Today marks the first Saturday in over three months when The Doctor has not been a part of my living room. Yes, Series 31 – or NuWho Series 5 – finished last week. How has it stood up to the previous incarnations?

I’ve watched Doctor Who since the seventies. I’m not a new convert. I’m got form. Davidson was “my” Doctor – I was too young to really remember the Tom Baker era, although I do remember his fall from Jodrell Bank and visiting the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool in the same year. As an aside, that was a fantastic exhibition with a fantastic TARDIS – it left an impression on me, but I don’t remember feeling any remorse or crying any tears when Tom finally handed over the baton.

I remember, with almost crystal clear clarity, the wonders of Kinda and Snakedance. I can remember Nyssa, wearing not very much at all – quite a pleasing sight even at that age. I remember the death of Adric, and subsequently Davidson turning into a the pseudo clown of the Colin Baker era. The portrayal was a miscalculation, the quality dipped, but the Trial of a Time Lord was a redeeming story with a depth which would stand with any of the previous series.

Then politics of the BBC, and the Sylvester McCoy era – with the very questionable beginning of Series 24. Make no mistake the start of that season was very, very poor. But Season 24 gave us my all time favourite companion of Ace – I was a teenager – and a wonderful relationship between her and her Professor. Quality improved, with Series 26 standing tall, topped by the The Curse of Fenric. Then Michael Grade got his way and cancelled Doctor Who. But if there was a way to go out, Season 26 was not a bad epitaph. Not bad at all.

Doctor Who subsequently became the butt of cruel jokes. History was re-written. It was repainted as a typically British show, with poor production values. Wobbly sets? Running down corridors? Dodgy monsters? Yep, that funny show, with that bloke out of All Creatures Great and Small. But one man had vision – Russell T. Davies, whom managed to resurrect the series against all popular expectation and wisdom. Many of us were excited, but with some trepidation – how on earth was the show going to be received. It was cancelled once for a reason.

The subsequent Series 27 wasn’t perfect, but it was as good enough. There was a subtle shift to move the companion on almost equal billing as The Doctor, and this was reflected by the relatively star billing of Billy Piper alongside Christopher Ecclestone. Great highs – The Empty Child – and great lows – Aliens of London – followed, and the nation got swept up in Doctor Who again. In retrospect, five years on, it’s easy to see that it was precisely the right time to bring it back, to capture the void in all-ages family programming on a Saturday evening. Also in retrospect, Series 27 wasn’t quite as good as people may remember. On the hit/miss ratio, there were as many misses as hits – which the subsequent series have avoided.

Ecclestone didn’t like hard work, and left after a single series. And so David “Barcelona” Tennant took over as Ten, and the golden era began. Series 28 was better across the board,although we’ll ignore Love & Monsters, and Fear Her which were budget driven episodes. In companion terms, we traded down for Series 29 and lost Billie Piper to Freema Agyeman, the Dalek’s got much, much sillier in Daleks in Manhatten but we received a fine back stretch with the Family of Blood, the incomparable Blink and the return of The Master, played superbly by John Simm for a final three episode finale.

Unfortunately, Tennant’s final specials were disappointing to me. Despite being one of the best Doctors in the history of the programme and Series 30 being of the very best with Catherine Tate supplying a superb companion with a generally excellent selection of stories, the subsequent specials however suffered from a companion of the week and the pages, and pages of necessary exposition to introduce them and the Doctor wallowing in pre-regenerative angst like some teenager suddenly confronted by his own mortality, not a man who was old beyond his years and had been through the process at least nine times previously. This wasn’t Davidson, smiling sadly as he gave Peri the antidote at the expense of his own regeneration.

The specials therefore became one huge, sentimental, indulgent tombstone to the passing of Tennant, and indeed the whole production team. The slightly messy syrup of Series 30′s Journey’s End looked positively restrained by the time we got to The End of Time. On the World is Not Enough DVD, Michael Apted made specific commentary that when you’ve resolved the plot you want to get out of the film as quickly as possible to the credits, not overstay your welcome and tarnish the experience with fluff. Unfortunately, The End of Time then treated us to ten minutes plus of sentimental wanderings as the Doctor put his affairs in order – this could only be described as an conceit. It was sloppy writing and mired the bookend to an otherwise superb overall archive supplied by the Tennant era. Even the wonderful John Simm was utterly wasted as The Master – now suddenly with super-powers after a botched resurrection attempt, which has to go down as one of the worst acted, campiest scenes in NuWho. And considering Aliens of London, that’s quite poor.

