A Monday night dilemma over totty or a timelord

In the first episodes of the two new police dramas currently going head-to-head on Monday nights, a woman bled to death in a school playground as midnight tolled, a Ugandan immigrant was hooked by his feet to a ceiling fan and beaten with a hammer, and a racist drowned in a bowl of urine. These weren't the interesting bits. May I instead draw your attention to the programmes' two stars:

Exhibit A:  Rupert Penry-Jones, aged 39, born London, one-time boyfriend of Kylie Minogue, and last seen as Richard Hannay in The Thirty Nine Steps over Christmas.

In Whitechapel (ITV 9pm Mondays) he plays a priggish and ambitious DI being fast-tracked to the top by the guy who played Prince Charles in The Queen.

The programme opened with Penry-Jones in black tie at the club. Rupert does a good line in pretending he went to Eton (he didn't - Dulwich College) and is often cast as a snotty type who helps lesser mortals along with their subjunctives. An ex-model, he also projects the slightly foppish put-me-in-a-gold-paisley-tie fashion sense of Edward VIIIth. Having said that, in the series Spooks, in which he was the much lusted-after action hero, he was frequently called on to dither over relationships – a dead wife, a colleague with a crush – but you can't really imagine Rupert losing his mind over a woman.

He gives the impression that love is a mere dissipation of energy. In Whitechapel – in which his character must rootle out a Jack the Ripper copycat killer – Penry-Jones is elevated to the level of something not quite seen before on British television. He is openly cast as the totty in a very American sense. In one scene a female doctor makes a big display of ogling him - this woman's jaw is on the floor. In response, Penry-Jones stalks down a hospital corridor oozing the scorn of the too-often admired. It called to mind Brad Pitt's comment that he often feels like a woman being harassed by construction workers.

At times he is more creature than human, and the cast scuttle behind him

Throughout the programme, Penry-Jones is repeatedly filmed reflected in windows or looking at himself in mirrors, as though checking to see he's still there. Like all beauties he can look almost peculiar from some angles – more creature than human. The other members of the cast scuttle behind him, apparently tiny, deliberately dressed in shabby greys and washed-out blues.

Much is made in the actual plot of their bad breath and receding hair, their spare tyres wobbling under too-small M&S bomber jackets. Even London itself seems below par and grubby, shot as it is through a lens the municipal grey-green of a 1930's tea-cup.
And in the middle Penry-Jones, the great sexual product of British television, giving off his very particular air of good health and the incessant, dull hours of the rich.

Exhibit B: Matt Smith, aged 26, born Northampton, previously seen as a Labour party researcher in Party Animals, recently cast as the new Doctor Who.

In Moses Jones (BBC 2, 9pm, Mondays) Smith plays a young DS assisting the hunt for a gang of ritual killers in Shepherd's Bush.

Because he wasn't yet cast as the Doctor during filming, nobody thought to make very much of him, but as a rule the camera in Moses Jones can never decide which actor it wants to fix on - there are a huge number of characters, all very beautiful, all brilliantly performed. Instead it flits nervously from face to face, or jogs down London streets that are (in distinct contrast to those in the gloomy Whitechapel) coloured with quick throngs of people, with Hari Krishnas and market traders, all projecting ah, the richness of human variety! But the eye is always, always drawn to Smith.

His forehead concertinas with a zillion  lines that then disappear, like magic

Look at his forehead. I don't think I've seen a forehead this huge outside the Natural History Museum. This forehead is the locus of all this actor's energy and is constantly moving, as though it were actually a pair of super-powerful binoculars through which Smith is examining the world - Smith's eyes come over as entirely secondary sensors. In one scene he orders a cup of tea at a cafe and when it arrives slopping over its Styrofoam  cup,  he seems to sniff it with his forehead. In another, he's shocked and shy in a brothel and the forehead concertinas with a zillion wound-deep lines that then disappear utterly, like magic, like youth.

Smith has his own kind of dignity, but the lopsided walk of someone rather uncomfortable (he was a footballer as a teenager and worried that acting was uncool) and you can't help picturing him forever dropping things and losing his keys. He holds his massive head always slightly to one side, as though he has a pain in the neck for which there is no relief.

I suggest you check out this  head, and get used to it. It's is the head that's going to be on every 13-year-old's mouse-mat, photographed resting awkwardly against the door of the Tardis, for ever more.

So there we are. Totty vs the Timelord. Your choice. Nice to have one, no? ·