My exhibition of the year so far? The Doctor Who Experience at London's Olympia, naturally – and if you have not yet seen it, may I urge you to go before it closes.

Art exhibitions are certainly put into perspective by the responses this multisensory extravaganza gets from visitors. I mean, people paid a lot of attention to Leonardo da Vinci's paintings at the National Gallery, but how many actually dressed up as Leonardo? And how many teenaged David Hockneys did you see going around A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy?

At the Doctor Who Experience, ordinary visitors rub shoulders with super fans who have spent hours on clothes and makeup to look like Matt Smith, David Tennant, or Karen Gillan. They are very impressive, as are the whirring Tardis control room where children can help pilot the Doctor's ship, the tunnel haunted by Weeping Angels, and the thrill of being held prisoner by the Daleks.

Before anyone says I am stepping outside my brief, the Doctor Who Experience includes an exhibition – and it invites comparison with "proper" art exhibitions in the power of its exhibits. It does for me, anyway, because the first exhibition I ever saw was the original Doctor Who Exhibition in the 1970s. The sight of a Zygon – orange, horrible and covered in suckers – in a glass vitrine has never left my mind. Imprisoned in a tank, its display made it part of a cabinet of curiosities, a galactic freak show. The idea of an imaginary creature being displayed as a real artefact must have coloured my idea of art. I have been fascinated since that experience by the idea of the cabinet of curiosities, the museum of wonders – and this is probably why I warmed to the art of Damien Hirst when he was putting big fish in tanks.

The exhibition component of the Doctor Who Experience is just as gripping as the old 70s show, and has the same bizarre quality of displaying science-fiction monsters as museum treasures. Gloriously, it even has some of the same monsters – in fact, it has a Zygon much like the one that horrified and fascinated me when I was nine. The Doctor Who Experience also has the original robot from Tom Baker's first Doctor Who adventure. And it has modern monsters too: the Face of Boe (above) in his jar looks particularly good. In a manner of speaking.

I would much rather parents took their children to this exhibition than to displays of the latest contemporary art. Doctor Who is imaginative and demands attention; it has a way of enriching rather than simplifying the experience of people young and old. It ramifies. This is why it works so engagingly as an exhibition – in the 1970s and now. And if you're not in the family-fun business ... go anyway. Just don't hog the Tardis controls.