television, giving off his very particular air of good health and the incessant, dull hours of the rich.

Exhibit B: Matt Smith, aged 26, born Northampton, previously seen as a Labour party researcher in Party Animals, recently cast as the new Doctor Who.

In Moses Jones (BBC 2, 9pm, Mondays) Smith plays a young DS assisting the hunt for a gang of ritual killers in Shepherd's Bush.

Because he wasn't yet cast as the Doctor during filming, nobody thought to make very much of him, but as a rule the camera in Moses Jones can never decide which actor it wants to fix on - there are a huge number of characters, all very beautiful, all brilliantly performed. Instead it flits nervously from face to face, or jogs down London streets that are (in distinct contrast to those in the gloomy Whitechapel) coloured with quick throngs of people, with Hari Krishnas and market traders, all projecting ah, the richness of human variety! But the eye is always, always drawn to Smith.

His forehead concertinas with a zillion lines that then disappear, like magic

Look at his forehead. I don't think I've seen a forehead this huge outside the Natural History Museum. This forehead is the locus of all this actor's energy and is constantly moving, as though it were actually a pair of super-powerful binoculars through which Smith is examining the world - Smith's eyes come over as entirely secondary sensors. In one scene he orders a cup of tea at a cafe and when it arrives slopping over its Styrofoam cup, he seems to sniff it with his forehead. In another, he's shocked and shy in a brothel and the forehead concertinas with a zillion wound-deep lines that then disappear utterly, like magic, like youth.

Smith has his own kind of dignity, but the lopsided walk of someone rather uncomfortable (he was a footballer as a teenager and worried that acting was uncool) and you can't help picturing him forever dropping things and losing his keys. He holds his massive head always slightly to one side, as though he has a pain in the neck for which there is no relief.

I suggest you check out this head, and get used to it. It's is the head that's going to be on every 13-year-old's mouse-mat, photographed resting awkwardly against the door of the Tardis, for ever more.

So there we are. Totty vs the Timelord. Your choice. Nice to have one, no?