Catherine Tate: she's a genius as well. Thanks Doctor Who Confidential for setting us straight on that one.

Pity her Doctor Who swansong was such a big pile of wank.

One of my more sophisticated friends is celebrating his birthday with a Doctor Who-themed party on Saturday. A better dessert to the oncoming season finale I can not imagine. Naturally, one is expected to dress up appropriately, and this has caused numerous problems. Not just for me - I know that said friend has spent most of 2008 searching for a pair of stripey trousers a little bit like Peter Davison's - and I think it's fair to say that you don't generally come by Doctor Who costumes that easily.

Oh, I have to go as a Doctor, naturally. I did toy briefly with the idea of going as the Master, but I can't be doing with all the facial hair involved (I wasn't considering the John Simm incarnation, obviously, and I felt to go as Derek Jacobi would only be to invite unfavourable comparisons). No, it has to be a Doctor, so the first question was which Doctor.

The last thing I wanted was to be a duplicate Doctor - not only would it break the first law of time, but it would be hugely embarrassing turn see somebody across the room with a better version of the same costume - so I steered clear of the current regeneration, easy though it would have been to stick on my brown suit and a mockney accent.

Tom Baker? Not in the heat of summer. Patrick Troughton? I'm too tall. It would be immensely fun to go as Colin Baker, but that would be to set myself an impossible costuming challenge.

And so I arrived at Sylvester McCoy, part of the appeal of whom is I don't think anyone else will want to go as him. And although I've failed to get hold of the requisite tank top, I don't think it really matters as nobody ever liked it anyway. The rest - checked trousers, panama hat, umbrella with a question mark handle, are all readily available from Primark. It also looked like being a simple enough costume to throw together.

Until I got to the paisley. McCoy's Doctor clearly had a penchant for the stuff, as it featured on his hatband, scarf, handkerchief and all the other random bits of material that seemed to flow from his pockets along with pages of script. But could I find so much as a paisley tie? Not a single one.

I recall that I once had a paisley tie. But I threw it away, as I rightly saw that it was irredeemably ugly and unfashionable. A similar attitude clearly prevails in every clothes store in the country. And not just clothes stores! Not even will charity shops stoop to a paisley tie these days - it seems that when your Granddad dies you might as well incinerate his paisley ties, because Oxfam sure as hell won't stock them.

I've got a day to go and I'm hoping I can still track the requisite neckwear down, perhaps if I can locate a deeply unfashionable charity shop in the heart of Cornwall or somewhere. It's a desperate situation though, because without the paisley OR the tank top, I frankly might be just about anyone and not a Doctor at all.

Perhaps it's merely a natural consequence of the gradual decline in educational standards and slipping expectations, but just as it is now much easier to get an A-level than it was in the 18th century, it also seems considerably easier to qualify as a bona fide genius. Or at least, that's the impression I got watching Doctor Who Confidential this week.

Thankfully, the programme was rather less smugly self-congratulatory than usual, and no wonder - everyone was so in awe of the multiple genii who had contributed to the episode. First up, Davros: crippled scientist, creator of the Daleks and survivor of the Time War, he is (as former Davros actor Terry Molloy helpfully explained), definitely a genius (albeit an evil one). Which seems a fair enough observation, given the scale of his achievements.

And perhaps by extension, it seemed natural enough that the actual designer of the Daleks, Ray Cusick (who we saw being shown around the studio in a patronising way) should have the word genius liberally flung at him by everyone from the lowliest designer to the great Russell T. Genius himself. I mean, after all - Mr Cusick was a designer at the BBC who took a small sum of money and designed the bloody Daleks! Genius.

Davros, genuine genius that he is, has also been realised on screen by several geniuses, Michael Wisher being the first, but look also at Julian Bleach, the current actor in the role - somehow he doesn't just say the lines but he makes them, like, really really scary! He is an actual genius.

As is Nicholas Briggs, the man who does all the Dalek voices. Yes, you heard - all of them! And he sits in the readthrough talking through a ring modulator and his voice comes out all Daleky and he literally gets applauded by all the other actors! The man, as some Welsh bloke told us whilst shaking his head with a look of awe, is only another fricking genius.

