Is David Tennant the best Dr Who?

BY JANE CLIFTON

OPINION: Enjoyably zany though it is, Dr Who has never been more aptly named.

Not only is the Doctor's manifest form (actor David Tennant) about to change (to actor Matt Smith) but he seems, on New Zealand TV at least, to have at least three different assistants on the go.

Officially, there is Donna, played by Catherine Tate. But there's a special in which he teams up with Kylie Minogue - she should be so lucky - and a woman looking very like Martha appeared in Saturday's episode on UKTV.

But by then I was hopelessly confused, as poor lost Rose (Billie Piper) had also cropped up in a funny little sequence, in which Donna asks a bystander for directions, and the stranger turns out to be Rose, who looks unwell and rather cross, before literally disappearing before our eyes.

And who could blame her? Like Rose, we are simply not ready to part with Tennant as Dr Who just yet. But this is his last series, so we must make the most of it. He gets this reviewer's vote as the best Doctor ever.

Witty, mad-eyed, relentlessly eccentric, with exactly the right stuff-you body language to carry off the know-all time lord.

He's been helped no end by the genius plotting of Russell T Davies, with this series opener one of the best yet. More than ever, it seems as though Davies has employed the cleverest writers and designers, and Britain's most endearing actors, and simply gone for broke.

Sarah Lancashire plays Miss Foster, the glossily Teutonic promoter of a wondrous new diet pill marketed by Adipose Industries, which removes kilos literally overnight. As the Commerce Commission is always telling us about such products, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Adipose turns out to be a front for a distant planet, which is harvesting body fat from humans to make into new life forms. Only there's a mystery.

One successful slimmer tells the Doctor - who is investigating - that the flapping of his catdoor wakes him up at exactly the same time every night. And he doesn't have a cat.

Once Adipose has sufficient numbers of weight-watchers taking the pills, the process accelerates, and we learn why.

At the appointed time, the poor fatties watch their spare tyres splodging off them before their very eyes into little units that sprout cute little arms and legs, and cheerful little faces and toddle off. When the process goes haywire, entire bodies are subsumed into the happy little fat creatures.

These cuties are, of course, nascent aliens, every bit as scary in their way as the Ood or the Daleks. The sinister Miss Foster is their foster mother, charged with the dispatch of the new blubber babies to their new home planet.

Strung throughout this is Donna's desperate search for the Doctor, with whose lifestyle she became infatuated during the Runaway Bride special a couple of years back. The Doctor disrupted Donna's wedding on the perfectly reasonable grounds that the groom was secretly a malevolent alien intent on world domination.

Tate played Donna then as an indignant, bolshie trout, galumphing about in her meringue. But since her first Tardis adventure, the character has softened, and longs to rejoin the Doctor for more adventure. In barely credible - but who cares? - malarky, she tracks him down via the Adipose fiasco, and after establishing that they don't fancy each other, they decide to team up.

In Britain, whole websites oppose Tate's re-inclusion in the series, on the grounds that she uses up too much oxygen. But it isn't written in stone anywhere that the Doctor's assistant must always be a beautiful, slender, graceful modest young woman of admirable spirit.

Why can't it be a gobby, middle-aged woman of normal size, with a stomping gait?

The only problem is that devotees of Tate's wonderful comedy show will keep seeing flashes of her various old characters. Donna is particularly prone to lapsing into the querulous, gaping posture of effeminate Derek Faye - "Who, dear, me, dear? Gay, dear? No, dear!" - right before he says "How very dare you!"

But am I bovvered?

* What do you think? Post your comments below.

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