Doctor Who: Every Post-Regeneration Episode Ranked Worst To Best

Watching The Christmas Invasion prequel - the mini-episode Born Again - provides entertaining context as to why the Doctor is pretty much incapacitated during the 2005 festive special: he goes through a Jim Carrey gamut of wildly fluctuating post-regeneration emotions.

Get that man a cup tea!

There are plenty of inspirational nods to Independence Day with the Guinevere One space probe bumping into an imposing spaceship, which is tracked with dramatic interest from Earth before covering central London in a sinister shadow.

Cue people looking up with mixture of intrigue and astonishment.

But what makes this wonderfully British is that our good old traditional cup of tea stirs the Doctor from his feverish slumber. Moreover, Mickey adds to his list of save the day heroics alongside the big yellow truck in The Parting of the Ways, and his hacking skills in World War Three and The Age of Steel, by dropping the flask of tea and shutting the TARDIS door just in the nick of time.

Thereafter, the Doctor's "I'm the Doctor" moment arrives with typical Tenth Doctor swagger: "Did you miss me?", followed by the Tenth Doctor's typical fire and ice and rage when he kills the Sycorax leader. And so ushered in the NuWho golden age.

Which is less than can be said about Harriet Jones' Golden Age premiership, which ends prematurely when the Doctor whispers the start of her Thatcher-esque downfall. It does pose a great moral dilemma: even though you're £18 a week better off, would you be comfortable with the knowledge that our prime minister ordered the - arguably justified - killing of an alien species?