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Has Doctor Who become too full of cheap shocks for its family audience? Two dads debate whether the programme is safe to watch with their kids Yes: Clever writing, but not great for getting the kids to sleep The new Doctor Who is too dark and convoluted. I’m a lifelong Whovian, but in the Matt Smith era there’s been too much doctorin’ of the Tardis by Steven Moffat and his writers. The opening scene of the new series had the Doctor being shot by an impossible astronaut and dying before he could regenerate. Yes, it was in the future and he may be rescued by a plot twist, but this would be deeply unsettling for young children (and indeed middle-aged dads). Most kids care more about the Doctor than God, and he shouldn’t die just for the sake of a clever plot. There’s too much sex, too. The Doctor should be a father figure, but now every assistant seems to fall in love with him and on Saturday he was snogging River Song. My 10-year-old daughter had to turn away during this section with a cry of “Eerrgh! Yuk!” The Silence – who erase your memories of seeing them – were a classic Who creation and my 12-year-old daughter now has symbols on her arm to remember if she’s seen them (three so far). The series has become increasingly reliant on the internal fears of children. The crack in the bedroom wall that is really a tear in space and time and the Weeping Angels that send you into the past when you blink. Clever writing, but not great for getting the kids to sleep. In the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, there was a clearer realisation that the monsters were men in rubber suits. It was fairly easy to explain to a child that a church gargoyle was not that likely to come to life and inspire the Brigadier to order “Jenkins, chap with the wings there, five rounds rapid!” The Doctor should be a maverick wanderer, a rebel with a Tardis console, not a superhero. Now every plot seems to centre round the Doctor or his companions as being crucial to the very fabric of the universe. At the end of the David Tennant era the stars went out and the Earth moved, while in the last series we had the Tardis exploding and destroying the universe, at least until some more infuriatingly complex time hopping by Matt Smith. The death of Rory Williams was more gratuitous sensationalism; nice guy Rory is shot and falls through a crack in space and time and is then bought back as an Auton with Rory’s memories who shoots Amy. Sometimes you just yearn for aliens invading a home counties quarry, and a simple good versus evil plot – and with proper Daleks, not the redesigned Teletubby versions . The Christopher Eccleston story The Doctor Dances had it right: scary gas mask monsters but at the end the nanogenes repair the dead, and the Doctor exclaims: “Just this once, everybody lives!” At present the writers seem intent on proving how clever they are through too much complexity and too many cheap shocks. Pete May No: It’s important for kids to learn about fear My seven-year-old son fancies himself as fearless. All it has taken to disprove his belief in his own bravery these past couple of weeks has been to turn on BBC1 on Saturday tea-time. He’ll crouch down at one end of the sofa, curling himself into a ball, until I ask if he wants a cuddle. He’ll scuttle over, and squeeze himself into me, without ever daring to take his eyes off the screen. What’s scared him so much, of course, has been The Silence , the swollen-skulled, black-suited monsters of the opening episodes of the new series of Doctor Who: a bizarre almagam of Reservoir Dogs and John Merrick. Matt Smith, the actor who plays the current Doctor, has already claimed they’re the scariest ever Who monsters . But too scary? Nonsense. Doctor Who’s great gift has been to introduce generations of kids to dread, with the safety net of knowing, first, that the Doctor and his assistants will prevail, one way or another; and second, that the fear will pass in less than an hour. It’s important for kids to learn about fear, to experience the rush of adrenalin it produces, to recognise their own reactions to it, and there’s no better way than Who. It’s in the same family of experience as learning about risk: after a couple of decades of trying to eliminate that factor from play by sanitising playgrounds, it’s now understood that children need to learn to assess risk, and so playgrounds are becoming more challenging again. The similarity between the two experiences lies in the elimination of hazard, that being a danger that cannot be assessed. There’s no hazard in Doctor Who: if it’s too scary, a child can leave the room, or turn off the TV, or hide behind the sofa, like an older generation did when the Daleks rolled on to the screen. Yes, today’s monsters are creepier than the Daleks, but so what? The Hammer version of Dracula was terrifying once, but now it’s about as unsettling as Anne of Green Gables. The threshold of horror rises with every passing generation and always has done, but there’s no reason for Doctor Who to remain stuck in the past. And just as kids like the thrill that comes from leaping around a good playground, so they like being scared. Not too scared. Not so scared they can’t sleep at night, but just so scared they can’t quite tear themselves away from what frightens them. That’s certainly how my son reacted to The Silence. What the best Who monsters do is teach our children that the world is an uncertain place, that there can be dangers in our everyday world. That is true; it’s also something most parents teach their children. What Who also does is remind kids that there is someone doing their best to protect them from these dangers, again something most parents happily do. But the scariest-ever Who monsters? Has Matt Smith already forgotten the Weeping Angels ? Michael Hann Doctor Who Television Science fiction Fantasy BBC1 BBC Television industry Michael Hann Pete May guardian.co.uk