Tell me Doctor, where are we going this time?

[barrington]

New UK science minister Malcolm Wicks reckons that "Doctor Who can help save science". So far I'm with him, obviously. There's a whole section of my latest show devoted to saying more or less just that. But the minister loses me with the very first sentence of the article: "Schools should use episodes from Doctor Who to teach children about science rather than technical and "boring" textbooks."

Well, they'd have to put some actual science in it first. The new series has even less than the old; it's wonderful and magical and still espouses the benefits of brain power over just blowing things up (though if I'm honest I have to say a lot of the time the Doctor (particularly Eccleston) uses said brain power to blow things up), but it's a fantasy with science fiction trappings. There's no science involved.

Unless, of course, he knows more about the third series than we do...