For your information, this is what a normal screening of a TV programme is like: 40 or so journalists, crumpled and saturnine, eating the free croissants in silence, before grabbing their bags and bolting at the first opportunity.

At the screening of Series 3 of Doctor Who last week, on the other hand, there were screaming fans outside. A line of paparazzi. The new assistant, Freema Agyeman, turned up in £4,000 earrings. Dawn French, Catherine Tate and Jonathan Ross had blagged tickets. There was a party afterwards — with Daleks, and the Tardis, and very good wine.

This is because, let’s face it, Doctor Who has become the flagship show of the BBC. It overtook the ailing EastEnders at about the time that EastEnders had the risible “Fairground of Death” storyline — a helter-skelter collapsed, trapping Dot and Pauline in a Portakabin. Doctor Who, meanwhile, had Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper oscillating through six shades of potent sexual tension, with the endless reaches of space-time at their disposal.

That a children’s sci-fi show, made on what amounts to a minuscule budget, in Wales, by gays, should be one of the defining programmes of the 21st century, is just the kind of thing that makes Britain great. You’d never get the Americans knocking out a show about a 900-year-old pacifist with a magic screwdriver, whose biggest enemy is a set of giant, fatal pepperpots.

Given this, the start of Series 3 is a big deal. After all, the mesmeric and bankable Billie Piper has jumped ship, leaving the Doctor to find both a new assistant, and a whole new dynamic, within the first few minutes of episode 1. That this objective is achieved, and with ease, is all credit to the show’s writer/producer/fairy godfather, Russell T. Davies. For although the new Martha Jones still needs to bed in and finesse a few of the finer points of characterisation, in Freema Agyeman, Davies has found an actress with the energy and flair to take on both the universe, and the Doctor, on her own terms. This is no small matter, given that David Tennant, as the Doctor, is now hitting the space-ball out of the galactic park in nearly every scene. There’s a cold, hard edge in his Doctor now — typified in the pivotal moment in episode 1.

“This is nothing special — I’ve done this a thousand times before,” he says, kissing Martha for a plot- vital “genetic transference”. Martha — a gobby, cheery junior doctor — instantly falls in love with the Doctor. So in love that, 20 minutes later, she uses her last breath to save his life. But the Doctor . . . the Doctor still pines for Rose.

I’m not going to tell you anything else because, clearly, as a person of rational mind and exquisite taste, you will want to have it all as a surprise at 7pm tonight, BBC One. Let’s text each other afterwards, semi-hysterically, with our favourite bits!

Not a surprise at all is Shrink Rap, a show that aims to televise Dr Anthony Clare’s Radio 4 series, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, but with someone more televisual than Clare — who, to be fair, just looked like a man with lots of qualifications. Interviewing celebrities in his stead is Pamela Stephenson, wife and biographer of Billy Connolly, now a qualified psychoanalyst trading under the name “Dr Pamela Connolly”. Of course, I have no qualifications in psychoanalysis — I could barely point to the location of my brain in a picture — but I’d hazard a guess that Connolly’s sudden adoption of her husband’s surname reveals some deep-rooted issues with patriarchy, an attitude to self-image that is in flux, and big hopes of selling the series to the US, where Billy Connolly is still very famous. In this week’s opening episode, she “analyses” Sharon Osbourne — an operation that amounts to little more than Osbourne running through the contents of her autobiography again and dabbing at her crocodile eyes, while Connolly makes faintly alarming “sympathetic” faces.

Finally, in TV Admin News, Sky Movies is having a branding re-shuffle, and is changing the names of its movie channels. It will no longer be the utilitarian, Soviet-style “Sky Movies, Channels 1-12” but the far more vivid, dynamic Sky Movies Drama, Sky Movies Action, Sky Movies Family, Sky Movies Indie, etc. Personally, I’m holding out for Sky Movies Gay — a constant loop of Hello, Dolly! The Way We Were, Who Will Love My Children? and the 2003 S Club 7 movie, Seeing Double.

Doctor Who, BBC One, tonight, 7pm

Shrink Rap Mon-Fri, More4, 11pm

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette