Last night BBC Four aired a combination of so many of my interests — passions, really — that it was startling. “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” even managed, with those last two words, to put “Police Squad!” back in my head.

But intentionally, it was Doctor Who from the 1960s reworked for the 2020s. The most talked about and promoted aspect was that this black and white show has been colourised but for me the interest, even the excitement, was that it was edited. Instead of about 175 minutes over 7 episodes, it was 75 minutes in 1.

Losing up to 100 minutes from a story goes beyond the technical side of editing, the production side, and instead heads deep into editorial rewriting. So I’m fascinated by editing, I relish times when I’ve had to remove, say, one syllable from an actor’s line. Or how many times in making 58keys on YouTube — truly rather small scale compared to even 1960s Doctor Who production — I will include a note to “Cover Bad Edit”. I can’t get enough of how you spend so long writing things and then when they’re made, you realise you can lose eight minutes and improve everything, as long as you cover the edit.

Then I’ve written a lot about television history so just the change in sensibilities about how long it will take an audience to get a point, I am absurdly riveted by that. And here was a production that I suppose you have to say butchered the original show, I mean it took out more than half of it, but did so with absolute obsessive care for that 1960s story.

I watched all of the surviving episodes of Doctor Who over the last 18 months or so and consequently it doesn’t feel that long since I watched the original of this story. Which may be why I believe I caught every cut and every redone shot.

For the most part, for the greater part, a cut would take me out of the story but only to applaud how clever it was. We did get scenes where someone’s body and particularly their head would move too much between shots, but then I’ve seen that on modern shows when two different takes of a scene are used.

And the show must’ve had its equivalent of my “Cover Bad Edit” because so very many times it did precisely what I, again in my smaller way, do. I will cover a bad edit by finding something, anything, to put on the screen for you to see instead of the ugly edit behind it. In the case of Doctor Who last night, they many times did this by showing another part of the story. Sometimes that was so good, so well done. The dialogue from one scene would continue over the start of the next, like a pre-lap in reverse. So on the one hand, we were moving faster, we were into the next scene, but also it meant only the minimum dialogue needed to get the plot across was included.

It didn’t fix some of the odder points in the original show, though. In both versions, a Dalek is disabled by being shoved onto a rubber cloak. Then a few moments later, the characters pull the cloak out from under it to use for something else and it’s impossible to understand why the Dalek wasn’t recalled to life.

Then it did unfortunately add another odd moment because a whole sequence was replaced by two Daleks plotting. Presumably it was original footage format the show but their conversation was different and it was again a moment to applaud the cleverness of it all. Except it meant later on that Susan (Carole Ann Ford) knew something significant that she clearly did in the original but clearly could not in this new one.

Plus while the ending of the original is a bit rushed, at least in 1960s terms, this new version felt more rushed still. It felt like oh, okay, so that’s sorted, is it?

“Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” is a deeply impressive and simply remarkable piece of work. Except, as well as covering an edit by moving to the next scene early, it did also very many times it would show us a flashback to earlier on in the story. The first time it did this, I thought it was profoundly brilliant and as satisfying as the addition of the 1980s Doctor Who Cloister Bell sound effect.

The second time it did it, I thought it was brilliant too. By the third time…

There were points where this flashback and possibly flashforward lark was tedious. Watching the characters examine anti-radiation drugs left for them outside TARDIS, seeing it over and over again, painfully slowed down a story that was being sped up.

That was also noticeable in the parade of Thals, the goodies on this story’s planet — it wasn’t just the picture that was done in black and white in the 1960s — because they would come, go and die before you knew even their names. Quite often, we’d only hear their name after they’d been killed off. I think I caught the names Alydon, Ganatus and Antodus, but the lead Thal was definitely Anodyne.

I also think I saw the original too recently to be able to watch this version and just get into the story. I can’t judge it. But I can think a lot about how editing the original doesn’t remove its 1960s origins and replace them with 2020s sensibilities. If it were written again, it would be 2020s in pacing and style and the whole undertow of a drama reflecting its own times.

So now I’m off thinking about the differences between shaping a story when it’s being written and then reshaping it later when being edited.

I tell you, if “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” had featured a big scene with chocolate, it would’ve been my perfect television drama.