It was written by Richard Curtis and directed by Jonny Campbell and featured an uncredited guest appearance from actor Bill Nighy.

The Eleventh Doctor takes Amy to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where they admire the work of the Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh.

The Doctor discovers a seemingly alien figure in a window of the 1890 painting The Church at Auvers, and decides they must travel back in time to speak with Vincent.

The evidence is in Vincent's displayed works: the face no longer appears in The Church, and now Vase with 12 Sunflowers bears the inscription, "For Amy".

If you look back at Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci...all hugely famous in their lives.

Writer Richard Curtis was previously executive producer on the Doctor Who spoof The Curse of Fatal Death, a one-off comedy special written for Comic Relief by show-runner Steven Moffat.

[7] After seeing a read-through performed by leads Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, Curtis made more changes.

"[11] When writing "Vincent and the Doctor", Curtis put up prints of van Gogh paintings around the house as well as a board with index cards outlining the plot.

[5] Tony Curran was ultimately cast as the part; Curtis called him a "wonderful actor" who "really could not look more like" van Gogh.

[14] The scenes at the church were filmed at Llandaff Cathedral in Wales,[16] while the National Museum Cardiff doubled for the interior of the Musée d'Orsay.

Once the artists found the one they wanted, they had to redesign it to look like the painting; this involved putting an awning up, changing the windows, and adding a platform with tables and chairs.

[21] "Vincent and the Doctor" was released in Region 2 on DVD and Blu-ray on 6 September 2010 with "The Lodger", "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang".

[25] Keith Watson in the Metro was surprised by the "impressive imagining of Van Gogh's world", praising Curtis's humour throughout the episode.

[26] Mark Lawson of The Guardian praised it as "exceptionally good" and "thrilling and funny, as well as educational", noting its "historical rigour" and its "good arty jokes",[27] while Deborah Orr wrote that it was "hardly original for someone to alight on [van Gogh's] tale as a tear-jerker, although it is pretty shrewd to think of placing it in a popular time-travel context" and that "the feeling that I'd been gently monstered into life-affirming feel-good sobs by Richard Curtis was not new, not in the least".

[30] On The Guardian film blog, Peter Bradshaw considered "Vincent and the Doctor" to be a "terrifically clever, funny, likeable wildly surreal episode".

[3] He also criticised the script for its "lashings of weapons-grade sentimentality" and for "throwing up possibilities that weren't followed up" and the monster as an "afterthought [posing]...no tangible threat".

He was positive toward Curran and Gillan and that the episode "finally gave us a three-dimensional Amy Pond", but thought the "usually excellent" Smith "didn't get much to work with".

[32] He also thought that the Krafayis was "a nice idea" for being a metaphor but was not threatening, and he labelled the emotional ending as "self-indulgently mawkish".

Club's Keith Phipps gave the episode a B−, explaining that it "didn't quite work" and suffered from tonal problems.

[33] A more negative review came from Gavin Fuller in The Telegraph, who criticised it as a "bland, inconsequential episode that, once it set up what was a decent enough premise...completely failed to run with it".

[34] He compared it unfavourably with the third series episode "The Shakespeare Code" in being centred round a historical "tormented artist" but wrote that it lacked that episode's "narrative drive", with "a serious plot hole" in van Gogh's ability to see the creature and that the Krafayis were "the most pointless monsters ever to appear in the series' long history".

[37] It lost both of these; the Bradbury to the film Inception[38] and the Hugo to the series finale "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang".