The Eleventh Hour

The Eleventh Hour was, in short, a triumph. The success of modern day Doctor Who had over the last few years, perhaps taken the show to a level that was too difficult to handle, with the quality of the storytelling ultimately suffering, with David Tennant's last two seasons being both predictable and repetitive.

Any debut story for a new Doctor (and in many cases production team) have to deliver on many levels. It has to introduce a new Doctor; introduce a new companion; tell a story; and all usually wrapped up in new music, with a new title sequence at either end. The Eleventh Hour managed to hit all of those targets, despite the new theme tune arrangement being a huge mistake. But more of that later.

Matt Smith's Doctor is going to be brilliant. I may have had my doubts at the casting of a Doctor younger than myself, but he pulled it off. Matt has an interesting face, he oozes charisma, as any great Doctor should, and just as he can look like a fresh-faced 20-something year old, he can also look mysteriously older. Smith clearly has both the madness and other-worldlyness about him that defined such great Doctors as Tom Baker's and Jon Pertwee's takes on the time lord.

The story itself, focussed on introducing new companion Amy Pond, combined with some rather large eyeballs paying a visit to Earth, in search of "Prisoner Zero"; a CGI snake-like monster that transformed itself into coma patients or anybody else (including Pam Batchelor from Look Around You).

There was probably as much emphasis on the grown-up Amy, played by Karen Gillan, as there was on Matt Smith's Doctor. I found the character of Amy to be instantly likeable and absolutely ideal for the Eleventh Doctor's companion.

With the Doctor's visits to Amy as a child and his typically Doctor-ish lateness in returning as promised, there was a hint of Girl in the Fireplace to that aspect of the story, but it worked well regardless. The rest of the adventure was well-paced, well acted and well directed, for all of it's engaging 63 minutes. It may not have been the most original debut story, but it was for me, the most thrilling new Doctor adventure in a long while - dare I say since "Rose" in 2005.

With all the RTD campness and overblown storylines now a thing of the past, this felt like really solid Doctor Who.

I was thrilled to see that the tired title sequence had finally been re-designed, but sadly, it was rather rubbish, with tacky lightning bolts firing the TARDIS down what looked like a close-up of somebody's naval. This felt like a missed opportunity to do something original and bring back the dark and mysterious kind of distinctive title sequence the show boasted in the 1960s and 1970s. As it stands, it's a lightening fast zoom, almost like they can't be bothered to do anything spectacular, in favour of getting into the action. Fair enough, but for me, the title sequence has always been every bit as important as the story itself, and the same goes for the theme tune.

Again a big hurrah when a new drone swirled in, heralding the start of a new arrangement... Unfortunately, it was barely recognisable as the all-important Doctor Who theme tune, with the famous bassline lost underneath the cheesy orchestrations of the previous version of the theme.

The Doctor Who theme music is one of the most, if not THE most famous UK television series theme music, with the original electronic Delia Derbyshire version still sounding exciting today. There have been, in recent years, some superb and highly underrated new interpretations of the theme music from the likes of Orbital and David Arnold - yet instead we are faced with this new version which has almost completely lost its identity. Given that Mr Moffatt (which I still can't spell) is a lifelong fan, I'm surprised this got past his ears.

The new series has a much more fantastical and almost fairytale approach in parts, and I felt the incidental music should have reflected that. Instead, Murray Gold's incidental music just sounded like a repeat of the repetitive and predictable score that has been used for the last five years.

The final missed opportunity was the new TARDIS interior. Again, kudos to the production team for keeping to the tradition of change and revamping the inside, but quite frankly, it looks like a junkyard, with the console being the central pile of junk. And with the lighting so similar to the previous set, at a glance, it barely looked like anything had changed.

Although this has much more of the home-made time machine look that we saw in the two Peter Cushing films of the 1960s (not unlike Smith's bowtie and tweed jacket...), it does feel a little twee, and I was hoping for something very different. Maybe something more futuristic to nicely contrast the beautiful exterior of the new TARDIS prop.

But I suppose those are minor gripes. After all I don't watch the show to see what the inside of the TARDIS looks like or how the titles have changed - although for me, it's all part of the overall picture.

But The Eleventh Hour itself was overall, a brilliant episode. It felt new and refreshing, and revitalised, thanks to the new team behind it. And going by the look of the "coming soon" trailer, things are just going to get bigger and better from here.

Welcome back, Doctor...