10 Ways Doctor Who Is Now Completely Unrecognisable

7. A Sense Of Scale

Aside from a brief flirtation with big-scale effects at the start of Trial of a Time Lord (a sequence that still looks quite incredible, regardless of how you feel about the story that follows!),Classic Who tended to tell quite intimate stories. There were practical reasons for this, of course. The sheer number of base under siege stories arose due to the fact that it was easier to dress a corridor as an alien environment than to dress a whole landscape. In NuWho, though, viewers can, and do, frequently travel to worlds that feel completely alien and encounter situations that make the jaw drop. From dinosaurs in Victorian London to steampunk Cyber Kings and the snow-blind landscape of the Ood homeworld to the sight of the TARDIS dragging the Earth across whole galaxies, NuWho flirts with a sense of epicness that the Classic Show could only dream of. There are pay offs to this, of course. Some of the best Classic Who stories were made even better by limited budgets, forcing a kind of inventiveness from the crew that resulted in some spectaular and weird stories. The old jokes about wobbly sets and cheap filming in quarries, though, can no longer be applied to Who as it exists in the 21st century. Amen to that.