I have a secret love. It is marketed for middle-aged parents who want to enjoy watching Saturday evening television with their children. It costs about £1,000,000 for each 45 minute installment. It is possibly the best thing on TV at the moment, but its latest run has just ended. Dr Who is one of the best defenses of the License Fee I can think of*.

TV these days leaves a lot to be desired. Entertainment is usually nothing of the sort: drumbeat-filled minutes before some nonentity is announced as the next big forgotten sat-that-could-have-been; gaudy sets masking vacuous presenters; plotlines so deliberately nonsensical that reality actually seems preferable again. Children’s’ TV is charitably described as patronising. Children watch post-watershed programmes, and anybody thinking that school films of you average school playground at lunchtime could be shown before 9pm need to emerge themselves in modern childhood. Children’s TV is no longer relevant to children, and yet parents do not want to accept adult TV as standard fare for their offspring.

Step in Dr Who. Nothing is quite like it. Deliberately pitched at the adult as much as the child, the resurrected TV classic has breathed new life into television. Just when MySpace looked like it could tear kids away from BBC1’s latest dramatised children’s novel, Dr Who came out all guns blazing. There is something here for everyone.

It appeals to the child in everyone. The hero arrives somewhere unknown at the beginning of each episode, and when it’s planet Earth he still has the task of figuring out just when. The Doctor emerges from his phonebox in an ancient Roman market, and we have just about clocked where and when by the time the Doctor declares “we’re in Vesuvius – and it’s volcano day!”. He knows nothing of the challenge he faces in the next three quarters of an hour, but he will learn just one second quicker than we will – always cleverer than the viewer, but not such that we can’t think we can get ahead once in a while.

Adults remember Dr Who from its old incarnations, with its shaky sets and whisk-clad dustbin monsters. Now they can indulge in their favourite activity of reliving their childhood through their children in a way their children appreciate. Dr Who is socially acceptable. Playground talk can divert from sex, drugs and knives to matters of televisual entertainment with a seamlessness not possible with soaps or CSI – simply because Dr Who is about neither drugs or sex or knives. The Doctor never carries weapons, and he refuses to fall in love because he will outlive any suitor. As for drugs, who needs them when the entire universe and several parallel ones are at their fingertips?

Dr Who delves deeper, too. Everybody has a tortured soul trying to break out, and the Doctor is the ultimate focal point for character association. Because he refuses to love, yet cares deeply, his life is somehow eternally unfulfilled. Sure, he can charge throughout time and space stopping intergalactic wars and freeing races of cloned slave creatures, but he will never catch every atrocity or stop every death. Dr Who teaches that some things are right, some are wrong, and that some things are just meant to be whatever morality dictates. He let a Roman township burn alive in AD79 for the sake of saving the rest of the world: an unpreventable crisis, but one in which the alternative was too dire to contemplate.

A less personal morality is rampantly pushed through the programme, not so much searching souls as ravaging them. To the Doctor, every species matters. Daleks are as important to him as Ood, although he clearly has a soft spot for humans. In Saturday’s stunning series finale, Davros finds his world collapsing around him, and laughs manically in the knowledge that the Doctor caused the destruction of an entire race. His final victory was condemning the Time Lord for a brutal genocide: “you are the destroyer of worlds”. The programme-makers, of course, were unable to fully apportion blame to our Doctor but the sentiment remains. Death is the Doctor’s worst nightmare, and death at his own hands is an impossible burden to bear.

One burden is more challenging still, though. In the finale to the current series, “the Doctor’s soul was revealed”. He is challenged for not carrying weapons, but making weapons out of bystanders. He survives because of the self-sacrifice of those around him. Davros again heaps on the morality: “How many more? How many have died in your name?” Cue montage of character deaths from the last four series, and a bleak-looking David Tennant suddenly realising that the weight of the world rests not on his shoulders, but on the trust others put in him. This latest series has promoted him from demi-god to quasi-messiah, as the Doctor watches the end of the universe approach from the safety of a forcefield on a Dalek spaceship. His loyal followers (not quite twelve of them, and no betrayer) unite to save the universe from the pure evil of Davros and his satanic breed Dalek demons.

