I have so much to say about this. Practically nobody agrees with me on such things these days, but as a mission statement, "make Doctor Who like Doctor Who" seems eminently sensible. Keep it special.
Our purging of silliness from the show wasn't just political correctness. It made the stories much better. The Doctor's ''sonic screwdriver'', for example, was magical baggage we had to lose. A pen-sized gizmo that could blast through tempered steel, translate Azurian into English, and fend off the Karturi by generating an impenetrable neutron dome might be just the ticket in real life, but in fiction was a sure-fire story-killer. We didn't want our audience shouting out from behind the sofa ''where's the sonic screwdriver?'' whenever peril threatened.
We wanted a strong narrative line, and we relished the way our storylines could arc over four episodes, bristling with cliffhangers. All of which seems to be missing from the current season. Perhaps it's fear of a short audience attention span that has contracted the stories to single or double episodes. To compensate, we get snappy dialogue and a couple of cracking lead actors who do a lot of running around.
If a quarter of a century ago the first two laws of Doctor Who were ''Science'' and ``Story'', then the third was ''Keep It Special''. It might be a super sight gag, or a spooky spine tingle, but if it had shades of Benny Hill, or The Prisoner, out it went.