Where would I be without the Doctor?

It’s honestly impossible to say. After all, we’ve been inseparable for most of my life. From my writing to my wardrobe, the influence is obvious. And why not? Doctor Who is quite clearly the best show on television! Travelling through time and space, going anywhere - and anywhen - to do anything? Excitement and wonder and terror and joy? Suitable for children of all ages? That’s Doctor Who, that is.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the Doctor.

I was still in single digits when I first encountered the Doctor. It happened entirely by accident. We’ll get to that later - but I can tell you now that it changed my life in an instant. It really did. I’d never met anyone like them before. And imagine my surprise when I discovered they weren’t merely one person, they were many people! All of them different in so many ways, yet all of them somehow the same: united by a boundless enthusiasm to help those who needed helping, and to stop those who needed stopping.

I’ve always found heroes more satisfying to write than villains. That’s because of the Doctor: a hero who showed us that being good didn’t mean you had to be boring. The Doctor is reliably the most entertaining person in any situation: using brains instead of guns, jokes instead of muscles. Vanquishing armies of Daleks with nothing more than a teaspoon and an open mind. If you were getting picked on at school, without the confidence to stand up for yourself, wouldn’t you want a hero like that?

Sylvester McCoy & Me (aged 14)

Taken at Longleat in August 2002. I’m meeting the 7th Doctor. He autographs a DVD cover for me. I’m so nervous that when he hands it back, I accidentally smudge his signature with my thumb. I don’t realise until I’m outside. “David, Hi! Yours, [thumbprint]”
As you can see from the photo, I am **exactly** the sort of kid who needs a hero.

Many years have now passed. I’m an adult, who writes for a living (allegedly). We’ve just had a new season of Doctor Who, with a new Doctor, and it’s been exciting, daring, silly and scary, exactly as it ought to be. I felt the same rush as I did when I was a child. Only Doctor Who has that effect on me. In an industry where I work with actors of all stripes, I only get starstruck by those who travelled by TARDIS. It bypasses my professional faculties. “My God!” my brain goes, regressing to instant childhood, “You’re Doctor Who!”

I wanted to write a celebration of the Doctor - the impossible hero with many faces - but when I got down to it, I couldn’t disassociate the character on screen with the effect they’ve had on my life. No matter where I’ve gone, or who I’ve been, there’s always been the Doctor. So, I’ve decided to write about that.

My life, my Doctor. A journey through time and space.

Before we start, let’s be clear: I love every Doctor. I won’t be ranking them, here or anywhere else. They’re all heroes. Instead, I’ve chosen the seven whose influence I most keenly felt at specific junctures in my life. They reflected qualities I admired, or anxieties I shared, or maybe they simply gave me a welcome reprieve when Big Things were going on in Real Life. Whatever the reason, here they are, and here I am.

Oh, one last thing - we’re not going in chronological order. My TARDIS isn’t working properly.

DO LOTS OF PLANETS HAVE A PORTSMOUTH?

It’s 2005. I’m 17 and living in Portsmouth. Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor.

I’ve been a Doctor Who fan for eight years. I’ve got the videos, the books, the magazine subscription, and an online home called Outpost Gallifrey, where fans all over the world can type messages to each other about their favourite stories - and even write their own. Yes, I’ve taken tentative steps as a creative writer via the tried-and-true method of fanfiction. My stories are short, silly, and hopefully humorous. My online excursions help me to rebuild the confidence I lost at school. Doctor Who has done a lot for me already.

But during those eight years, there’s never been any new Doctor Who on telly - until now. Like every fan on Saturday 26th March at 7pm, I’m glued to the TV. My stomach is in knots. I’m hoping so hard that they’ve done it right. (Of course, I’ve no idea what “done it right” would look like, but I’ll know it when I see it.)

