Then, after a promising start in two below-average stories, the Sixth Doctor calms down a bit, and isn’t always funny or manic, but remains obtuse and arrogant. If you’re going to have a Doctor who is a rude narcissist, you need to make him quick-witted and funny. It’s why David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor works: if he wasn’t charismatic, then every story would be like Midnight.

I am not, by the way, claiming that the Sixth Doctor is like the Tenth Doctor with less grinning and rubbish clothes. I’m flat out telling you he is.

I’ve mentioned before the importance of humour to make a Doctor’s negative qualities palatable, and in the Sixth Doctor’s case, he gets few memorable one liners or moments of memorable interaction. Indeed, his best quip sums up the problems in the TARDIS at the time, when he is asked about the ship, “What precisely do you do in there?” He replies, “Argue, mainly.”

The Doctor is travelling with Peri. After strangling and being generally quite belligerent and weird towards her, it is not quite clear why Peri is travelling with the Doctor (even less so than the famously combative Tegan). She isn’t, like the First Doctor’s original companions, the hero of the story, but instead the audience’s identification figure. If she doesn’t seem to get on with the hero, then how are is the audience supposed to react to him?