Day 2 Your favourite Doctor

It's day two of the British Invaders 30 day challenge and it's a biggie. Almost nothing else divides fandom like the question "Who is your Doctor?". As we have established I started watching Doctor Who in the 1970s and my memory of the Doctor is the teeth, curls and scarf of Tom Baker. The actor who is perhaps most associated with the show and it may well be his image that pops in to most people's minds when they think of Doctor Who.

However my memories of the show in the 70s are mainly about the monsters. It was the Autons, the Sea Devils, Zygons and even the Wirrn (yes, I know) that gave me the creeps and were written to my cerebral hard drive. Then in the 80s I wasn't really watching Doctor Who or any television at all. I was either being a medical student with no television, or I was a junior doctor working all hours in the days long before the European working hours directive. I still have very little knowledge of the fifth, sixth and seventh Doctors. I know that is a scandalous confession from one of the co-hosts of a podcast all about British science fiction television.

My next confession may also be controversial: at the present moment I prefer new Who to classic Who. I liked the ninth Doctor and wish we had got to see more of him beyond the point when Rose Tyler helped him recover from what he had done in the Time War. I also liked the tenth Doctor, at least I did before he was almost deified by Russell T Davies, a process that reached its nadir in Last of the Time Lords. At least they pulled back from that afterwards and David Tennant got to do something more interesting with the character.

So having said all that you can guess that just leaves me one choice for my favourite Doctor and here he is.

Yes, Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor is currently my favourite Doctor. His character is more tricky than the tenth incarnation. He can be a wacky clown at times, and it's nice to see elements of Patrick Troughton's second Doctor in there. He is also manipulative and tough which may hearken back to his sixth and seventh selves. And he has a weird dress sense, I'm glad that variations on the line "Bowties are cool" have become his catch-phrase instead of "Geronimo!". The eleventh Doctor is not the best dressed man in the room, but he thinks he is.

I'm not sure he has been in many great episodes yet. Strangely it seems that Steven Moffat may have been better as a Doctor Who writer than he is as the show runner. He did have that great scene at the end of the Eleventh Hour that may be my favourite moment from new Who (well apart from all of Blink). The Doctor's Wife was fantastic, as was Night Terrors, and he had a few moments in A Good Man goes to War before it turned into a pile of mush.

Matt Smith has hinted that he may be leaving the show at the end of 2012 so maybe we won't get to see the eleventh Doctor reach his full potential, but for now my favourite Doctor is the "Madman with a Box".