It’s just one of many things I’m apprehensive about right now. There’s also my future to consider. You see, ignoring entreaties to become a lawyer (or a doctor), I have a vague idea I’d like to be an actor. I enjoy drama at Sixth Form. “The thing is,” I’m gently informed by a concerned aunt, “Acting is for posh people.” Which isn’t us. We’re working class, like everyone else we know. This hasn’t really registered with me yet. (Nor will it until I go to university, where I regularly meet students who took for granted things I’d never had.)

I mean, we get by pretty well. I never feel deprived. Being poor isn’t the same as living in poverty: no, we can’t afford a car or a holiday, but I’m spoilt rotten at Christmas (hence the Doctor Who videos). But my ambition to chase my theatrical dreams across the country is met with healthy, well-founded scepticism. I form the impression that people like us don’t do things like that. I ought to prepare for disappointment.

My Pompey accent doesn’t help either. We all have them: a fusion of Hampshire and Cockney, owing to the migration of East End dockworkers to Portsmouth in the 1940s. It’s not posh. It definitely hasn’t got the perfect diction that actors have in the old BBC TV shows I tend to watch. And then there’s our dialect: “He’s well a squinny!” “Beard on, dinlo!” (Translation: “He complains a lot.” “I don’t believe you, fool.”) You don’t hear that sort of thing in Shakespeare. Or even in Doctor Who.

I reluctantly concede. With all these factors whirling around my head, I try to make peace with the fact that - for reasons beyond our control - my chances of becoming an actor are very, very slim.

Then, on 26th March, Doctor Who is back. Christopher Eccleston is energised, funny, and so absolutely right for this. He’s both angry and silly. He’s got a massive attitude. He’s rude and abrasive. But most of all - unlike every Doctor before him - he isn’t posh. He’s one of us.

I mean, obviously I’m not a Northerner. We’re as South as you can get. But while it’s yet to be suggested that lots of planets have a Portsmouth, one thing is abundantly clear: the Doctor isn’t a posh bloke in a frock coat anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Doctor being posh blokes in frock coats! It’s part of the escapism; you didn’t see people like that round our way. But Christopher Eccleston was the first Doctor I imagined I could actually bump into in the street. And I didn’t realise how important that was until we had him.

Over thirteen weeks, Eccleston gives an edgy, tough, but firmly compassionate portrayal of the Doctor. He takes the character’s essence, established over eight previous incarnations, and gives us a radical take on the role by being so refreshingly everyday. He’s tougher than I’ll ever be, and I’ve never owned a leather jacket either. But Doctor Who came back and gave us a working class Doctor, with an attitude and an accent, and the righteous anger of the put-upon who’s sick of putting up with it. For me, it’s properly transformative. Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor demonstrated that people like us deserved adventures too.

To my shame, I didn’t entirely follow his example. I worked hard to change my accent, trying to adopt the BBC RP that had already fallen out of fashion in the arts without my knowing it. To this day, my accent has the texture of fabricated RP, though the original Pompey occasionally shines through (for instance, we have trouble with our voiceless dental fricatives - or in other words, “three” always comes out as “free”).

But thanks to the Doctor, I knew one thing: I wanted to have adventures.

Within a year, I left home.

MAYBE THERE’S NO POINT IN ANY OF THIS

It’s 2017. I’m 29 and living in North London. Peter Capaldi is the Doctor.

My appreciation of the Twelfth Doctor grows in direct proportion to the size of his hair. It was short and severe to start with, when the Doctor was darkly muttering about being “a good man.” I didn’t warm to him, truth be told. In the next season, he loosened up, with sunglasses and a guitar. It was fun, but I worried that the Doctor was having a midlife crisis. Then suddenly, in his third and final season in 2017, everything clicks: the Twelfth Doctor as a grouchy professor. Serenity and severity. Dry wit and a deep soul. By the end, his hair is massive.

In retrospect, Capaldi was terrific from the beginning. He’s a phenomenal actor. Gaze into those eyes and I swear you can see thousands of years of love and anger and joy and regret. It’s a riveting performance of such depth and texture, I still feel guilty that I didn’t fully appreciate it until he was nearly out the door.

