Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion of Earth. After yesterdays new episode atrocity, I was frankly in need of something to cleanse my palette and remind me I'm a fan of this show, so I slammed in this old one - and it's cracking stuff. It was probably an act of insanity to attempt a story on this scale on a 1960s BBC Saturday tea time budget, but they went and did it anyway - and pretty much pulled it off with just sheer bloody minded conviction. Essentially, of course, this isn't really a vision of the future - it's totally an allegory on what 1960s Britain might have been if the Nazis had won WWII, with the Daleks standing in for them (Christ, you even see a couple of them pointing their plungers upward in a Nazi style salute at one point, in case we'd missed the point!
) and the story is as bleak and grim as you'd expect from such a scenario. At six parts, this one flies by surprisingly quickly, so much so that the final victory seems a little too easy and you wouldn't have minded them going another episode or two to give more time to the heroes' fight back. But that's mere quibbling. The fact is, I watched two DW stories yesterday - and the one made on the cheap in black and white 46 years ago takes a great dump on the one made in 2010. That's both funny and a sad indictment of the state of modern television! 
