“We’re knights of the round table, we dance whene'er we're able. We do routines and chorus scenes, with footwork imp-ecc-able.”

Battlefield is a serial that picks up the ragbag of Doctor Who’s past, shakes its elements out across a table and skilfully rearranges them so that the series is fit to face the near future in which it’s set. As such, it feels like Doctor Who announcing literally and metaphorically that it can deal with whatever the future throws at it. You have to admire the series’ confidence, if not its prescience. Because Battlefield is also the last opening story of a Doctor Who series until Rose, a staggering sixteen years later. In television terms that’s a whole generation, and multiple generations of kids, away.

Rose was the most watched non-soap television drama of the year that year. A stark contrast to Battlefield, the first episode garnered the smallest audience of any new Doctor Who episode of the twentieth century; and despite the across the board fall in television viewer numbers during this century, none of the episodes following Rose have ever dipped below Battlefield Part One’s 3.1m viewers.