Whether you're a committed fan or, like this reviewer, an occasional but curious dipper-in, you can't help admiring the BBC's unflinching devotion to committing the whole of the good doctor's adventures to DVD. The latest offering contains the first three series, dating from 1963-64, where we meet William Hartnell's benign but frosty rendering of humanity's favourite time lord via his granddaughter, Susan, in a police phone box parked incongruously in a scrapyard.

The set includes the Doctor's first round with his most implacable, remorseless and downright daft enemy, the Daleks. The viewer meets these tin-can tyrants for the first time on the war-ravaged wasteland of their home planet, Skaro, where they're fighting for possession of the drug that will cure radiation sickness. Some drug, eh?

Along with granddaughter Susan, the Doctor is accompanied on these early adventures by a pair of apparently middle-aged frumps who look like, and indeed turn out to be, schoolteachers removed from Susan's terrestrial seat of learning.

Remote from any consideration as to whether these infant Doctor Who yarns are good television, adventure, or even science fiction, it's interesting to view them as a fibre or two plucked and preserved from the social fabric of their times. The Doctor is full of stern, deeply paternalistic but unquestionable wisdom (though there are moments of ego-driven humour) that is far removed from the amiable but bumbling brilliance that shaded later incarnations of our saviour ó and still does, come to that.

But do they still work? If you're unable to see them through the reverence-tinted glasses of the committed cult viewer, then at least remember that they were first screened not so long after Yuri Gargarin became the first human to go into space and to a generation that thought afterburners on a ramjet engine were a pretty snappy idea.

By any standard, the programs are well-produced and nicely paced. The acting is melodramatic and the writing corny, but they were the beginning of something great, and it shows.