It's funny, because it had looked to me like these were simply people doing their jobs very well (except Russell T., who only sometimes does his job slightly well, but who to be fair was not actually described as a genius in this episode, I just assume he must be by proxy; and Davros, who certainly did his job very very well but on quite a different scale which I feel maybe does qualify him as a genius of Mozartian proportions). But really - if doing your job well is all you need to do to be a genius, there must be absolutely loads of them, surely?

Except now that I come to think of it, there are quite a lot of people in quite public and important jobs doing them not very well at all. Gordon Brown? Not a genius. Jacqui Smith? Has a long way to go. Alastair Darling? Definitely not one. Robert Mugabe? Well, he is a genius (albeit an evil one).

Short of getting Robert Mugabe to run this country, I wonder if the only solution is for the current production team of Doctor Who to take over government? They might make a bit of a mess of it, throwing in too many ideas and not really developing any of them properly, and no doubt they'll start lighting bits of our country with pink and green gels - but they're certainly good enough to make Mark Wright over at the Stage lose all his powers of objectivity when writing reviews. Because indeed, the last episode was "perhaps the most bonkers, delicious, audacious, brilliant, silly, exciting and scary piece of Doctor Who seen in the 45-year history of this crazy, unstoppable TV series" - really!

It's official, then. Shakespeare's Lear; Mozart's Figaro; Da Vinci's code; Wagner's Ring; and Doctor Who series 4 episode 12: the Stolen Earth. Genius.

This evening 2 Victoria Street had a lads' night out. Which mostly consisted of sitting in a pub playing a card game called "Shithead". In the version of the game that I know, one is only required to bear the title of Shithead when one has lost the most recent game; the mantle then passes to the next loser, and one can regain one's self-respect.

However, after the first game, Chris decided it would be better of the loser bore the stigma of the title for the rest of his life, and instead elected to play a round of "Flangeface".

So, just for the record, I am now officially Shithead Flangeface Wanksock. Whilst Chris is Syphilis Cheeks. And Alastair is The Bishop of Southwark.

...or is the blood op part of this headline hiding an even more sensational revelation?

In the olden days, railway travel was one of life's great pleasures. When I was little I would arrive at the station, walk through a little wooden gate and buy a ticket from a friendly, smartly-dressed man in a ticket booth, who would give me a lollipop and a cheeky wink, and even if I was a little late the gleaming green steam engine would still be waiting, the driver leaning out of his little cabin saying "hurry along you little tinker!" with a cheeky wink, as I stepped into an airy, pleasant wooden carriage and the train puffed out of the station with a merry toot. And it would naturally arrive at its destination on time.

These days, when you turn up at a station you are thrown into a disorganised scrummage to reach some automatic ticket machines, two thirds of which will be out of service, and you then wait for somebody to open an electronic barrier that obstinately refuses to respond to the ticket which you have purchased. By which time you will have missed your train, which will have pulled out of the station even with five hundred commuters still halfway out of its doors, ensuring that even if you do just about make it through the barriers on time you will never make it through the human wall blocking the way to the grimy, sweaty carriages. And the train will nevertheless arrive at its destination late.

And they call this progress.

How do they do it? After a whole series of derivative (and badly-lit) crapness, how does Doctor Who come up with a two-parter which comes so close to perfection that I'm just not going to quibble over the few bits that didn't quite work?

Two words: Steven Moffat.

Of course, script writers don't have any control over how a production turns out, the quality of the acting, or how well-lit an episode is. But "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead" showed - again - that if you get the script right first, the rest often follows. Twas ever thus, as the chequered history of Doctor Who amply demonstrates. It's something that the current production team seem to have been largely ignoring lately, but which Moffat clearly understands - which bodes well for his forthcoming stint as executive producer.

Bring it on!

I knew I'd seen David Tennant's Doctor with a Donna Noble-style chavvy woman somewhere before...