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Timeless. Chaplin and Keaton couldn't have constructed a more perfectly timed bit of physical comedy.

The Singing Detective is right up there in the top rank - no disagreement there!

Out of touch as I am, I’ve only just become aware that the classic 1976 BBC drama serial I, Claudius is being made available on various platforms. Simply and seriously: if you’ve never seen it before, go for it. Don’t miss a minute. Start with episode one and go right through. It’s the best TV ever.

I hasten to add, I certainly don’t think he’s the worst writer of that period. He has clever ideas and an elegant ear for dialogue. Black Orchid sings above its silliness. My controversial DW opinion is that Four to Doomsday is the second best story of that season. (Kinda is best. I’m not that mad.)

If anything the Chipping Norton one rankles more with me. Sloppy research on stuff from before he was born (or in the case of Black Orchid, from when he was 5 years old) is one thing. But not checking if a railway station still existed, 20 years after a famous mass closure of railway stations… eek.

His research is quite amazing at times. Neither the screwdriver cocktail nor the Mackenzie Trench police box existed in 1925. K9 & Company is set in a parallel universe in which Chipping Norton railway station wasn’t closed down by Dr Beeching 20 years earlier. And as for The King’s Demons…

Brings to mind a weird age discrepancy in the 1982 Doctor Who story Black Orchid. Ann was to marry a man who went missing two years ago, yet when her identical double Nyssa inadvertently asks for an alcoholic drink, it’s all comedy harrumphs and “Better make that orange juice for the children.”

No, that’s Thomas Wheatley. Tom Chadbon is the stockbroker in Casino Royale.

And with that inflection would come a far more dramatic sense of what a big deal it is for Dr Plaxton to have thrown in her lot with these filthy barbarians. Instead, they’re as smartly and camply dressed as she is. I’m getting a bit cross now, thinking how good this episode could have been. Bah.

Yes, absolutely. Done with a ‘Scum’ aesthetic, Stardrive would probably be regarded as one of the classics.

Oh yes, that jazzed-up closing theme is very much fingernails down the blackboard, isn’t it? Oh well.

I do actually think that on paper, Stardrive is a good episode. In execution it’s let down by the fact that Space Rats ought to be properly scary: galactic hell’s angels. Instead they’re dressed, decorated and acted like the sort of light entertainment punk rockers you might see on Terry and June.

Granted, Warlord is fairly bonkers, but that opening film sequence with the troopers taking pot-shots at the drugged proletariat is nightmarish and fantastic.

I mean, when I say dung, I’m being melodramatic. I love them all, of course. Even Voice from the Past.

I think some of the early episodes are fine. Rescue picks up the story nicely, and Traitor is a hidden gem. Even a slightly rubbish one like Stardrive has that terrific character scene where Vila feigns drunkenness to save the day (and his own skin). I won’t try to defend Power or Animals though.

This breathtakingly terrible take has just come to my attention. In terms of foaming-at-the-mouth wrongness, it’s on a par with ‘The 1990s was a dodgy decade for David Bowie’. Hands up anyone who thinks Season 4 classics like Sand and Orbit are worse than Season 1 dung like Breakdown and Bounty.

Unintelligent man who famously revealed on live TV that he didn’t know Rwanda was a different country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo accuses France of something something something

What a sad day. Raising a glass to that very fine actor Tom Chadbon, who graced every franchise from James Bond to Blake’s 7 to Game of Thrones, and whose brilliant comic turn as Duggan, the out-of-his-depth private detective in the 1979 Doctor Who classic City of Death, is the stuff of TV legend.

Bill Oddie, what a lovely bloke. He wrote us a letter when we started making The Young Ones, wishing us the very best, and warning us against interference from higher up. He didn’t know anyone in the cast personally. It just came out of the blue. Lovely thing to do.

Raising a glass to the mighty Bill Oddie. What a remarkable legacy he leaves us of laughter, music and ecological passion. I had the pleasure of working with him on Doctor Who and the Pirates, in which he was superb, so I was able to tell him how much he had enriched my life. I hope he didn’t mind.