Doctor Who (BBC1); Unreported World (C4): I HAVE seen the future of broadcasting. There will be 60 Big Brother houses occupied at once.

Call My Bluff will be played with real guns. And anyone who refuses to sing on Stars In Their Eyes will be blinded. How this would affect the ratings I don't know. What's certain is that writer Russell T Davies was having great fun in the opening episode of the final story in the resurrected Doctor Who series.

When Big Brother asked: "Will the Doctor please come to the diary room?", I thought my mind had been addled by watching too much TV, especially as the familiar BB music was playing at the time. The Time Lord's travelling companion Rose echoed that feeling as she found herself a contestant on The Weakest Link. "I must be going mad," she said, facing the robotic presenter Anne Droid (voiced by the real life Anne Robinson). Losers on the quiz in the year 200,100 are disintegrated, just as housemates voted out of Big Brother are "evicted from life".

Meanwhile, the Doctor's other helper Jack Harkness was being given a makeover by robotic Susannah and Trinny. The facial was extreme as it involved operating on his face with a chainsaw. "Where were you hiding that?" they demanded to know as a naked Jack produced a laser gun to defend himself. "You really don't want to know," he told them.

What's been great about the new Who is the way Davies and the other writers have taken the elements fans expect to see - slimy villains, incomprehensible technological talk, dodgy special effects and a sonic screwdriver - and coupled them with a crisper, cooler, more modern approach. The results have been unmissable. Rarely has a series so successfully been brought back from the dead.

And those who moaned that only a solitary Dalek was seen in a previous episode will rejoice that the cliffhanger revealed not one, not two, but half a million Daleks ready to exterminate everyone. It would have come as more of a surprise if last week's trailer hadn't given the game away. But the scene is set for a confrontation between the Doctor and his feared enemy that will leave him a changed man.

Land Of Missing Children, the first in a fresh series of Unreported World documentaries, went to India in search of child sex slaves and found plenty of evidence.

A UN report suggests that 30,000 children are trafficked into Calcutta each year. Reporter Sam Kiley followed the trail of one 14-year-old girl who'd been rescued by her security guard father. She'd been drugged, raped and sold to a brothel in Bombay. The girl told how her captors had threatened to kill her if she tried to escape. Another distraught mother ran up to Kiley in the street begging for help. She told how her daughter disappeared after being sent off on an errand. Three years later, the same thing happened to her other daughter. The girls were aged ten and 11.

The involvement of Durbar, the sex workers' union, doesn't always seem helpful. They, and elements of the police force, are adamant that there are no underage prostitutes. The union is lobbying for the legalisation of prostitution, winning the financial backing of the British government among others. Quite how this will help the slavery and rape of minors is debatable.

Published: 13/06/2005