Russell T Davies, the writer and executive producer of Doctor Who, who successfully brought the show back in 2005 after a nine year hiatus, is stepping down. He'll complete the four "specials" showing in DW's gap year in 2009, before handing over to Steven Moffat for series five onwards.

Davies has had a poisoned chalice to handle over the last four years, by most measures he's done an amazing job and made an enormous success of the show, which could so easily have fallen flat on its face three years ago. Of course a minority of older fans have had their knives out for him since before the first episode aired, and are now celebrating his demise. Personally, I really enjoyed his scripts and the whole direction he's taken the show, so I'm sorry to see him go - but it's good that he's going out on a high, and giving the show some room to develop and continue without him, on into the future.

Moffat has scripted some of the most acclaimed episodes of the series so far ("The Empty Child", "Girl in the Fireplace", "Blink") and was the popular favourite to succeed. I hope he'll be great, I'm sure he could be, but if I'm honest some of his other writing credits have left me very cold. I thought his nineties sitcom Coupling was unspeakably dire, and his more recent Jekyll was pretty poor, but hopefully he was just saving all his effort for more brilliant Who stuff.