THE return of “Doctor Who” to British screens last week did not get quite as much fanfare as the Olympics, but it was a close thing. No longer just a science-fiction serial which frightens children with rubber monsters, it is now a cornerstone of the Corporation’s output, praised to the skies by fans, critics and BBC continuity announcers alike. But as highly praised as “Doctor Who” is by its viewers, the programme praises itself even more. Right from the opening narration of last week’s episode, which hailed the Doctor as a legendary saviour, the dialogue did not miss an opportunity to stress how intelligent and noble and altogether fantastic he was.

This back-patting has been a habit of the series for the past few years. The Doctor’s companions have come to speak of him in awed tones, as if he were a time-travelling messiah. “He’s got a plan,” they say, reverently. “The Doctor always has a plan.” His enemies view him as the most dangerous entity in the universe. And if other people’s encomia weren’t enough, the Doctor himself loves to quip about his own brilliance and sexual magnetism. He is also prone to hyping up the severity of his plight. How much trouble are we in, one of his companions asked him last week. The Doctor’s response: “Out of ten? Eleven.” Talk about writing your own reviews.

All this self-mythologising isn’t very British, frankly. It is off-putting, too, especially as the character was conceived, in 1963, as a dotty old meddler in a time machine that did not work properly. The essence of his charm was that he was not an intergalactic superhero in the Flash Gordon mould, but a wandering eccentric. The programme was a celebration of the nerdy underdog, not the strutting bully-boy that the Doctor has become. In the show’s early days, he could rarely get his TARDIS to land where (or when) it was supposed to. Not anymore. Last week’s episode concluded with the Doctor bragging about his pinpoint accuracy with a teleporter. In the same episode, we had to listen to his new assistant, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, telling everyone what a genius she was, which makes the prospect of her joining the Doctor in the TARDIS a worrying one. It may be bigger on the inside than on the outside, but is it really big enough to fit in two egos as swollen as that?

At one level, it is only logical that the Doctor should now be worshipped as a demigod. Week after week, he battles megalomaniacal aliens, and week after week he trounces them. Perhaps it would be absurd for the scripts to keep presenting him as a harmless boffin. In the episode that introduced Matt Smith as the Doctor, he repelled some alien invaders simply by telling them to look him up in their databank. They were so intimidated by his winning record that they scurried off with their tails between their legs. (Not that they had tails. Or legs.) But James Bond has saved the world almost as many times as the Doctor has over the past five decades, and the bad guys in Bond films do not quake in fear at the very sight of him.