Time For A Cool Change

Jodie Whittaker packs a Tardis-full of do-gooders to preach intergalactic tolerance.

- Diana Wichtel

The new series may have a nana as hero in the first episode but this is not your grandmother’s Doctor Who. Actually, my grandmother never watched the show when it first screened here, in 1964. Like the Tardis, that was the year I landed in New Zealand and I recall Nana preferred The Black and White Minstrel Show, which was just wrong on so many levels, even then, and Coronation Street, featuring characters so alien to my Canadian sensibilities that they might as well have been beaming in from the planet Gallifrey.

Then, the Doctor was like an intergalactic version of my grandmother – a curmudgeonly, patrician figure it was best to obey. He was trying to save the universe from a variety of villains who looked like they were constructed from old home appliances, toilet plungers and homicidal blancmange.