Being Human is back, having controversially parted ways with two of the three regulars and parachuted in a new vampire and werewolf. 

Why this is relevant, aside from SciFiNow going behind the scenes on the new series – as recounted in the latest issue by the stunning scribblings of our senior staff writer Jodie Tyley – and Toby Whithouse dropping a few Doctor Who Series Seven nuggets in there, is that the backlash to the casting change instantly draws comparisons to another slab of BBC telefantasy with a devoted following. 

One of the voices proclaiming that the series should just end rather than replace its original cast had for his Twitter icon an image of Matt Smith. The irony alarm had to be unplugged it was making so much noise. 

I know, I know, that’s a bit unkind. The ability to change the core cast of Doctor Who is central to the concept, and that’s not the case for Being Human, but you have to remember that it wasn’t always so, and change was just as alarming 40-odd years ago as it is now. 

William Hartnell left, perhaps because of his glove habit (+10 Who Points if you laughed at that), and the production team were left with a number of options: they could find another crotchety old character actor, kill the show dead, or cast a radically different new face into the same rough chassis of the old one, while inventing some guff about the Doctor’s alien race needing periodic renewal to smooth over the cracks.

How would you have reacted in 1966 when you heard the cult show of the day was just sweeping the previous three years under the carpet? “Pffft, a new Doctor!?” you might have screeched on whatever passed for Twitter in the Sixties. “You might as well change the police box into a rocket-powered Cadillac, because it’s clearly not going to be the same show.”

It wasn’t the same show. Well, it kinda was, but it also wasn’t. The concept expanded and matured, and the dynamic shifted radically, and then in 1969… they did it all over again!

There’s a lot we can still learn from Doctor Who. A show with this sort of lengthy and cluttered history, with incredible highs and lamentable lows, is a good vantage point from which we  can look down at the rest of science fiction and fantasy.

Like the Doctor himself with his centuries of perspective, our love for a show that is nearly half a century old is a wondrous aid for putting things into perspective. There’s a new vampire in Being Human? Pffft, whatever, my favourite show replaced its lead actor ten times!

SciFiNow Issue #64 is out now, with a massive behind the scenes feature on the controversial new series of Being Human, and an eight-page Complete Guide to the Second Doctor. You can buy it digitally from the Apple Newsstand, or online from the ImagineShop. Check it out at www.scifinow.co.uk.

Don't fear the Doctor Who movie reboot!

"A television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can't have a continuity error—it's impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say 'he changed time.'”

That quote, from current showrunner Steven Moffat at 2008’s San Diego Comic-Con, probably won’t salve the open wound that is talk of a movie reboot currently tearing Twitter [www.twitter.com/scifinow] apart like the opening of the Eye of Harmony. But it’s certainly worth remembering.

A Doctor Who movie reboot is nothing to be scared of, because appropriately for a series about time travel, it’s already happened twice.

In 1965 we were introduced to a kindly old inventor, Doctor Who, and his family, and they took off to battle the Daleks on their dead planet. It was all very thrilling, and in glorious COLOUR! no less. Then in 1996 the Doctor discovered he liked girls in the yucky way, and that he had a human mother. The former and its sequel are rightly appreciated as a historical curiosity, a testament to grand storytelling chops of Terry Nation, and celebrated for its strong cast – I quite like to pretend that Bernard Cribbins is reprising his role from 1966’s Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD as the avuncular Wilfred Mott, however ridiculous as that is to consider – but the latter gained enormous traction. Paul McGann was the Eighth Doctor; he felt and looked like one, he was magical, serene, passionate and alien, and so future writers of books, comics and audiobooks took that and rationalised away or just discarded the things they didn’t like. 

More significantly, though, we’re ostensibly treated to an reboot with every new creative team to take on the series itself as the tone shifts and different priorities come to the fore. As Paul Cornell argued in this piece [http://www.paulcornell.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who.html], the ad hoc and idiosyncratic nature of Doctor Who has always resulted in inconsistency. Like many other creaky old British institutions, it simply evolved and changed, without anyone setting down the law. 

Arguably this freedom is what has given the show such incredible longevity, as producers, writers and assorted other creatives simply advanced tirelessly into bold new territories and media, taking in fantastic highs and pitiable lows. It doffed its cap to the past if it served a story or established a point, and ignored it if it didn’t, treating canon as a toybox rather than a set of yellowing scriptures to be grimly intoned in a dead language.

The nature of the show helps too, as the Moff said way back at the beginning of this piece. If the Earth Cybermen are the Mondasian Cybermen of that universe, why can’t luckless '60s copper Tom Campbell be the Wilfred Mott of a London without Motts? Or Peter Cushing’s doddering old Doctor Who in a world without Time Lords? Or Dimensions In Time have taken place in some sort of meta-fictional world where Doctor Who is merely a TV show produced by the same national broadcaster as a ghastly Cockney soap opera?

