“‘Ha! Ha!’ said the Clown. ‘Is it bringing you down, that you’ve lost your chance?’”

I’ve said before that it can sometimes be harder to write about an acknowledged-to-be-great Doctor Who story than an under appreciated one. With the latter, all you really need to do is to treat them respectfully and they will give up new ideas and interpretations. Throw in a couple of jokes (or at least in-jokes) and you’re away.

With the former? Praise has already been showered. Interpretations have been offered. It has been welcomed into “the canon”, and while Doctor Who is generally more rewarding long-term than a lot of its pop culture peers, once an individual episode has been beatified, even deified in that way, there can often be little left to say. Who, for example, would willingly attempt to find something new to say about the BAFTA winning instant classic that was Blink? Watch it? Great! I’ll do that right now. Write something about it? Ulp.