Rose

They may not have noticed the Nestene Consciousness glooping away under the their Eye, or the first suburban street in ‘sowf’ England where wheelie bins outnumber cars; or even the back of a department store that looks like a Bananarama set; but they will have noticed that Doctor Who was back. If you are going to reintroduce a brand (wistful, irrelevant aside to the Marathon chocolate bar), then you need all the mass marketing you can get so that the audience dusts off the nostalgia and buys into the product. Throw in a faux ratings battle; get the press paralytic at the press launch; and deck the billboards with reams of paper; and before you know it Joe public has an inkling that the only place they should be on Easter Saturday is squared eyed in front of the telly, swirling down the odd vortex, whilst choosing the right Celebration (must be low on sugar).

So, the success of the first Doctor Who TV episode since the millennium bug had us all looking at our Argos watches in shame is one of brand and marketing. Without some unsung hero dashing out the copy; building the profile; marketing the brand, the opening night would have had all the wrong signals.

The BBC Production Team seems to have mirrored this frantic oversell. Rose, as a first episode, has a lot to do in terms of positioning characters, revisiting core components of the series, whilst modernising the experience for a family audience with attention deficit disorder. It succeeds on all these levels, which is why we all shrug our shoulders and ignore the absence of story.

It is nice, therefore, not be given the time to think. One of the terrors of the old Who format was that the audience was given precisely that. Stupid plots ambled away, as some extra hilariously gurned their face off to the sound of someone tapping a teaspoon on the side of a cup. Episode one of the new Doctor Who was a cold water splash of wink, wink; say no more. Those silly Nestenes, always the wheelie bin, never the bride (hang on...).

Now, one cannot have style and no substance without some decent characters popping up, or popping off (screen), to ride us through the romp blindly. The entire better if they are grounded in reality by way of the better Carry On films. Some of the fun sequences in the opener belonged to Jackie Tyler and Mickey as they quickly reminded the audience how good comedy was in the Seventies. For a moment, in Rose's flat, it looked as though Christopher Eccleston was about to join in (Carry On Shameless, anyone?), but, no, this was a tease; just one of many in the opening script to conjure up the collected experience, and stop the eyes from drifting to the land of long sewer sequences filmed with daylight effect bulbs. As it turned out this new Doctor (soon to be old) was a bit of a fruit loop, desperately trying not to be Tom Baker. He succeeds here (not without fighting the urge to flash his pearly whites all over town), because, below the line, he is complex and alien. His also totty, which, in this age of living plastic (holds sides) is going to get bums on seats in the same way that a starved monkey will blank the banana if shown female monkey porn.

Billie Piper is also totty, but one that squints in lifts to indicate that the scene is going to change, and that she is going to have to wander in to a dark warehouse clutching the Lottery money, rather than go to the shop and buy the ticket . Rose is an intelligent Vicky Pollard; family friendly tinkers at social policy are off the cuff and quickly zipped along so there is not too much explanation around why her black boyfriend is a useless, cheating (?) git. One can only hope that the guy she gave up her education for had a bit more going for him; otherwise one seriously has to question her taste in men. Oh yes, that’s right, she goes off with the Doctor in the end to film a Timotei advert. Still, think of all those parents sagely rattling off the benefits of education as a prompt after the first episode, completely decimating the audience for Doctor Who Confidential looking at work behind the scenes.

Speaking of which, perhaps one of the production team can shed some light on why much of the ‘human’ drama was filmed using techniques more akin to Danielle Steele’s ‘Secrets’. Did someone borrow the soft focus from a Cosmopolitan shoot? Boak’s direction was similar to that used in NY: LON, until there were more than three words of dialogue when by all accounts he panicked and just left the camera running, or had some poor guy walk backwards with a steadicam at pace. At times there were breathtaking movements where the direction aided narrative simplicity (93 seconds of Rose huffing and folding jumpers as synapses connect for the viewing public), and the big set pieces were, well, big; but there just wasn’t much time for Boak to imprint this episode with much identity. Such a monster piece of television, with the cry for more monsters, promoted as a monster hit.

Which, of course, it was. A huge hit, and there is none more excited than licensing division of the BBC; or Russell T Davies; or all those lovely creative folk that brought Doctor Who back into the mind set of a nation who were more surprised it was coming back , but could tell that it had been away. Chip-eaters up and down the country suddenly found themselves thrown into a world of fantasy, romp, camp idiocy, thrills and sugar rush. They could pretend for 45 minutes that they were not the dysfunctional unit they knew themselves to be, but a family screwed up in front of the telly in a rare vacuum of shared experience. Fake and artificial, maybe, but not at all dissatisfying.