokes "The Time Warrior", when somehow the presence of a sci-fi element like the Sontarans or a Time Lord like the Master is enough to invalidate the story from being a "pure" historical, unlike those stories like "The Highlanders" which feature only the TARDIS and the Doctor.

Let's look at "The Time Warrior". The important points to note are these - (i) the historical setting is established before the arrival of Lynx's spaceship. (ii) Lynx and the Doctor very much assume the role of 'guests' to the time period, being re-classified in its own terms: the Doctor becomes a "wizard" and Lynx a "star warrior". More importantly, both seem aware they are refugees in history, and are enveloped in its folds; the Doctor adopts the spirit of the era in his defence against the Sontaran, using home-made stink bombs prepared from herbs rather than his sonic screwdriver, and even when Lynx tries to change history, the most he achieves is to destroy one castle. The point is not one of storytelling discrepancies, but the fact that, like most classic series historicals, "The Time Warrior" WANTS to be an adventure set in the middle ages. Not the real middle ages, but the one we want to explore - full of serving wenches, brave knights, robber barons and castles. By 1966, stories where lots of people in period costumes talked away to each other and a historical event was witnessed were already pushing the attention threshold of the ever-more expectant viewer, so from there-on there was always an additional element of Doctor Who familiarity to sweeten the pill (hence no more "pure" historicals). But stories like "The Time Warrior" or even "The Masque of Mandragora" know that the sci-fi element is there to liven up what is still essentially a foray into the past, and we still get time to smell the roses.

The New Series, on the other hand, doesn't want to make historical stories at all; it wants to visit history (because the trappings look cool, and because that's what Doctor Who does), but only in order to tell the usual tale of families in trouble from marauding CGI aliens. The telling factor was the gag with everyone in Rome talking with modern day speech patterns. Now, we know that characters saying things like "Aye, I know not what Gods are these!" is no nearer what one might actually hear were one to eavesdrop on the Romans of that century, but that's not the point. As previously mentioned, a satisfying historical gives us what we expect to see and hear. Just as last years Shakespeare was cool enough to be found propped up in a twenty first century London met bar, having the imminent victims of Vesuvius speak like chavs defeated the whole point of a historical setting in the first place, never mind going to such expense to get the visuals right. And while every post-Troughton historical pushed its luck by contrasting monsters against the period detail (diminishing the historical feel of the story with the pay-off of more excitement) "Fires of Pompeii", like last years historical tale, isn't really concerned about exploring the lifestyle of the day more than using it as a playground for the Doctor to make postmodern quips to his companion. Where-as before, the past was something frightening for the Doctor to possibly get overwhelmed by ("The Aztecs" or "The Massacre") now it seems little more than an authentic real-life theme-park for him to stroll smugly around in. Which is ironic, given the feeling of impending doom that a trip to Vesuvius on the day it erupted should have evoked; "Pompeii" had scares, but they were all about the monster rather than the effortlessly more terrifying natural disaster going on in the background.

It did, of course, get some things right. The 'stone circuit boards' were a nod in the right direction of a pseudo-historical, and of course all the sci-fi trappings were superb, from the high priestess turning to stone to the memorable 'eye hands' motif. This wasn't a bad Doctor Who story - it was just a bad historical. Perhaps the most irritating thing was the first almost-retconning of a Big Finish - yes this was bigger, brasher, more sophisticated and with better monsters. But having listened to "The Fires of Vulcan" in the past few days, the historical characters and visions of soothsayers and gladiators fleeing from falling ash or being simply entombed horribly in their homes was brought over far more effectively on audio through having got to know, love or hate them first - and I'm afraid I was left with the regret that "Vulcan" hadn't simply been turned into a new series script.

At no time in "Pompeii" did we ever gain the sense of a normally functioning city suddenly and implausibly being brought to its knees by horrific natural disaster. And that, surely, should be the point in doing a Pompeii story in the first place. Regrettably, the current Doctor Who production team brought Rome to them, rather than visa versa, and never thought to afford a holiday to the usual series staples in favour of that old adage, "when in Rome..."

Si.