Fandom is facing one of the biggest questions in its history, one that makes ‘are characters such as Sara Kingdom and the Brigadier companions?’, ‘when exactly is the UNIT era?’ and ‘how many chickens have there been in Doctor Who?’ look trivial by comparison. Any non fans or newbies reading this will just have to take my word on those: they’ve been biggies in the past! Anyway, this one is sure to keep fans arguing over their pints for years to come: just what number of Doctor is Peter Capaldi supposed to be playing? It should be a simple calculation of ‘the previous Doctor’s number plus one’, but recent revelations about the Doctor’s past have thrown the whole system into disarray. Don’t tell Sesame Street’s The Count for goodness sake: he’ll be in therapy for years!

There are arguably three ways in which this can pan out:

(1) Everybody sticks with tradition and simply calls Peter Capaldi the twelfth Doctor.

(2) We count John Hurt and shunt up the Doctors so that Capaldi is No. 14

(3) Actually, I think I’ll come to this one in a bit…

The case for Capaldi being the twelfth Doctor is purely to keep things simple. It’s a long established fact that complexity can lead to confusion, and confusion and market branding are not very comfortable bedfellows. When marketing the new range of books or comics, or indeed, the new TV series, it’s important to be able to categorically state that it features the twelfth Doctor without having to go into long winded explanations why the new Doctor is being called the fourteenth when the previous one was called the eleventh, which would be necessary if they splashed the news that he was actually the fourteenth over the publicity material. They’d have to embark on a massive rebranding campaign to inform everyone that Eccleston was actually the tenth, Tennant the eleventh (and twelfth - which adds yet another level of complexity) before establishing Smith as the thirteenth and Capaldi’s immediate predecessor. It seems nonsensical that they should go through all that just to maintain that Capaldi is one number rather than another. It’s so much easier to stick to him being No. 12 as far as marketing is concerned.

Of course, in the continuity of the series he is indisputably the fourteenth Doctor. We’ve had an unbroken succession of regenerations on screen, with November’s online minisode showing McGann becoming Hurt (great in-joke there btw ‘will it hurt?’) and Hurt’s regeneration giving a brief visual hint of him becoming Eccleston (in addition to the leather jacket and a back-reference to the ninth Doctor’s comment about his ears in 2005’s Rose), and we also saw the regeneration culminate in two tenth Doctors in 2008’s Journey’s End, and it’s all made a plot point in Matt Smith’s Xmas 2013 finale. So, Peter Capaldi is the fourteenth Doctor.

But I have a third option. In all likelihood no-one’s going to like it, but considering that Capaldi is the first Doctor of a fresh new regeneration cycle, would it be appropriate to call him Doctor 2.1?

Happy New Year! 2014… it makes you think, doesn't it? We've just had the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, a momentous date which heralds its 51st year, and now, in 2014, with new episodes featuring a new Doctor coming later in the year, we are entering the series’ 52nd calendar year. Those numbers keep on creeping up, don’t they? A lot of years. Does it make you feel old?

During the build up to the big day of the Doctor, my mind often cast back to that other big anniversary, the 25th. It was a slightly smaller affair, and one which the general viewing public could be excused for not noticing, but for my eleven year old self, it was huge! I’d been watching the show regularly for a good six or seven years, was starting to build a respectable library of the novelisations (maybe a dozen by that point) and with our first VCR (Video Cassette Recorder for you youngsters out there) I was starting to build up a fair few actual episodes on tape; by the anniversary I had eight whole episodes taped off telly to watch and re-watch to my heart’s content. That eighth episode was Silver Nemesis, Part One, and it was glorious! It was really the dawn of my status as a Doctor Who fan, rather than simply an avid viewer.

25 years seemed like an impossibly long time back then. But then, 1963 was fourteen whole years before I was born, and my most distant memories of the show, with the fourth Doctor regenerating into the fifth, a vague memory of K9 in a greenhouse in the middle of the night, and gleefully hiding behind a cushion from the big bang at the end of every closing title sequence being a mere quarter of the way back into its history. And yet, here I am now, contemplating a time when the universe was less than half its present size. Do I feel old? Absolutely not!

Okay, so the decades are rolling past, and our lifespan is such that this fact is a major deal, but all I can think of is my Mum telling me, on several occasions throughout my childhood, how the first ever episode was transmitted on her 22nd birthday, and how she used to race home across London every Saturday after hockey practice to watch it. Of course, she was my Mum, so the previous generation thing was simply taken for granted, but the concept that my adult self would one day be looking back over that same expanse of time simply didn't realise itself in my pre-pubescent mind.

But old is the one thing is does not make me feel. 2013’s 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who’s own 25th Anniversary episode, Silver Nemesis, Part One, has simply given me an appreciation of how young Mum was back then, both in 1963 and 1988, and she doesn't really seem to be that old now. Time is just a measurement of how much life you've lived. Feeling old is just an optional extra.