"It's like when you were a kid, the first time they tell you that the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it because it looks like it's standing still."

"I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it."

"We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go...."

"That's Who I am."

Before Star Wars, before Star Trek, there was a battered old police box in a junkyard on Totters Lane. And there was The Doctor.

Like so many other kids over the past forty years, I grew up with Doctor Who. I remember, vividly, watching the Daleks exterminate everyone around them with glee, hiding in terror from the Cybermen, and anxiously awaiting the next tea-time installment to find out how the Doctor and his companions were going to survive the latest cliffhanger.

And so when the series came back last year (after a George Lucas-esque 16 year wait, broken only by an odd Americanised TV movie), I couldn't have been happier. The regenerated series is quite simply the greatest thing ever to hit my TV screen.

"Time travel is like visiting Paris. You can't just read the guide book, you've got to throw yourself in: eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double, and end up kissing complete strangers. Or is that just me?"

Part of the great appeal of Doctor Who is it's immediacy. It's so easy to imagine the TARDIS materialising on your street corner and, like Rose and so many before her, being whisked away to Thrilling Adventures In Time And Space.

The Doctor himself isn't some goody-two-shoes military officer or diplomat, like so many sci-fi heroes. He's simply wandering around the universe at random, visiting places because he finds them interesting. There's a great appeal to that lifestyle, and I'm sure we can all identify with it.

"So, when it comes right down to it, why did you come here? Why did you do that? Why? I'll tell you why. Because it was there! Brilliant! Excuse me, uh, Zac, wasn't it? "Just stand there, 'cause I'm gonna hug you. Is that alright?"

What makes it even more fun is that our heroes act like they're on holiday too. The characters act very much as we would if we got our hands on such a great toy as the TARDIS. This is a show which doesn't take itself too seriously, and has its tongue firmly wedged in its cheek. What's Rose's reaction to meeting Queen Victoria?:

"'We are not amused.' - I bet you five quid that I can make her say it."
"Well if I gambled on that, it'd be an abuse of my privilege as a traveller in time."
"Ten quid?"
"Done."

The Doctor is a terrific character - an eccentric, an explorer, a tourist and an alien as old and wise as Yoda. He has a dark side - as the sole survivor of the Time War that destroyed his people, and will not suffer injustice.

"I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it."

Yet he is at heart both a hero and a pacifist, doing only what needs to be done. The Doctor doesn't wield a ray-gun, but instead has a range of wonderfully silly gadgets:

"Who looks at a screwdriver and goes, 'That could be a little more sonic'?"
"What? You never been bored? Never had a long night? Never had a lot of cabinets to put up?"

Even the TARDIS itself - an indestructable 900-year-old machine that can travel anywhere in Time and Space, capable of getting our heroes out of the tightest of scrapes - is still basically, and endearingly, a bit rubbish:

"It's not 1860, it's 1869."
"I don't care!"
"And it's not Naples."
"I don't care!"
"It's Cardiff!"
"Riiiight...."

Because we know we're not meant to take it at all seriously, Doctor Who has managed something unique - Almost everybody loves it! No one really nit-picks the many, many plot holes or things that don't quite make sense:

"What's a horse doing on a spaceship?"
"Mickey, what's pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!"

It's a credit to the BBC that they threw themselves wholeheartedly into making the new series a success. Doctor Who brings together the best in the business - the best writers, the best actors, and almost movie-quality effects from the guys at The Mill. And of course, it has the best theme tune in history (even grander in its new orchestral incarnation for 2006!).

If there's one word to sum up the new series, it's cinematic. From war-torn London to New New York in the year five billion and twenty-three, the scope is amazing, with a different location every week, and different enemies (from body-snatching aliens to Daleks to zombies to werewolves to the Devil himself), there is no sci-fi/fantasy setting that hasn't been tackled in grand, epic style.

In fact, if I were to make one single criticism of the series, it's that it often has too many ideas, and doesn't always allow enough time to develop them. So, when the Doctor gets trapped in the past without the TARDIS and faces the prospect of settling down at long last, with someone he could be happy with ("I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!"), this could have been the basis for a whole episode. Instead, five minutes later, the problem's solved and he's back on his way again, off to a parallel universe that's about to be overrun by Cybermen.

"We are Human point two. Every citizen will receive a free upgrade. You will become like uzzzzzz!"

I find myself occasionally wishing for the rambling six-part stories of old, where plots had the chance to be played out to the full. But if this is the biggest complaint I can level at a show, it must be doing something right!

Fortunately, the characters and the central idea are so strong that the series never feel disjointed, no matter what disparate corners of the universe it lurches from. And it's all, as the Doctor might say, "brilliant!"

It's thrilling, it's frightening, it's heartwarming and funny. And it's nothing short of astounding that, in these days of dozens of cable channels, one quirky sci-fi show can command a fifth of the viewing public every Saturday evening. A vast shared experience of peeking out from behind the sofa, every one of us enjoying being terrified out of our wits.

"That's the way it's always been. The monsters and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other."

28 series in, it still feels like the adventures are just beginning. And if this week's apocalyptic, planet-shattering episode (with a frightening revelation about Rose's possible future) was supposedly 'a quiet character piece', according to head writer Russell T. Davies, it looks like being one hell of a ride from here!

"So where we going?"
"Further than we've ever gone before!!!"