The Time War helpfully erased all sins when the 'new series' kicked off in 2005, and who knows what brave new world or great galatic reset Time War II will usher in.

And if you don’t like it, then the things you do like will still be there, along with some things you didn’t like and some things you didn’t care about either way. And how much luckier and richer for that are we when you look at the sort of George Lucas-enforced mandatory drivel Star Wars fans have to put up with?

SciFiNow Issue #60 is out now, check it out at www.scifinow.co.uk.

Regardless of your take on Season Six, the Matt Smith era, the Private Eye controversy, or even the entirety of ‘New Who’, you can’t escape how remarkable it all is.

Ten or fifteen years ago, when all we had to go on were audio books, tie-in fiction and rumour, it was utterly inconceivable that you’d be seeing one of the Doctor’s companions clutching a baby on the cover of almost every TV guide in the land, that Sandman author Neil Gaiman would have written an episode, and that children would be gushingly relating the plot to the latest episode with enthusiasm usually saved for Harry Potter, Pokemon or Ben Ten.

Being a Whovian used to be such a lonely pursuit, but not an unpleasant one. The wilderness years between 1989 and 2004 were like a long winter spent in front of the fire, snowed in away from civilisation, but with plenty to keep us entertained in the shape of such a vast, rewarding canon to analyse, dissect, rediscover and bask in. Since Doctor Who’s return, though, it’s become a genuine sensation; one that transcends genres and interests as a half-way house in popular culture.

The Monday morning following ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, I found myself in an animated discussion about the episode (you’ve no doubt found yourself in a few of these since), clustered around the kettle with the office’s resident Who fans, when someone who’d previously shown no interest in the series – or in sci-fi at all in fact, leapt in – opining on the Amy/Rory dynamic and the story arc with impassioned fervour.

Doctor Who is no longer this dusty old suitcase we found in the attic, full of brilliant relics and snapshots from another era; it’s something that’s very much alive, constantly shifting and growing. It might still frustrate, disappoint, delight and excite us, but it doesn’t belong to us alone. It belongs to everyone, and that’s its single greatest gift.

Ten or fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to talk about Doctor Who at work. Now, you can’t get away without talking about Doctor Who at work. 

SciFiNow Issue #55 is out now, featuring a Captain America exclusive and a whole cosmos of sci-fi, from Green Lantern and Cowboys & Aliens, to Falling Skies and True Blood. Check it out at www.scifinow.co.uk

It’s thanks to the Hand of Omega that I’m editing SciFiNow...

The link between the super-powerful, world-toppling Time Lord doohicky from 1988’s Remembrance Of The Daleks, and my career as an opinionated keyboard basher isn’t as tenuous as you might think. One of my earliest memories is of watching the cliffhanger to Episode One, in which a Dalek ascends the stairs to close in on a cowering Seventh Doctor with my dad, whose own enthusiasm for sci-fi began with the Journey Into Space radio serial of the F ifties. 

That was the start of a lengthy obsession that has yet to abate, but it also sparked off my enthusiasm for publishing. Fairly soon after that moment of almost religious awakening over the anxious face of Sylvester McCoy (don’t picture that), I received my first fanzine. 

This was the result of a recent remarriage, an event not unlike the opening of a booster pack and laying out the random pick and mix of new cousins, aunts, uncles and uncategorisables. In this pack was the foil-plated, hand-numbered card of your dreams, the Penny Black of the New Family CCG. My cousin Paul had just returned home to Grimsby after university, where, as far as I was concerned, he’d obviously enjoyed immense popularity as king of the world with his own Doctor Who fanzine, the roughly photocopied Hand of Omega. I vividly remember my mum driving over to his parents with me in tow, and him slowly descending the stares to nonchalantly hand me the only two issues he had remaining.

It was without doubt the most exciting thing I had ever experienced; I think I actually boasted about this at school. I wasn’t popular at school, but I’m not sure in retrospect if there’s a correlation.

I wanted to be that awesome. I didn’t understand the concept of a fanzine, but like a loveable alien attempting to mimic mankind, I did a damn good impression of it. I produced my own zine, one of the features pasted directly from his – an interview with the chap who played Sutekh in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ – a couple of articles photocopied directly from Doctor Who Magazine, and the cover was my own felt tip rendering of the cover for the Target tie-in of Doctor Who and The Dalek Invasion of Earth. 

I stapled together about a dozen copies and sold them in the school playground, shifting about three over dinnertime. 

Plagiarism aside, it was an auspicious start.

SciFiNow issue #54 is out now, featuring Neil Gaiman talking extensively about ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, his childhood fear of the Fourth Doctor and bringing Sandman to the small screen. Check it out at www.scifinow.co.uk