It’s possible that I simply wasn’t paying attention. The years of his tenure, 2014 to 2017, coincide with the creation and earliest seasons of Wooden Overcoats, the sitcom that effectively kickstarted my writing career. My plays were staged in London venues. I left my job behind a shop counter in Covent Garden for a job behind a desk at a TV talent company (where my duties included administering the estates of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore). And I met and fell in love with my partner - in tumultuous circumstances - as she stole me away from Brixton to the North London flat we still share today. Wonderful things were happening.

But I also associate these years with my grandmother’s illness and her slow decline, until she passed away in March 2017. My own mental health was fragile, to say the least. When Capaldi’s Doctor embarked upon his third voyage the following April, I had just taken the, er, “courageous” decision to leave my desk job, and devote myself to being a full time writer. This rapidly became full time unemployment.

I realise now that the prickliness and uncertainty of the Capaldi era disturbed me too much. Like me, the Doctor was fighting his own dark nights of the soul, but I didn’t have the head space to be there with him.

Then in July 2017, I watch The Doctor Falls, originally intended to be Peter Capaldi’s last episode. And it’s astonishing. Very possibly the best episode of Doctor Who ever made. I’m in tears. The Doctor has rarely looked this exhausted and desperate. His best friend has been taken from him and turned into a Cyberman - basically, murdered. He’s fighting a losing battle to save as many people as he can from armies of remorseless mechanical killers. His only hope is to persuade his worst enemy to help him:

“I’m going to be dead in a few hours, so before I go, let’s have this out, you and me... I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s RIGHT! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not many, maybe not for long. Maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do. So I’m going to do it, and I will stand here doing it till it kills me.”

— the Doctor

In Capaldi’s hands, this monologue becomes a howl of… hopeful despair? It haunted me then, and it haunts me still. At his weakest, he’s at his bravest, because he’s going to carry on. I can’t honestly compare myself to the Doctor - saving lives on a galactic scale is rather more difficult than writing comedies to pay the rent. But the principle resonates with me: “It’s the best I can do, so I’m going to do it.”

The crisis is averted by the episode’s end, but the Doctor is at his lowest ebb. Fortunately, he’ll draw strength and solace from the next person he meets: a wise old man called the Doctor. The original, you might say.

GRANDFATHER

It’s 2001. I’m 13 and living in Portsmouth. William Hartnell is… not the Doctor.

In fact, nobody is. Not on TV, anyway. The series hasn’t been made regularly since 1989 (a few weeks shy of my second birthday) and it seems unlikely it’ll ever come back. There will only ever be eight Doctors.

This doesn’t especially worry me in 2001. I’ve been a Doctor Who fan for about four years - though I keep that a secret from all but my very closest friends, because I don’t want to get beaten up at school. I watch weekend Doctor Who repeats on UK Gold. I spend my pocket money on old books and second-hand videos at a sci-fi shop on Albert Road, slowly building up my collection. But I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that all I watched was Doctor Who! I also liked old sitcoms. And the films of Peter Sellers.

I’m a strange child. I’m also the archetypal nerd: thick glasses, terrible hair, and an asthma inhaler. Somehow I avoid getting beaten up by the bullies at school, but they do treat me with enough general contempt to make my years there a misery. Then my home life is thrown into turmoil when my parents divorce. Despite their best efforts to shield me from the worst of it, it’s hard to adjust, and for a time I’m resentful towards them both. The idea that they must be hurting too doesn’t occur to me. Of course it doesn’t. I’m a teenager.

But what has any of this got to do with William Hartnell, who passed away in 1975? The forbidding first Doctor, a grandfather in exile, described in Doctor Who guide books as crotchety, cranky, and bad-tempered? Well, I don’t associate him with any of those qualities. When I think of William Hartnell’s Doctor, I see the twinkle in his eye, a youthful vitality that belies his age, and a beaming smile. I hear him giggling at a joke that nobody but me understands. In fact, to be honest… I think of my own grandfather.

