REGENERATION

I sat my daughter down with a variant on what Michael Moorcock said to Harlan Ellison, the first time Harlan was introduced to it: ¨Just watch it. No preconceptions. Don’t worry about the wobbly bits. Just watch and listen.¨ It was the first new episode of DOCTOR WHO since the 1980s. (If one ignores the US TV movie, which we all did, then.) Forty minutes later, she was hooked. She was young enough to forgive the bits I winced through, the alien bin and the dodgy CGI replacing the wobbly sets.



For me, it was simply this. It was called either the time tunnel or the howlaround, when I was a kid: that spinning, churning borehole through the universe. I knew how that bit of visual feedback was produced, but somehow it never mattered. It was primal science fiction imagery to me. The howlaround was back. The TARDIS twisted into view, as that thunderous bassline rumbled. And the BBC mark faded up under the TARDIS, for five seconds. And that was it. That moment. In those five seconds, a key piece of British culture had gloriously returned.



It’s a ritual in the house now. Everything else gets cleared. We forget all the disappointments and annoyances of previous episodes and seasons. And she’s 18 now, and brutally passionate about the things she loves in the way perhaps only an 18-year-old can be, so there have been long disquisitions over drinks about all the things that are wrong with it. But it’s a ritual. New season, new Doctor. Everything gets switched off for an hour tonight, because Doctor Who is on.



And I think about watching it with my father, all those years ago.