While much of Doctor Who fandom appears to be celebrating the news that Russell T Davies is returning as showrunner, I have to say that I am very much less than thrilled.

Yes, Chris Chibnall's era has had its problems, and I think that Jodie Whittaker's Doctor has often been underserved by the material she's been given to work with. Also, the whole Timeless Child thing is utterly wtf and I'm mostly just pretending it didn't happen, on the grounds that it's the kind of thing that's bound to end up getting unhappened sooner or later. However, I've loved the conscious effort to increase the diversity of the series, and have enjoyed the way he's taken the opportunity to explore smaller stories. Not everything has to be about the fate of the entire universe.

For me, Steven Moffat's version of the show was the best. Yes, he also had his problems (though I disagree entirely with the people who claim that all his depictions of women are misogynistic), but his Doctor Who is as magical as I remember Doctor Who being when I was a child.

Russell T Davies, on the other hand...while I am, obviously, very grateful to him for bringing back the show, I can't forget the way just about every woman over the age of 30 in the whole of his era of the show was portrayed in a negative light, and middle-aged women always seemed to turn out to be evil. Or the recurrent fatphobia. Or the way one female companion got given a "happy ending" consisting of a human Doctor lookalike she'd only just met, because appearances are everything. And another female companion got randomly married off to the only other Black main character in the series. And Donna Noble, the most amazing woman in the universe, had all her glory and character growth undone. (And I was never very keen on the huge Total Bollocks Overdrive Earth-in-peril stories which marked the RTD era. I prefer a bit of subtlety, and the possibility of pretending that I'm still young enough to believe that it might all be really happening, somewhere out there.)

So definitely less than thrilled.

I'd run out of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, so I decided to subscribe to Britbox so I can watch classic Doctor Who.

So far, I've watched An Unearthly Child (oddly familiar from the Target novelisation though I'd never seen it before), The Daleks, and Edge of Destruction which I thought was terrific.

Well worth the £5.99 a month, and it's going to keep me going for ages.

Because I was so utterly bowled over by the last couple of episodes of the latest series of Doctor Who, I have been reading all the discussion of them I can find. Including in the Doctor Who group on Ravelry, which was probably a mistake as it's full of casual viewers and people who think there's too much about gender and it should just be about the adventures, and someone who (a) appears to think that Steven Moffatt is "pushing" non-heterosexual characters because he's gay himself and (b) followed that up by responding to someone who said that RTD was gay and they hadn't been aware that Moffatt was (presumably because he isn't) with "RTD doesn’t make a big deal out of it like Moffat". I'm sorry, are we talking about the same RTD here? Russell T. "Gay Agenda" Davies? I'm quite used to seeing charges of misogyny levelled at Moffatt while no-one mentions the misogynist beam in RTD's oeuvre, but this is a new one on me...

Whoverse; spoilers for all of S2 of Torchwood and everything up to 'The Stolen Earth'. Short and complete. Gen. None of these characters belong to me.

( Martha Jones sees dead people. )

We were commenting yesterday that there's something TARDIS-like about Oxford college gardens; they always seem to be far bigger than you would expect. Which made me wonder about garden parties on Gallifrey, although in the end this ficlet turned out to be rather closer to home.

250 words, gen. The Doctor is reminiscing; Donna is more interested in the strawberries. Doctor Who belongs to the BBC; Encaenia belongs to the University of Oxford.

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( Encaenia )