“I will return, to my English Rose”

18 years ago tonight, Doctor Who came back. This is the review of the first episode I wrote immediately after transmission, and it was up 1 before Doctor Who Confidential had finished. I’ve only given this a light copy edit, nothing else has been changed. Frankly, I think I nailed it.

Rose starts out as normal television and slowly and inexorably turns into Doctor Who.  To take this approach is intelligent, brave and not something that I was expecting, to be entirely honest with you. But then I was hoping to love it anyway, and there’s a far tougher audience than me waiting for our show out there; people who need to be seduced if they’re going to succumb to this most peculiar of institutions.

The gaudy zip, edge of camp and slightly hyper attitude to the mundanities of ordinary life that dominate a certain kind of contemporary British TV are very much in evidence in the early minutes of this opening episode. In it we follow Billie Piper’s surprisingly effective and endearingly puppy-ish Rose Tyler as she goes about her ordinary, everyday life. A life which is about to be turned upside down.