The average tweenage viewer may not appreciate the subtle moral indoctrination here, but they soon know right from wrong. Some of the more powerful philosphical arguments might pass unnoticed, but that is no reason to keep them away. The programme is good, clean TV – no blood or gore or swearing. In fact, Gordon Ramsey’s effing souffle looks rather trivial compared to the Doctor’s c-word free end of the world scenes. Week in, week out, he watches peril the likes of which Ramsey’s kitchen staff could only imagine, yet he keeps his mouth clean and his head straight. Realistic it may not be, but it gives parents the sense of safety they so desire. This is TV that parents actively want their children to see: high drama, intelligent, and above all clean.

Of course, Dr Who is tacky – the poor man’s sci-fi. The plots rarely make sense, and there is a constant annoyance of major advances in the narrative being made by some thought process or memory the viewer is not party to. This is a great shame, as even the most intelligent and alert viewers are left reeling from sudden jerks to the narrative. But the joy does not come from following the story. It comes from watching a man in a blue box zip about time and fix things, with all of the drama that entails. With, of course, a meaningful dollop of morality thrown in for good measure. We are, of course, talking of that ultimate hero, the quasi-messiah, the tortured soul, “The Doctor – the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not… for shame.”

Dr Who is perfect TV because the Doctor is the perfect hero – the guy you are tempted to want to be, but eventually decide is probably better left being himself. He is an enigma, sure, and one we would love to delve into. He seeks to make content people, but he is not a content man. Ultimately, it is the Doctor’s eternal lonliness that keeps the viewer happy. Davros, again, articulates it well: “who have you got? All those friends of yours?”. The Doctor’s response satisfies anybody tempted to think of filling his shoes: “they’ve all got someone else”.

For logical storylines, look elsewhere. For good, wholesome entertainment for all the family which delves into deep emotions and jiggles with your sense of morality, there is nothing better on TV. If Dr Who can keep advancing and not slip into a self-parody of its former self, I hope it is here to stay for many series to come.

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*BBC 4 being the other big one.

I love BBC4. It is unashamedly high-brow, featuring gameshows about grammar and news that is closer to an academic journal than your average broadsheet. The recent series on Sacred Music has made the label “high-brow” look cheap. I have enjoyed it thoroughly.

Charting the history of Church music from the Plainsong of the 12th Century to the mastery of Bach, Sacred Music has brought a niche subject to a mass audience. The series does not speak down to viewers, but rather leads one along on a story they (certainly I) know very little about. It is unashamedly intellectual, but remains neither pompous or irrelevant.

Throughout the four-part series, which began on Good Friday and ended today, the choral group The Sixteen has been providing examples of the vastly varied kinds of music produced over the centuries. Telling the story through the music is a risky game, but it works wonderfully: the singers are exceptionally talented, and Harry Christophers is remarkable in his enthusiasm for the pieces he performs. Each episode seems to tell a particular story, with the music slowly rising throughout the programme to the end. From the four-voice pieces that featured in the first episode to the powerful organ music of the last, it is obvious just how important this music has been for the world.

But the programme is not merely about music - telling the story of the development of Church music must include the story of the development of the Church, which explains it. From Gregorian monks to Luther’s 95 Theses, Church politics has led to a dramatic change in Church music - indeed, in Palestrina’s era Church music was the main matter for debate in Church politics. By telling the story though the music that made it, Sacred Music has provided an important gatewayfor people who know nothing about the music they may be only faintly familiar with. It is a pity that so few people will have watched the series, although it is encouraging that the Radio Times has featured the programme each week as a “choice”. I hope BBC 4 commissioners continue to make this kind of original, thought-provoking and intellectual programming.

If there is one concern about the series, it was the sometimes iffy camerawork. Anyone watching a programme about 12th Century Church music on BBC 4 on a Friday evening is likely to be able to concentrate for more than three seconds without a change of angle, and would rather focus on a manuscript with a steady camera, not one deliberately shook as if attempting to keep a sugar-high toddler entertained on a Saturday afternoon. This said, the overall quality of the programming was excellent, and certainly the best TV I have seen for a very long time.

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For more information, visit the Sacred Music website.