Distressingly, more than 45 years have passed since a significant part of my Saturday afternoons were spent hiding behind the sofa as the terrifying Daleks invaded our flickering black and white TV.

I’d like to think that this is down to time travel but unlike Doctor Who, who can regenerate and come up good as new at the drop of a sonic screwdriver, I am obliged to degenerate at the same rate as the rest of the human race.

No wonder, then, that I have remained a lifelong fan of the ever-changing Time Lord and his adventures in time and space.

I mean, he looks pretty damned good for a 900-year-old.

Needless to say last Saturday found me glued to my wonderfully high-tech flat screen to see, probably, the last full episode starring the wonderful David Tennant.

As this latest inter-galactic adventure fantasy unfolded in graphic detail, I found myself mulling over how far real-life has moved on since the fuzzy monochromatic days of the early 1960s when William Hartnell was keeper of the famous Tardis.

In those days everyone seemed a little out of focus and the Daleks were like giant cardboard and tinfoil salt cellars threatening the universe with old sink plungers.

The images were brought to us by means of valve-driven televisions that needed to be warmed-up even to achieve appalling picture quality.

Today Doctor Who is a far slicker affair, which of course it has to be to maintain any credibility at all with a 21st century audience.

However, it manages to balance this with a certain simplicity that echoes its creative origins.

The Tardis remains, for instance, a 1950s/60s police telephone box with innards that wouldn’t look out of place in HG Wells’ turn of the 19th/20th century Time Machine.

It was also great to see that, though it’s now 2009, the production team still thought it was OK to arm Lindsay Duncan’s deep space explorer with what was clearly a blue plastic water pistol, even if it was supposed to be some kind of futuristic ray-gun.

Talking of water – what a stroke of genius it was in this latest adventure to make it epitomise evil.

I can only imagine that Russell T Davies and his team were inspired by the traditiona l reluctance of many of their young audience to take baths and showers.

They knew that having victims of a Martian virus turn into monster zombies exuding gallons of water as though plumbed to the mains would add fuel to the bath-time arguments of children everywhere.

As for me... I no longer watch from behind the sofa.

These days, I am relaxing on it, generally sipping a nice cup of tea!