It's a funny feeling. When the dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum starts, and the new-look title sequence begins, the hairs on your arms stand up, and a smile fixes itself, rictus-like, to your face. This warm feeling alone is enough to transport you blithely through the first five minutes of the new Doctor Who before any critical faculties kick in. And when they do, you realise that you're enjoying yourself.

Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is a sharp-tongued northerner with a great line in fast patter, prone to endearing bouts of incredible dimwittedness, while Billie Piper makes a great Noughties assistant, a can-do girl who doesn't need to carry a baseball bat to prove her point.

For me personally, the storyline of the first 45-minute episode couldn't have been better chosen. The living showroom dummies that are the Autons scared the hell out of me when I was a child, and it's gratifying that their 2005 digitally enhanced counterparts remain delightfully creepy. But then, what I think doesn't count. For the new Doctor Who to succeed, it needs to invade and capture the playground, not the office.

It's a challenge that the show's main writer and co-producer Russell T. Davies (best known for Queer as Folk and the current Casanova) approaches with characteristic flamboyance. As well as the requisite monsters, the first episode is dotted with sight gags and in-jokes, and is set in a recognisably modern Britain. "If I can make schoolkids frightened of wheelie-bins on Monday morning, I'll have done my job," Davies has said.

The chances of him succeeding are impossible to gauge on one episode alone, since so much exposition is required - meet the new Doctor, meet the new assistant, meet the sonic screwdriver, tour the Tardis, explain what a timelord is - that defeating the evil, mannequin-controlling blob of slime that's come to wipe out humanity is almost incidental.

In fact, the show may have benefited from a good, old-fashioned cliffhanger ending, but in the brave new Doctor Who, only four of the 13 episodes will be two-part adventures, the remainder being self-contained 45-minute shows, laden with special effects from the London-based company that won an Oscar for its work on Gladiator, and tailed with a 30-second preview of the scariest bits of next week's show.

I recently asked a 15-year-old boy what he thought about the return of Doctor Who as a regular serial. "I know what it was," he told me of the show (that was axed before he was born), "but I've never seen it."

I'll be setting the video for every episode of the new series, and grinning through it all. Not sure about him, though.

Nigel Kendall is Deputy Editor of The Eye, the weekly film, music and television supplement in The Times every Saturday