Here's a question for all you budding TV buffs: which of the following television shows represents the very best of BBC popular drama over the last sixty years:

All Creatures Great and Small
Ballykissangel
Bergerac
Casualty
Colditz
Doctor Who
EastEnders
The Onedin Line
When the Boat Comes In
Z Cars

The startling answer - at least as far as the BBC are concerned - is Doctor Who. At a glittering and well publicised presentation ceremony, the awards for the best BBC programmes over the last sixty years were presented and Doctor Who actually won the 'Best Popular Drama' vote.

Now, some newspapers chose to report that the cast of EastEnders were apparently up in arms about this as they felt they should have won, and other sources were heard to mutter that the Doctor Who vote had come in en masse from the fans in an organised campaign. In fact for once there was no such organised campaign. The fan presses and genre magazines were strangely quiet about the whole thing. Even the Internet, usually a hot-bed of intrigue and obsession, contained relatively little in the way of messages urging fans to vote.

So what happened? Simple, really. The viewers - and reportedly around 500,000 people phoned in with votes, 480,000 more than buy the Doctor Who merchandise - voted for Doctor Who maybe simply because it is the best popular drama series that the BBC has produced. Did this even cross the minds of anyone at the Corporation when they saw the result?

Apparently not. At an event during the Conservative Party Conference on 9 October, Head of BBC Television Will Wyatt, the boss of Alan Yentob and Michael Jackson who actually commission new programmes, was asked about the recent Doctor Who TV film. 'It didn't do that well over here,' he said, seemingly forgetting the 9 million viewers and a placing in the top 15 TV shows for the week. He also said that it was 'too dark' and not right for the family audience they had hoped to attract ... but the BBC had script approval! If it wasn't right, why did they approve the script? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Other BBC officials at the event included Jenny Abramsky, former head of the BBC's Radio Five Live news and sport radio station and currently in charge of planning the BBC's launch of digital TV. 'I hated it,' she said of the Doctor Who film and went on to wonder why the BBC didn't make things like Blake's 7 any more. 'It's not that we won't make SF,' she burbled, 'it's that we won't make Who.' A further comment from Wyatt seemed to seal Doctor Who's fate. When called over by Deputy Director General and Chief Executive of BBC Worldwide, Bob Phillis, to answer the question as to whether the BBC would make any more Doctor Who - a question which Phillis seemed unwilling to answer himself - Wyatt's unequivocal response was 'No ... we can't afford it.'

The fact that far more expensive shows, like the recent Rhodes, have received disastrous ratings, would seem to indicate that the money is there, but only if the BBC Bosses deem it so. They feel that Doctor Who cannot be made without vast budgets being available, well it managed quite well for twenty six years without this, so why should things be any different today? With reactions and attitudes as reported above, it would appear that the 'top brass' at the BBC is staunchly anti-Doctor Who. This is very odd especially as Doctor Who was voted by the viewers - the people who actually fund the corporation and provide the budgets for all programmes - as the best popular drama. You'd think that someone in the BBC hierarchy would stop and think about it, wouldn't you ...

None of which explains two pieces of information from sources unrelated to fandom and the BBC that I heard recently, to the effect that Steven Spielberg had quietly acquired the rights to make two more TV films of Doctor Who ... if it happens, you heard it here first!

***

There seems to be a glut of science fiction and fantasy packing the TV schedules at the moment. I am one of those rare creatures who does not own a satellite dish or cable system. Therefore our viewing is restricted to the four terrestrial channels.

Even so, there seems to be so much on that one could watch. There's Star Trek The Next Generation of course, in its 'but I thought she was dead and he had a beard' repeat variant, and Star Trek: Voyager - is it only me but does that female captain really sound as though she sniffs helium between shots? There is Sliders, which is basically a re-make of The Fantastic Journey, repeats of Quantum Leap - sorry, but it's a re-make of Doctor Who, Third Rock from the Sun which is so un-funny that I really don't see the point and The Demon Headmaster - surely one of the best shows on TV.

I was also totally impressed with Wilderness, a quite brilliantly acted and directed recent three-part drama series on ITV. Amanda Ooms quite took my breath away with a singularly inspired performance as a woman who keeps her 'inner wolf' locked away ... except for when she gets angry. Well worth a look assuming it's ever repeated.

A quick flick through a copy of the current Radio Times throws up the following, most of which are repeats: The New Adventures of Superman, Seaquest 2032, The New Twilight Zone, Joe 90, UFO, The Avengers, The Champions, Chiller, Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, Out of Sight and Red Dwarf VI, not to mention just about every children's cartoon series. Not forgetting, of course, The X-Files which, even though those BBC schedulers are determined to kill it off - just wait until it ends up on Friday nights at around 11 pm - is still pretty watchable.

All in all, there has never been so much SF on television. But what contribution has the BBC made? Well, there was Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, an enchanting six-part drama which sat uneasily between the children and the adults. Never directly for either audience, it still managed to engage the imagination and was a pleasing enough piece. Anything else ... there's another series of Red Dwarf in production ... hmm.

In fact, as the Beeb has just laid off all the staff in their costume, make-up and graphics departments, with the visual effects department left hanging on by a thread, one wonders exactly who is left at the BBC to actually make programmes any more.

Perhaps this is why they don't want to make Doctor Who. There isn't anyone left who can.