"Eleven is the best. You'll cry your eyes out."

TV This weekend the Guardian & Observer ran some Doctor Who coverage. There was this delightfully positive interview with Jenna and with Mike Tucker, model maker extraorinaire and dedicated the regular top ten page to listing "The 10 best Doctor Who stories".

I'll let you go and see what they they chose, but there's not much to argue with here.  Moan about the lack of Colin and Paul all you want, but the former's only truly great moment on television was the cliffhanger in the Vengeance on Varos and the TV movie is a curio.  All their best work was in the wilderness years and beyond.

Underneath, like everyone else, I gave my ten:

Marco Polo
City of Death
Storm Warning
The Caves of Androzani
The Scarlet Empress
Blink
The Eleventh Hour
The War Games
Father Time
Inferno

Or rather ten I thought of before I inevitably began changing my mind.  The inherent problem with trying to choose the ten best Doctor Who stories is that like film, like anything, it's near impossible because of the volume of choice and the parameters keep slipping.  In my post Gravity miasma, I'm assuming that this is how people who knew something about film felt after seeing Citizen Kane for the first time, but will this still be true in five or ten years time.  At one point I felt a similar way about The Waters of Mars.

When in 2009, Doctor Who Magazine conducted a poll of all available stories, this happened:

The Caves of Androzani
Blink
Genesis of the Daleks
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Pyramids of Mars
City of Death
The Robots of Death
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways

The bottom ten were:

The Space Museum
The Dominators
Fear Her
Paradise Towers
The Underwater Menace
The Space Pirates
Time-Flight
Underworld
Time and the Rani
Timelash
The Twin Dilemma

A bit out of date and the top ten includes some contemporarism but I don't think you could argue with either, apart from Paradise Towers which I rewatched again recently, because of course I did, and enjoyed it immensely. Also trust Doctor Who fans to coincidentally put neighbouring stories at opposite ends of a poll like this.

If nothing else it confirms what I've always said.  That even when Doctor Who's rubbish, it's amazing*

* Apart from The Twin Dilemma which is just rubbish.  But just that.  Everything else is amazing.