My brief appreciation of Russell T Davies, the man who revived Doctor Who, is here at HiLobrow.com.

I could have written at much greater length about his work on Doctor Who. The show obsesses my family. I have three children ranging from two to eight years old. Across her repeated viewings, my eldest child Alice has noticed things that I have missed – are the shadows that kill the parents of the narrator of Love & Monsters the Vashta Nerada that appear in Silence of the Library, she wonders? Last week she declared Jon Pertwee’s Planet of the Spiders to be the scariest episode, and explained to me the similarity between the spiders that squat invisibly upon the backs of their victims, and the fate changing beetle that besets Donna in Doctor Who (my portrait of Russell T Davies appreciates his creative looting).
Every time I watch Doctor Who I do so in the company of children: I see what excites them, what annoys or bores them, and their reactions are mostly the same as mine – it’s very rare they will like something I do not. There is a universal appeal. What I think Russell T Davies did, that other great science fiction revivals have avoided or failed to do, is engage the family, and that’s not an achievement to be treated sniffily.