It is difficult to fully review the first of a very strong two part story before the second has aired. The 2 part story was tried last season with varying results and, in my view, the format was not always used to its best effect. Sufficient to say Rise of the Cybermen got off to a very promising start. With more than a hint of Dalek Invasion of Earth and Genesis of the Daleks (men in wheelchairs apart from anything else) and Day of the Daleks with the attack on an English country house and Inferno (duplicate world), there was a lot going on here.

The Doctor initially has to come to terms with the death of his Tardis (the last Tardis) and the inability of the Time Lords to ensure smooth transition between alternate worlds, Rose battles to understand how her mother and father are together in this alternative universe but she does not exist (save for a dog they called Rose) and Mickey discovers that his dead grandmother is still alive in this different London and then stumbles on his totally different counterpart Ricky who comes across as a far more dominant and aggressive person. Intertwined into this action is the downloading of information direct to people through bluetooth devices, the disappearance of people off the streets in the back of large Willy Wonka style lorries and the strange and remote John Lumic in his grand Zeppelin hovering over London.

But of course the best is yet to come - thud, thud, thud - the new generation Cybermen crash into Jackie's birthday party with great gusto - and there are loads of them - each actor having been given intense training in the art of walking like a steel man. Have these metal men been accidentally created in similar guise to their counterparts from Telos and Mondas or is there some sort of connection that John Lumic has tapped into? Whatever the script reveals, these Cybermen are no disappointment. Nick Biggs voices with a new depth and feeling that puts the old Darth Vader interpretation finally to bed - "Excellent"!!

Performances are difficult to fully rate too - for once I would pass particular comment on Noel Clarke's dual role. There was much depth here and I daresay the actor has been given a strong script as his "farewell appearance". Graeme Harper's direction was a tight and professional as one would expect from a Doctor Who stalwart. And didn't David Tennant and Billie Piper look good as waiter and waitress??? Bring on part two . . .

I see no reason to mince words: that was crap. Utter, embarrassing, ridiculous, slap-your-head-and-start-crying crap. Almost as bad as "New Earth", and definitely worse than anything the first series spewed up.

I apologise. This may seem hysterical. So let’s go through it calmly.

The opening scene is bad. Roger Lloyd-Pack (Only Fools and Horses’ Trigger, and The Vicar of Dibley’s Owen) is an appalling choice for megalomaniac John Lumic, and as he growls wide-eyed at his new creation (kept out of focus but obviously a Cyberman – thanks, title), hilarity ensues. The obligatory death of his ethical assistant is painful to watch, for all the wrong reasons: the man makes a silly shape with his mouth, dies in a shower of fake blue light and looks somewhere between faintly amused and surprised. This is camp Who. Silly Who. The kind of Who that Who-bashers are always convinced exists.

Then our heroes are plunged into a parallel universe, and writer Tom McRae has no logical explanation for it (holding a button on the TARDIS for half an hour? What?! Even the Doctor says "I dunno"). Budgetary restrictions mean it looks just like ours but with vaguely relevant zeppelins everywhere, and citizens all wearing chunky daft silver ear-pieces. Terrified of the scope a parallel universe offers, McRae focuses on Rose’s parents (both alive here) as Rose tries to come to terms with her father being alive again. At the risk of sounding cold, who cares? The Rose’s father plot-line was played out expertly in "Fathers’ Day". All that needs to be said has simply been said. Sean Dingwall's performance isn't a patch on his last one, as the character is here robbed of all that shining immediacy and sad doom. He's a futuristic Del Boy here, and I don't care. Similarly Jackie, irritating to start with, is now a Rich Bitch. Rose's attempts to unite them are tiresome, self-indulgent and annoying. I still can't work out why the Doctor lets her give it a go, despite constantly telling her she mustn't.

