Doctor without a white coat

Being starved of English telly in its original language here in my palatial Parisian apartment, I was chuffed to bits when my father sent me the Christmas episode of Doctor Who on DVD recently. For those of you who know nothing about British popular culture, this once cheesy TV series featuring a time-travelling eccentric has been re-imagined as a slick, self-referential slice of family entertainment. It helps that thirtysomethings remember the original, which scared us to death when we were kids, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the monsters were clearly middle-aged men in ill-fitting rubber suits.

But that's by the by. Let's talk clothes. From the odd episodes I've managed to catch, I can tell that the new-look Doctor (played by David Tennant) is something of a style icon. The basic look is forties demob teamed with Chuck Taylors. The tie is always loose, the jacket a little too fitted, the trousers slightly too crumpled. A raincoat that would not look out of place in The Big Sleep occasionally appears: down the mean streets of the galaxy, this man must go.

And if you're a speccy type, it's reassuring to see that the Doctor occasionally drags out a pair of retro tortoise-shells (Oliver Peoples?) to squint at a malfunctioning control panel. In other words, this childish yet pleasurable lark is made even better by a dash of dapper inspiration.