Column by David in The Times.

ONE THING I HAVE NOTICED about Dr Who is that he meets a lot of famous writers. It makes sense. He’s not going to come across anyone we know travelling forward in time to the year 500,000, and travelling backwards – at least on Earth – the only famous people he’s going to bump into, apart from the occasional monarch, are writers. Although surely it might be good to have the Doctor bump into earlier scientific geniuses – Aristole or Galileo or Faraday – they would have lots to chat about. But presumably the people who control such things at BBC One think that these names might be stretching the definition of “famous people” for the Saturday night prime-time audience, and thus have kept it to writers, and very big ones at that: Dickens, Shakespeare, and, last week, Agatha Christie.

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Column by David in The Times.

NEVER ANSWER YOUR CRITICS is, as regular readers of this column may know, not a maxim I particularly accord with. I’m of the opinion that answering your critics is both therapeutic and entertaining. Thus it is that I draw your attention to a blog on The Guardian’s website, attacking a programme I used to host, BBC 4’s The Book Quiz, the final of which was held last week. In the blog – Why Does BBC 4’s The Book Quiz Have None of the Right Stuff? – a chap called Alex Larmar blogs furiously against the show in general, beginning by expressing his surprise that the programme was commissioned for a second series “after the first series, hosted by David Baddiel, was deservedly panned”.

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