They didn’t look alike, nor sound alike - but what they shared was wisdom and mischief. I’m convinced the endless affection I have for William Hartnell’s Doctor is bound up in my own love for my grandfather. He could have me doubled over laughing at his silly jokes and funny voices. He showed me photographs of when he used to be in a comedy act in his youth, performing around Portsmouth, which inspired me to improve my own feeble first attempts at writing sketches. He was also the spitting image of Ernie Wise of Morecambe and Wise - still my favourite double act even now, because of the joyful warmth they radiated on stage.

Yet Grandad was also serious, and perceptive. One moment in particular stands out. In the tumult of my parents’ divorce, our relatives stepped in to give us their support. They were wonderful. I would go to their houses and spend lovely afternoons and evenings with them. I wouldn’t talk about how I felt, and they didn’t want to make things worse by asking. They wanted to protect me. But I was bottling up my distress.

Grandad was the first to realise. One day, he asked me how I was. I said I was OK. He asked me if I was sure. It was an unspoken invitation to be open and honest. I took it. Poured my heart out. He listened. It helped. The Doctor faced down Daleks, Zarbi, and War Machines with steely determination. Grandad didn’t do that. But when I was thirteen, he treated me like an adult. He saw that I needed it, and I’m still grateful to him.

My grandfather passed away in 2006 when I was 18. His favourite Doctor was William Hartnell.

AWKWARD ODDBALLS

It’s 2010. I’m 22 and living in Edinburgh. Matt Smith is the Doctor.

My university years are a lot. I make many dear friends, I get my heart broken a few times, and I spend as many days and nights as I can in the student-run Bedlam Theatre. There I write sketches and plays, usually the night before rehearsals begin. I direct my own work without knowing what I’m doing; my interest peaks during the casting process, and my approach to blocking is slapdash at best. I’m rarely anyone’s first choice as an actor, and I’m nobody’s idea of a leading man. But I love the world of student theatre, a place where oddballs can flourish. At last, I belong somewhere. I even find my first velvet jacket in the costume cupboard: it’s a green blazer (very Jon Pertwee) and my friends say I look great in it. I start collecting them in charity shops.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who is massive. It’s everywhere. Unassailably popular. My head spins. You wouldn’t be caught dead liking it ten years ago! Now it seems like you’d get bullied in school for not watching it. In 2010, I walk into Forbidden Planet on South Bridge and browse Doctor Who toys: Daleks, Cybermen, Judoon… All the Doctors are available, even Paul McGann. You can buy an action figure of Catherine Tate! Madness.

The cultural supremacy of Doctor Who in this period owes an enormous debt to the sheer charisma of David Tennant, who played the Doctor throughout most of my university years. In fact, Matt Smith only makes his debut in my last semester, in 2010. But if Tennant’s Tenth Doctor embodied the sort of man I wish I’d been - cheeky, sexy, suffused with raw emotion - then Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor reflects the sort of man I actually am: awkward, anachronistic, and missing the obvious. An old man trapped in a young man’s body.

It’s amazing that the youngest actor to have played the role is so accomplished at conveying the advanced age of the character. Matt Smith’s portrayal delights in paradoxes. Young and old. Happy and sad. Relatable and thoroughly alien. I remember the thrill of watching his first episode, The Eleventh Hour, in April 2010. He’s sitting in a kitchen, in the middle of the night, newly regenerated, eating fish fingers and custard, asking a little girl about the crack in her wall, and it’s the most enchanting and safe and natural conversation in the world.

Thirteen episodes later - Amy Pond, Weeping Angels, Toby Jones, Rory, Vincent, Pandorica - I know with absolute certainty that I’ve watched the most incredible season of Doctor Who there’s ever been. It’s still my favourite now. I adore Matt Smith’s Doctor with an intensity I haven’t felt since I watched my first episode in 1997. I relate to him. At last, being odd feels like a feature, not a bug. I take it to embarrassing extremes. I have a phase of wearing slim jackets and bowties. It’s probably my version of a delayed adolescence.

