Vincent and the Doctor

Forget Blink. This is the episode you show to people who have never seen Doctor Who before. The name of Richard Curtis, let alone Vincent van Gogh, should be enough to encourage even the most ambivalent to give this one a go, and, within ten seconds Bill Nighy turns up. By the end only the stoniest of hearts, could fail to have become entranced.

Vincent and the Doctor truly deserves to stand alone: an astonishing forty-odd minutes of television that takes the premise of Doctor Who and uses it, TARDIS-like, to travel into new territory. This is the purest piece of time travel tourism in the new series, as we, the Doctor and Amy, simply get to hang out with van Gogh and even see the world through his eyes. There almost doesn't need to be an alien monster hanging around at all. In fact, given that the Krafayis plot is a bit feeble, you'd be forgiven for thinking it might be better to have just got shot of it all together. But, of course, this episode needs those moments of jeopardy to inject some adrenalin into proceedings and to reassure the regular family audience that this still is Doctor Who that they're watching.

Long ongoing series have the right to depart from their normal template for the odd episode, but the results are rarely as wonderful as this. The joy of Vincent and the Doctor is the chance to spend some time with a great artist, seeing the subjects of successive paintings brought to life, or, in the case of Starry Night, watching the world melt into swirling magical brushstrokes. In amongst the beauty we get a brief but serious glimpse of van Gogh's mental illness - a modern taboo discussed compassionately and without judgment in the middle of a Saturday tea-time family adventure serial - and a simply wonderful ending that packs a truly eye-watering emotional punch.

Dr Black's paean to the deeply troubled man he calls "not only world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived" lays it on a little thick perhaps, but this is surely the point: to hammer home the moment, so that we feel its crushing effects, just as van Gogh does, dizzy with camera work, impossible beautiful words in our mind.

Afterwards William sat still, unusually silent, as something heavy had landed on him. He was obviously deeply moved, struggling to accommodate this cocktail of feelings.

"How do you feel? I asked him.

"Happy I guess?" he said. "And sad. I don't know. It's just so much to take in."

Yes, it is. Being stunned, broken open, by other people, by their joy and suffering, by stories, by great art, that's called being alive. Given the chance to see the light of the sunflowers, or the dancing of the stars - that's amazing. Doctor Who took all that and poured into the heart and mind of a ten year old boy watching primetime Saturday night telly, because Doctor Who is the best television programme ever.


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