The overwhelming feeling was that Doctor Who, although this is probably more true of the producers and Russell T Davies, had run out of steam. It was flabby, sentimental, self-reverential.

Would this carry over to Series 31?

To be concluded in Part 2/2.

I skipped a review of the last England game, as I just wasn’t that motivated to write one.

Not being a professional journalist, I’m not paid by the word and nor do I have a deadline. And I simply didn’t care very much when England qualified for the knock-out stages. As an event it was unremarkable in that a supposed footballing powerhouse defeated a relative minnow.Unfortunately for England, they’d hardly presented themselves as a powerhouse, and the interest was if they’d actually be able to win or if they’d completely self-destruct and disappear without troubling the knock-out stages.

Expectations were thus low. Although the uncharitable might say realistic. However, England did manage to achieve victory, despite a very cagey end to the match, and a victory which allowed the nation to continue to revel in the delusion that England were potential contenders for the trophy. There simply wasn’t anything to write about.

No matter how you slice it, Germany were always the favourites. Forget the “experience” (of losing) being the equal to youthful German legs and ball control. England had played between competently and utter farce in their earlier games – which is hardly a solid foundation to take on our nemesis.

What was depressing was just how utterly poor England’s defence performed.

The campaign had so far been marked at the impotence of England’s attack. The defence hadn’t looked too bad, although I had previously said via Twitter that Terry just looked old and lumbering in the Slovenia game. This was against the common wisdom of the pundits. I’m sorry, but acting like a human shield doesn’t impress me. Pace, ball control and prediction impress me. If I could get a hundred thousand a week for being prepared to take a football to the face or body, then sign me up please. However, I think my perceptions were confirmed by this game. Even to a non-football fan such as myself, it was obvious that the defence was just horrific and beyond explanation – the Germans could almost take a shot on goal at will on the counter-attack.

Lampard’s disallowed goal was of course unfair. It allowed the little-Englander in the nation to rise up in indignation. It’s likely that 2-2 would have changed the poise of the match, but equally it was unlikely to have changed the end result. England simply couldn’t cope with the German attack. The Germans simply backed off in the last twenty minutes and avoided yellow cards, injuries and other potential impediments to a harder match down the road. England were just poor. The end scoreline was more flattering that it should have been.

It’s been amusing in the days since this game – this write-up has been posted some days after – to watch the knives come out for this bunch of under-performers and their very, very, very highly-paid manager.As I said in an earlier commentary, I don’t see how that sort of money is justified. It’s pretty obvious to the man in the pub, give or take five players out of a squad of twenty-two, just which players should have been taken and which team should have played, and pretty much in what formation. This all looks like a very nice jolly for Capello to me.

It is time to junk all the players and start again. They obviously are either on the wrong side of their careers or are just serial under-achievers, who choke on international pressure.

To finish my football commentary career: “You don’t win anything with kids”. Well, kids would have done better than this rabble. Watch the Germans – they’ve got as good a chance as anyone to win it, hunger, speed, the idealism of youth. Against lumbering experience, that’s going to win every time.

The first week of Wimbledon is now over. Federer and Nadal almost kicked the bucket, all the British interest evaporated other than Andy Murray, the women’s game is still largely forgettable but that’s not been the big story.

No, that’s been the three-day or eleven hour match, which finished 70-68 in the fifth set.

Much has been made of this on the physical level. John McEnroe was particularly gushing in his praise for the stamina of the players, and how this would result in a much better appreciation of tennis players as athletes. I’m not quite as impressed as a lot of people – not that I’d be up for doing this myself. Then again, I don’t make a living playing a game on a world tour and making a reasonable sum of cash for it. In other words, they are professionals.

After the match, the players proclaimed it as “the greatest match ever” – it was certainly the longest. It certainly captured the imagination of the public. It wasn’t Nadal v Federer Wimbledon 2008. It wasn’t rapier quality, but it was an awful lot of quantity. The match was effectively common fare – until neither player could put the match away. It was less about not making mistakes, more that the opponent was too tired to do very much about them.

However, you do have to say that whilst the men’s game was capable of this, you just couldn’t see the women’s game managing similar fare. To be honest, the women’s game is a joke until you get to the quarter finals. Service games are broken almost on a round robin basis. They can’t even play three sets in a Grand Slam at a reasonable standard, let alone the five of the men. But they get the same prize money strangely enough for sub-par entertainment.

The attraction, literally, is that a good number of them are quite pleasing on the eye and whom you wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crisps. Whilst really condescending, it’s unfortunately true.

