“AI AI AI AI AI like you veeery much.”

Doctor Who fans like making lists. Lists of companions. Lists of monsters. Lists of underrated stories. Lists of overrated stories. Lists of lists of stories. List. List. O List.

Sorry. Where was I?

Oh Yes. Doctor Who fans like making lists, and that if you were making a list of the most successful, or popular, Doctor Who TV stories ever made, you’d have a number of options in terms of the criteria you draw. There are innumerable fan surveys, several conducted through Doctor Who Magazine. Or you could choose the stories watched by the most people, repeated the most times, or the stories that managed to break their way into the top ten of the most watched programmes for the week they were originally shown.

Those would all give you pretty different lists, with some overlap. Top ten placings would massively favour the show’s twenty first century revival. Fan surveys perhaps flatter the long loved peaks of the old century. But there is, to almost quote a story that features in none of the potential lists suggested above, “…another way.”