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The page that has gone upmarket – it’s doing little tubs of coleslaw now. BY THE WATCHER

A History of Doctor Who in 100 Objects…

BILL’S CHIPS

“That’s life, innit?” muses Bill Potts during her first conversation with the Doctor. “Beauty or chips.” This startlingly bleak philosophical proposition is developed a few moments later when her asseveration that she always wanted to go to university is countered by the Time Lord’s snarky response: “Yeah, to serve chips?”

We’ve been here before. This is far from the first time that Doctor Who has used the hapless chip as a totem of all that is mundane, unambitious and underachieving in the human experience. Consider the case of Rose Tyler, who initially clings to chips as a comforting reminder of home: immediately after her first trip to the future in The End of the World, she makes a beeline for their salty embrace. But by the time we reach the emotionally charged chip shop scene in The Parting of the Ways, they’ve come to represent everything that Rose perceives as unsatisfactory about her former existence. “Get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, eat chips and go to bed – is that it?” she wails. “The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life!”