Originally, I meant to publish this on Sunday night – but it was a poor draft, and it slipped. Then work, and an all nighter in the datacentre got in the way, and it’s slipped until Wednesday afternoon.

Unfortunately, everything I was sarcastically predicting has already come true.

We, as in the United Kingdom, have the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. Various other pretenders will make some noise about their relevance, quality and heritage. But let’s face it, The All-England Club is where it’s at. Those who are simply want to win it. A tennis career without conquering Centre Court is simply diminished.

Despite this national heritage, we’re universally poor at playing tennis to a high standard. For the last fifteen years we’ve had quality representation, but only in the singular. Tim Henman and Andy Murray have single-handedly kept British spirits in a state of mighty self-delusion. Greg Rusedski can hardly be called British – as soon as he opens his mouth that’s given away rather keenly, but he also played his part in the delusion by teaming with Tim Henman to represent the national interest in the Davis Cup, rising the previously forgotten heights.

Then their careers ended, and Andy Murray lost interest in carrying the hopes of a nation on his back – and simply turned it away from national representation. A bit “not-cricket” you have to say, and he’s done himself no favours in terms of hearts and minds, but it has finally brutally exposed just how shallow the tennis gene-pool is in Britain.

It’s been a running joke about the British interest at Wimbledon, and the second-round sweepstake on those managing to survive past their wild cards.  My post would have predicted one – Andy Murray, with the rest swept aside. With the benefit of hindsight as I finish the post, only Laura Robson gave an additionally creditable performance. A likely female contender down the road to be sure. But that’s not now, and it will never be Davis Cup.

The LTA simply doesn’t have any clue on how to change the situation, other than spend money in new and increasingly impotent ways. Murray certainly was never part of the system. He’s earned his position in the world. The others, who have received wild cards virtue only of them being born in the country, have not only received free entry to the first round but the prize money associated with being there. Incredible. It just smells like the gravy train, and/or the LTA using these under-performers in some futile attempt to justify itself.

We run the greatest tennis tournament in the world. We have the worst tennis players in the world.

So, we have the Age of Austerity (TM).

There’s been plenty of pundit commentary on the problems of  UK PLC. What you can say is that there’s very little consensus and basically it’s pay your money (well, not anymore) and take your choice. Do you go the route of heavily reducing spending and increasing taxes, or just moderately. There’s not an alternative option, it’s just the scale.

For money, I’m in the former category. I was a director of a company, and I’ve been through the problems of debt – get your exposure wrong and it corrupts and pollutes anything your business is doing positively. I learned the hard way, and it was a valuable lesson. When you borrow money, you have to pay it back – that’s the deal, or you don’t get the money in the first place. There’s interest on the amount, so it’s not without penalty. If you can’t pay it back, then in business terms you can either come up with a new business plan with solid credentials or liquidate the assets.

Expand this to the country level, and there’s all sorts of additional considerations. A country doesn’t simply vanish, but the assets can certainly be acquired by others. The infamous “brain drain”, but less commonly quoted the bulk move of crucial industries abroad. Our manufacturing base has inexorably been drifting overseas. Multiply this by a couple of orders of magnitude, and there won’t be much left for UK PLC. It will simply be a shell of times past.

So, to make it simple, we’re making a new business plan. Reduce the borrowing, repay the sharpest part of the debt – and make damned sure we don’t get to the asset stripping. To me, this seems the route forwards. Debt is a tool, and UK PLC is never likely to be out of debt, but it’s a tool which the economic illiterate can abuse to devastating effect – it is thus the scale and the ability to honour it. Most of us spend our lives in long term debt – mortgages for example – but it doesn’t stop short term transactions or the business of living day-to-day.

I have never been a fan of the Big State. In 1997 Labour was always going to win. 17 years of Conservative Government was looking tired and moribund. Problem is that they borrowed heavily to embark on a phenomenal programme of public spending. Problem with public spending is that it’s a service industry. It doesn’t make anything. It doesn’t generate wealth. It may increase turnover, analogous to to a business balance sheet, but it doesn’t increase profit – the pie gets larger and so does the cost of maintaining it. Let alone expanding it.

The public service was never going to be able to repay the debt incurred to finance it. This initially came from another service sector, but importantly a private one – financial services. Explosive growth in output kept pace with the borrowing – until the inevitable bust, and there was always going to be a bust, and then it simply didn’t. And at the scale of the numbers we’re talking about, that went out of control very quickly. Lack of oversight and regulation re: the Labour Government on this cash cow, forced a very expensive bail-out of the sector, which make things worse.

