who assume that because folk music is old it must have something to do with troubadors

Hold on there a mo, Shimster - you mean it doesn't? Shit, man - this is where I've been going wrong all these years, assuming that at the heart of Folk there lingered a very real Human Creativity, whereas, in actual fact, Folk is Viral Thang that uses collective humanity as a Passive Medium... Hmmmm; sounds all a bit sci-fi to me; maybe this is why so many Folkies are also Graduate sci-fi nerds and why True Folk no longer apeals to True Folks, who have their own thing going on which the True Folkies invariably despise from their High Towers of Cultural Righteousness.

No indeed, Dr Who is part of the free-styling Zeitgeist, too heavy on Bathos and GCI maybe, but part of a storytelling tradition going back - oh - to the time of the Troubadours at least I'd say. In fact, the first ever documented sci-fi is a now-lost poem by Bertran de Born in which he encounters visitors from the future who step forth to greet him from a gleaming silver chalice bigger on the inside than it is on the out. According to Dante he called this device the Tardus by way of temporal irony...