There have been a few grumbles that this Doctor Who series seemingly refuses to leave Earth. Where are the alien worlds and cultures, fans cry? Good riddance to them, for now at least. I’ll admit I’m curious as to how the new production is going to simulate an alien world – CGI may have moved on in leaps and bounds but quarries are eternal – but what I love about this series is how it fantasticalises the familiar. This series is generally suburban, yes, and it’s a suburbia that’s forever under threat – by time travellers, Slitheen, Reapers, etc. And that means that the real suburbia suddenly looks like somewhere something fantastic might happen. That’s a gift to a child’s imagination worth a lot more than a bogus studio jungle, I think. Compare the Harry Potter series, where suburbia is explicitly and entirely boring, something to be subverted and escaped: the real action is always at exotic Hogwarts. Doctor Who used to be like that too, sometimes: the humanising and exoticising of the ordinary is one of this series’ great breaks with the past.