We cannot afford to maintain the expansion of the public services undertaken in the last ten years, let alone continue that expansion. It’s the universal rule – if you can’t afford it, you don’t buy it – unless you don’t want the repo-men knocking (like as happened to Greece). We’ve not been able to afford it for some years, but an election was in the way – horribly delaying the start of this process. The worst kind of political self-interest.

So, my vote is for. The alternative is worse. The shame is, proper financial management and control would have avoided the need for the brutal cutting of the public sectors – they should never have been that big in the first place, and nor should their expansion have culled our manufacturing base. It wasn’t in rude health at the end of the nineties, but it’s demonstrably worse now.

All in all, the last 13 years have been epic failure.

My radio station of choice is Radio 5 Live, and it’s full of the World Cup. Other stations? Similar. Radio 4 is however a little too dry for me, although I did have an extended period of listening to it when my old radio decided it didn’t want much to do with medium wave.

Injury this. Questionable selection that. You really can’t help becoming an armchair pundit such is the volume of speculation. Not that I really want to. I don’t know the cut and thrust of football, although the game seems remarkably simple to me. Obviously hideously dictated by the quality of the players available, but it seems fundamentally simple from a managerial perspective, and especially so for an International manager. The pool is both defined and fairly obvious, plus/minus some wildcards – it’s not like an International manager can buy/sell, or do all the wheeler dealing. To be honest, it all looks a bit of a con to me. This is not a high-brow, high-intellect sport. Sorry, it’s not. Really, it’s not.

As such, I’m beginning to get a healthy disrespect for the latest tales of woe. I think some chap once said “You won’t win anything with kids” – promptly before Manchester United cleaned up that year. Well, I say “You won’t win anything with injured players”. At times, a risk is staying with the status quo.

Contrary to the national orgasm currently sweeping the nation, I’m quite ambivalent about whole thing.

The most extrovert sign of the national obsession is the ever increasing number of cars sporting go-slower, fuel-wasting England flags – touted as some demonstration of national pride. In fact, the number of flags seem inversely proportional to the value of the car, and quite possibly the IQ of the driver. Not to mention the house flags, the most comical of which was a bijou council property sporting twin flags, both the size of the average living room. Probably seemed a good idea at the time, despite the loss in perceived property value.

I do occasionally glance at football – towards the sharp end of the season, I keep tabs on Manchester United. Mainly because it’s local, and I can’t say that I’m totally disinterested. Formula One is my spectator sport of choice, a much richer tapestry of politics and intrigue – and a much less mundane use of ninety minutes on a Sunday. I probably won’t be totally disinterested in England’s campaign either, but I certainly won’t be planning any viewing around it. Not that think it will be a problem for long – out in the quarter finals is my entry as a pundit.

Well, those two weeks came and went. The loft at the parents was cleared, all those little jobs around the house done, this site was re-born, and many photographs taken. Some hot days, some indifferent days, and some bloody miserable days.

And now I’m back at my desk. And I really don’t mind. Without work, you don’t appreciate play.

It struck me, rather strongly, of the relative merits of two motorways whilst driving on the M56 towards Wales.

The first, the M56 itself, was wide, open, and not infested with speed camera’s every 500 yards – unlike the second, the M6 towards Birmingham. The latter, I had the feeling of running a gauntlet of entrapment. Running 20 odd miles in an enforced 60 mph zone, on a relatively clear motorway is just a joke. And I certainly had less brain power on the road ahead, as half or more of it was on the speedometer.

I look half a kilometre or more down the road on a motorway. You simply can’t do that properly and pay attention to your speed to the tolerances of enforcement. Cruise control is helpful, but it’s not ideal as that only works if you aren’t catching someone up – then you need to flick it off and re-set it, which then creates it’s own frustrations and attention-sapping hazards. Give and take with the right foot is best, but that only works when the give isn’t under a gantry equipped with a speed camera per lane.

I certainly know which one was safer – for me anyway – the M56.

On the back of my opening Eurovision pondering, there was a fair point made by a commentator on a news channel.

We’ve spent the last 30 years having the competition presented to us by a man who just relentlessly took the urine out of proceedings, Sir Terry Wogan, that it’s probably little wonder we regard the competition with some contempt, a contempt which likely stabs our entries in the back before they’ve even take to the stage. And I must admit, this struck home – as my judgement on the competition was more along the lines of how many cynical laughs we were getting from it, rather than the musical content – which is obviously a dubious priority.

We’ve still got zero chance of winning, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, but equally we shouldn’t be expecting to, or have any right to until our perceptions of the competition changes and we see the value in doing so.