The Next Doctor

Well, there's much speculation about who might fill the role of the eleventh Doctor, once David Tennant has completed his run of five specials...

Some have even suggested it might be me! I suspect that the odds on that one are very long - all I have in my favour is being about the right age...

But this isn't really about who will be the twelfth actor to portray the Doctor in the BBC TV series (check the cast list for The Five Doctors if you don't understand that bit).

Last night, on Children in Need, the BBC broadcast the first two minutes of the Christmas Day Special, The Next Doctor. I won't spoil it for you too much, but if you want to be teased you can watch it online here.

As a minister, the thought of Christmas used to fill me with a kind of dread. Not because I don't want to celebrate the awesome gift of God in becoming a human baby, but because it gets harder and harder each year to find new ways of expressing that! By 12.00 on December 25, 2008, I reckon I will have delivered about forty different talks on the same topic! There's probably, God willing, another hundred and fifty or so to go before retirement...

It's also the sheer busy-ness of the season. It often feels like a roller coaster that launches in September and gets faster and faster until 12.00 o'clock on Christmas Day, when I collapse in a heap in my arm chair, and my family wait on me hand and foot! (that last bit is just my fevered imagination!)

Now there is the relatively new Christmas tradition, of looking forward to the special Doctor Who episode, usually recorded and then watched later in the evening once the kids are asleep, or even the next day if I can wait that long!

So it's nice to have a teaser at this time of year, to encourage me to look forward to it.

And it's amazing to think that next Sunday, Doctor Who will be forty five years old! Still going strong.