For those of us of a certain age, the future is seldom what it used to be. Take, for example, the labyrinthine, interactive, flashing and banging Doctor Who exhibition that’s just moved into the subterranean gizzards of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.

The nippers I took loved it, albeit in the distracted way that modern children have, as though all experiences are pretext for the visit to the gift shop. They mock-cowered with mock-horror before the tentacle-faced creatures known as the Ood and the evil statues that tried to kill the Doc every time he blinked.

There was, I admit, a certain cold, 25th-century sheen to the maze of corridors of props and costumes and gizmos. But every fibre in my being wanted to point out that horror was more horrifying in my day: real horror was the giant maggots of the green death and the sea devils and the meringue-like folds of Jon Pertwee’s hairstyle. Had the children asked, which curiously they didn’t, I would have explained what life was like in the early 1970s, when the necessity for thrills was much more acute than it is today. But the scariest aspect of all was that I’m now 30 years older than when I first encountered the time lord.

This era of Doctor Who is conspicuously absent from the Kelvingrove show beyond K-9, the robotic doggy sidekick of the Tom Baker-era Doctor, who has since reappeared in a form slightly less like a pre-war clothes mangle. The exhibition takes as an article of faith the fact that the first real Doctor was Christopher Eccleston in 2005. Eccleston, however, is considered merely the support act for the magisterially charismatic David Tennant. It’s billed as a Doctor Who exhibition but, really, it’s just Tennant’s dressing-room prior to a tidy-up. Doctor Who before Tennant is looked at like the Beatles before Ringo Starr: a first draft, a piece of apprentice work.

So, for anyone over the age of 15, little of this will make much sense. I stared at a display of French maid costumes on mannequins and thought I’d somehow missed a singularly kinky episode from the William Hartnell era. A passing 11-year-old, however, pointed out they’d been worn by Kylie Minogue in the Tennant episode Planet of the Dead. I searched in vain for the master, the daleks’ monstrous wheelchair-bound controller, but he’d been supplanted by some handsome, clean-cut modern guy. The rest of the costumes and props, for all I knew, could have been from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Battlestar Galactica. One phaser or telecommunications pod looks much like another; you see one spaghetti-faced goon and you’ve seen them all.

Of course, none of it is for mortgage-payers like us — it’s for the kids (and male engineering undergraduates), and in those terms it’s almost engaging enough.

It’s odd that such an emphasis has been placed on costumes though: children rarely have the curatorial, museum-appreciating gene, though mine did enjoy the chance to literally touch David Tennant’s hem. There is a sawn-off dalek whose pincers and voice box you can operate, but more things to push and press would have been appreciated.

Otherwise, it’s a trip through a space-time continuum that began fewer than five years ago, a scamper through a mythology that’s smaller on the inside than it initially seems. More than 40 years of time travel is barely acknowledged, which is galling if the good Doctor’s time travel coincided with your own. In its clanking metallic clamour, the exhibition resembles an attraction put on by Madame

Tussauds; it invites you to gaze in respectful wonder at artefacts you’re not young enough to understand. Which, in a strange way, has always been the point of the programme.

The Doctor Who Exhibition is at Kelvingrove until January 4. Adult tickets £7.50, family tickets start at £18

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