"Push me in a corner and I'll scream. Just give me one more, one more chance. One more, one more chance. Tonight."

Nicholas Pegg, the writer, actor and director who is probably best known to readers of this Doctor Who newsletter as one of the post 2005 Dalek operators, offers a compelling theory of David Bowie's artistry in his dizzyingly great The Complete David Bowie. Actually, he offers several, sometimes more than one on the same page, but there's one that feels particularly relevant to Doctor Who. It's the idea, I paraphrase here, that every David Bowie album is noticeably a transitional point between the one before and the one after it.

A logical implication of this is that there aren't really jumping on (or indeed jumping off) points in Bowie's career. Wherever you come in, you can backtrack and see the path to what you've already heard. If you go forward you can see how the next one developed from where you started. Now, if you'll forgive the drift into Thought for the Day-ese, "Doctor Who is a bit like that." It's why there are surprisingly few "jumping on" points in the old show. An Unearthly Child, of course. Maybe Spearhead from Space.

So many of the others, even Doctor debuts, make the reasonable assumption that the general audience knows a lot about the basics of the show. Wherever you jump in, even if it's the start of a season or a Doctor, you can see that this is a show that's been around for a while, and is part of a continuum. It's genuinely startling how many Tom Baker era series openers start with some minor scene in the TARDIS, rather than the kind of scene setting common in the "cold opens" of post 2005 Doctor Who. (About which more another time.)