The typical differences are made between the two universes: the Tylers never had a child (they named the dog Rose, har-har) and Lumic controls just about everything. Mickey’s counterpart Ricky (oh, wit!) is taking part in a resistance against the hardly-set-up regime. Lumic is making Cybermen for all the usual megalomaniac reasons (why even ask?). And the Doctor and co have to wait for the TARDIS to repair itself, naturally creating an opportunity for Mickey to meet his other self and Rose to bother her not-parents. It’s all a bit contrived and more than a little narrow in vision, and the characters are handled lopsidedly. The Doctor feels totally irrelevant, Rose strops and repeats old script ideas, and the whole thing feels like a flabby prelude to next week’s conclusion. It’s joyless, meandering rubbish, and that’s ignoring McRae’s tendency for blatant bad film clichés. The bit where he "cleverly" juxtaposes the birth of the Cybermen with cheerful music is pseudo-clever awfulness, fifteen years too late to even be a dire rip-off of Tarantino. There's also the little matter of silly science: the Doctor breathing on a power cell to reactivate it, and yet another off-screen use of the psychic paper - Doctor Who's favourite lazy cop-out besides the sonic screwdriver. Seriously, if the writers don't start even trying to logically explain things, and continue to churn out layman's terms and "magic" explanations, I'll just give up watching. I know techno-babble is bad, but the exact opposite is just as useless.

The acting is a masterclass of crap. Lloyd-Pack sets the chucklesome standard as Lumic, constantly hamming it up with a silly voice and mental stare. Even worse is Noel Clarke as the "evil Mickey", the personality of whom lies entirely in his ridiculous angry eyebrows. Most of the extras, including some bloke out of a soap (who is impossibly tidy and hair-gelled), are going through the motions. And David Tennant overuses his mad-eyes to tiresome extremes. He’s so taken to the handle of "Jarvis Cocker in space" that the Doctor veers between "lonely wanderer", spouter of philosophical God-crap and prancing space-ninny. But the Doctor is such a casual and redundant presence here that this almost doesn't matter. The scene where Rose and Mickey both ignore him and strop off is painful; dump the spoilt shits on Earth and get better companions, already. Rose's monumental self-importance (Pete and Jackie only split because they never had her, obviously. It couldn't possibly just be their fate; no, she must intercede, because she is the centre of the universe...) just deepens my hatred for the character. That and the fact that her character arc is totally and utterly finished, and the fact that Piper continues to act with her teeth. Seriously, she looks like she's chewing an invisible gum-shield.

Lastly, out of sad obligation, we must come to the Cybermen. They don’t look too bad, despite the daft way the mouth-pieces light up blue when they speak (why?). But their voices are awful. They sound like flatulent ducks. They also lumber around pointlessly, talking instead of doing, and the excessive shots of their feet simply highlight the rather bulky and ill-fitting leg joints. All of this comes to a head with the final conversation between tuxedoed Doctor and a Cyberman, as one of the silver sods introduces us to the catchphrase of the Cybermen – something clearly intended to rival "Exterminate!" in playgrounds throughout Britain, and intended to be scary, chilling, even horrifying.

"Delete! Delete! Delete!"

Quite what the kids think, I don’t know, but my friends and I were rolling around laughing – and this was the cliff-hanger – completely unable to be afraid of these ridiculous creatures. They even have a silly little salute. And all things considered, don’t you think they’re talking too much? What happened to "you will become like us", punch, splat? The whole "electrocuting hands" thing is far less threatening than the Cybermen using their natural heft to beat their victims into submission. Immense effort is made to make them bulky, heavy-sounding and immense. It’s all wasted, as they kill the same way as dropping a toaster in the bath. And the obsessive build-up of their appearance is useless, thanks to the BBC's obsessive policy of spoiling everything weeks in advance, and the fact that the Cybermen are so fundamentally rubbish. (NB: They are created in an entirely different scenario to the Cybermen the Doctor knows, as they are only zombified homeless people and not malicious aliens; thus his recognition of them is entirely coincidental, and at the end of the day, they're not even really Cybermen. It's like if Lumic was building Daleks, they wouldn't really be Daleks at all, but Lumic slave-robots that looked a bit like Daleks. Thus, the Cybermen haven't returned at all.)

It’s a huge wasted opportunity, very often hilarious when it should be frightening, and so beyond nostalgic tongue-in-cheek that it has become – sorry to repeat – crap. It’s an embarrassment from start to finish. Bad monsters, bad acting, no logical sense. Now they’ve Risen, would they kindly Sit Down and Bugger Off? If we’re very careful, they might not take whatever goodness remains in Doctor Who with them.

I am willing to wait. Since this is a two-part episode, I am willing to wait and see if this manipulative, muddled mess was just a very slow lead-up to a grand adventure.

After the wildly imaginative GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE, the bar was set high for the return of the DoctorВ’s number two nemesis. What we received was a rehashing of old and new clichГ©s.

