Dark Season - Russell T Davies' new show starring Kate Winslet

A dark and shadowy figure is using laptops to terrorise a school and convert its pupils into mindless automata. Only one person can stop this dastardly scheme - Kate Winslet! Who, for some reason, plays a 15 year old.

Because she is 15. Because this is 1991 and Russell T Davies has written one of his first proper dramas for the telly. Albeit Children's BBC - but we've all go to start somewhere, right?

While watching the fabulous "Imagine" documentary on RTD, I learned about "Dark Season". The CBBC show which, arguably, kickstarted his career. I probably saw it the first time around but, alas, the ravages of time had erased it from my memory. It is very much of its time. Filmed in the summer holidays with a bunch of drama-school kids and a healthy disregard for adult supervision.

Victoria Lambert plays... well... The Doctor as if she were a schoolgirl. She has long marvellous speeches about the nature of reality, she browbeats her teachers, and has a couple of plucky companions (including Kate Winslet) who she leads on a merry dance through time and space suburban England. There's some superb technobabble, megalomaniac plots, and cameos from old sci-fi shows. It features scientists in hiding, explosions, people with glowing hands, computers which suck out your brains, shadowy corporations and eldritch horrors. It fully acknowledges its clichés and contains lots of snappy dialogue. Even the title sequence has shades of Doctor Who.

Is it any good? Well, look, if you were the target audience for it in the 1990s then yes. It is a lovely piece of nostalgia. If you are a Doctor Who obsessive who wants a glimpse at what a revived Dr Who could have looked like, it's amazing. It contains many of the prototypes of the 21st Century version As a piece of media in its own right... the DVD is available 2nd hand from all good auction sites!

Delightfully, there is a sequel with a grown-up Kate Winslet available as a Big Finish audiobook.