That summer, I graduate with an MA (Hons) in Ancient History. Both my parents come to Edinburgh for the occasion. I’m grinning in all the photographs, though I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

While Matt Smith’s glorious era continues, I stay on in Edinburgh for two more years, and seek employment. I balance part-time positions at the Usher Hall and a luxury perfume shop. So, while at home I subsist on pasta and Tesco-brand digestives, at work my ears soak up classical music played by some of Europe’s finest orchestras, and my nostrils are filled with Eau de Parfum. Each bottle costs more than I earn in a day. Some cost more than I earn in a week. These worlds are far more alien to me than Skaro and Gallifrey.

I love the city with all my heart, but I can’t stay here forever. I’m restless. So, in 2012, I apply for a playwriting course in London. The Eleventh Doctor is voyaging into the Dalek asylum when I move to England’s capital.

My next adventure begins. I’m excited.

I SAW AN OLD FRIEND IN THE CINEMA

It’s 2013. I’m 25 and living in South London. Sylvester McCoy is Radagast the Brown.

That’s the only reason I toddle along to the Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema at 10am one January morning to watch The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I never got into Tolkien. I read The Hobbit at school, but that’s about it. I haven’t watched The Lord of the Rings. Fantasy never appealed to me; it seemed like a lot of shouting in woods. But I’ve got a day off, I’ve woken early for some reason, and morning tickets are a fiver. So off I go.

There’s nobody else at this screening, so I sit by myself. To my surprise, I lose myself in the movie. It’s exactly the distraction I wanted. Things haven’t quite been going to plan, you see, and I’m worried. I moved to London a few months ago to study an MA in playwriting, to professionalise the skills I’d learnt in Edinburgh. But I’m just not gelling with the course. I feel lost and frustrated. I begin to think that the course leader doesn’t like me. I’m doubting all of my abilities. I’m not clever enough, or talented enough, or interesting enough.

Maybe this isn’t what I should be doing after all? But if not this - then what?

I’m dispirited. Scared, even. I look up at the screen. Sylvester McCoy has turned up in the movie, as a raggedy old wizard, covered in bird droppings. He tends to some woodland creatures, and then tells our heroes what he found in a spooky castle. And I realise I’m smiling. I’ve never been so pleased to see an actor before.

The Seventh Doctor is mysterious and manipulative, an unknowable trickster, playing his games of chess on a cosmic scale - at least, that’s what fan consensus tells us. I enjoy the Seventh Doctor for a much simpler reason: he’s magic. Not literally, perhaps. (Well, there is a McCoy story all about Merlin…) I mean that when I look at him, I see an indefinable magic. He’s a funny little chap with a mischievous face. He strolls into chaos, twirling an umbrella. His voice is unique, with an unpredictable rhythm: smooth, excitable, grave.

And what makes him so magical is that I can’t tell in interviews where McCoy ends and the Doctor begins. Of all the actors who’ve been Doctor Who, he’s the one who I’d most expect to be a genuine time-travelling alien who just happened to get cast in a BBC TV series. Is Sylvester McCoy an actor playing the Doctor, or is the Doctor playing at being Sylvester McCoy? I don’t think even he knows.

Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor when I was born. Two years later, he was the Doctor when the series was cancelled. It seemed to cast a long shadow over his subsequent career, appearing in scattered TV roles and straight-to-video productions. Yet whenever he was interviewed, his eyes were always sparkling.

I’m in the cinema in 2013, filled with an unexpected, indescribable joy. Once again, my hero has taught me a valuable lesson while making me laugh. As I watch Sylvester McCoy playing an actual wizard in a multimillion dollar movie, I'm reminded that he must have felt lost and frustrated when Doctor Who was cancelled. He’d have had doubts about what he was doing, just like me. But he - Sylvester McCoy - or is he the Doctor? - carried on working, making friends, and seeking out new adventures.