First of all, Rose and her father. Rose received a beautiful and sincerely touching second chance to establish some sort of relationship with her dead father in FATHERВ’S DAY. That episode gave us a real chance to explore why Rose is Rose and why she formed such an instant attachment to her father.

If you think about it, Peter Tyler and the Doctor are not that much different. They both hatch В“impossible schemesВ” and (at least in the end) are willing to sacrifice themselves for the people close to them. Of course, the DoctorВ’s plans always succeed. ThatВ’s why he gets his own show and Peter Tyler died in a car accident in 1987.

Peter Tyler should have remained just that, a sweet and satisfying memory. To dredge him up again in the context of an В“alternateВ” world seems like a cheap rehashing of that episode from the first series. It plays unnecessarily upon the character mythology of the new show. For Rose to go blindly after her В“third chanceВ” to be with her dad seems selfish and a little masochistic.

But itВ’s merely a setup so that we can learn more about the В“alternate universeВ”. The universe itself has some imaginative touches, but really doesnВ’t engage you as a completely different dimension. It seems that pretty much everything is the same except for the zeppelins, the earrings and the curfew.

Even the alternate Mickey, or Ricky, just grimaces more. I love the character of Mickey, and I really enjoy Noel Clarke, but we did we really need to learn his backstory? To add that on top of RoseВ’s baggage seems unnecessary В– and really defines why this episode is so sluggish. His past is so similar to RoseВ’s that it doesnВ’t add any differentiation or emotional depth.

And whatВ’s with Mickey going from competing with the Doctor for RoseВ’s attention to suddenly acting like a scorned boyfriend (В“You can only chase after one of us.В”)? It seems very contrived. Are we being prepared for Mickey dying heroically?

With so little action and so much emotional angst, you are ticking away the minutes until something really interesting happens. When the Cybermen finally appear, itВ’s visually interesting and they do look scary. But therein lies a bigger problem.

The Cybermen will always look like robots. They will always look like a human creation. The thing that has made the Daleks so gripping and wildly frightening was that they looked so alien. Nothing had looked remotely like them before. Their weird voices and flailing pokers form an instant odd dread of being near them.

The new Cybermen look updated. They pound across the screen and big booming bass music tells us they are scary. But when they speak, you crank up the volume. And when they emit their new catchphrase В“you are deletedВ”, you groan. It comes across as a pathetic attempt to put them on par with Daleks screaming, В“Exterminate!В”. And it just doesnВ’t work. It seems obvious that the real Cybermen are using Lumic as an agent to further their long-standing hatred of the planet Earth. Whether Lumic knows this or not is an interesting question, but really not that interesting. One hopes this is the case and that this isnВ’t an В“alternateВ” genesis story for the Cybermen. The Dalek mythology remains intact (blessedly without Davros, so far), so letВ’s hope the Cybermen are the same.

There is still time to pull this mess around with a boffo second episode, but this first episode В– viewed on its own В– does not merit much excitement or praise. Even if it is a lead-up to bigger things, it did little to generate enthusiasm for what is to come.

A new and interesting way of telling a Cyberman story. Although not up there with the stronger Cybermen stories like 'Tomb of the Cybermen' and 'Earthshock', but it does rate above average.

I was pleased with the new look of the Cybermen, in the publicity stills which I saw last year the new look didn't really make me think 'Wow!' but actually seeing them in motion on screen has actually make me say out loud 'Wow!'. But I still prefer the look the Cybermen had in the 1980's. However I wasn't too big on the new voices they had, I much preferred how they sound in the Big Finish audio series.

The story was pretty good but I was disappointed that there was too much focus on Rose and Mickey meeting relatives that are dead in there own Universe, it kinda stole the thunder from this alternate Earth which seems to become totally dependant on the 'Human Upgrade'. Then again with any series that RTD is in charge of there is bound to be some family 'melodrama' somewhere.

The CGI airships where pretty cool, it made that difference to the London skyline you kinda knew straight away that this was a different place. Not many shows get the alternate universes right, shows like 'Sliders' and 'Star Trek' don't quite clinch it at times, but this story does.

This was also the first time in the new series that a cliff-hanger ending wasn't spoiled by a 'Next Time' sequence; they did that last year and completely missed the point of 'Cliff-hanger ending'.

The sequence with the people in the street freezing while they get the latest downloads was pretty inspired in my opinion, the last part of it when a new joke was downloaded was a nice touch.

Although a good episode for the most part it did have some things that spoiled it slightly. I rate this story 7/10.