Casting his magic wherever he went.

REJUVENATION

It’s 2024. I’m 36 and living in North London. Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor.

I’m watching the sixth episode of the season, Rogue. The Doctor is trapped in a forcefield, under sentence of death, and using the music of Kylie Minogue to flirt with his captor. You can’t imagine any of his predecessors doing it. Ncuti Gatwa has thoroughly redefined the role. He’s a naughty best friend, who dances in night clubs, and crackles with youthful energy. But he’s unmistakably an ancient being of unparalleled experience who just happens to look like a young man. He’s the Doctor. Full of life, and compassion, and fun. He’s superb.

Travelling with him looks like a great laugh. Thank God for that. We all needed it.

The last few years have not been easy, to put it mildly. The arts industry has yet to rebuild after the pandemic. Opportunities are scarce. Nobody has funding. I gave up on theatre in 2017 when my producers had to turn down the offer of an off-West End run; the venue costs were so high that even selling out every night wouldn’t have saved them from losing money. Since then, I’ve made a living from working in audio and podcasting - but what was once the domain of scrappy independents is now a firmly corporate world. Only Big Names need apply. And with social media breaking down, the odds of new work getting noticed are even more remote. I can’t speak for TV and Film, though reports there are dire too. Flourishing isn’t the aim anymore; it’s survival.

All of which should make me a puddle on the floor. I believe I would have been a few years ago. The pandemic did a number on all of us. I know many who haven’t fully recovered. If you weren’t hit by the virus itself, you were trapped by the surrounding anxiety. Even Doctor Who got caught up in it. The Thirteenth Doctor’s struggle against the Flux was an extension of the behind-the-scenes BBC strife to get the bloody thing made at all. Despite the winning performance of Jodie Whittaker, there were signs that all was not well in the TARDIS.

Shortly after the Eve of the Daleks in January 2022, I reached a crisis of my own. A decade of bad mental health caught up with me. Tablets and therapy kept my moods in check, but I was exhausted, defeated, and sad.

However, I may actually have turned a corner in 2024. Thanks to the urging of friends who were kind enough to relate their experiences, I sought more specialised help. In March I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve since been on a course of tablets that are doing wonders across all areas of my life, from the professional to the personal. For the first time - possibly ever - I feel capable of practically anything I might reasonably need to do.

My first BBC Radio 4 drama will be broadcast in August. It’s set in Portsmouth, where a naval base electrician solves a murder (even though my father, a naval base electrician, has yet to solve any murders himself - at least, so he claims). My eyesight was corrected last year with laser eye surgery, which is pretty nifty I must say. I’m blessed with the best friends a fellow could have, my family are terrific, and my partner and I are as madly in love with each other as when we began dating nine years ago. Oh, and I’m queer too, having come out as bisexual in a tweet about Nigel Hawthorne. Did you know Yes Minister is powerfully erotic? You do now.

In a sense, I feel as rejuvenated as the Doctor does! So why am I still afraid?

Well, for a start, I’m somewhat unemployed. I was relying upon a project to see me through the year, but it was cancelled without warning, putting a number of writers and producers out of work. I’m lucky enough to have colleagues with whom I can pitch new projects, and I have a decent reputation that gets me recommended to those who may have jobs in their gift. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and of those I’ve achieved it with. But I don’t know if this is going to work out in the long run - or even the next couple of months.

With the world in a perilous state, quality of life sharply reduced, and money thin on the ground, should I even be trying to make this work anymore? Is it time for me to hang up my metaphorical quill and find a sensible occupation? Why didn’t I take my family’s advice and become a lawyer (or a doctor)? What am I doing this for?

The Doctor gives me a wink. He’s been through hell and come out the other side, still smiling.

I get the idea to write this article. To look back upon those moments when I was at my most uncertain, and to see what kept me going. No, I don’t honestly ascribe every decision in my life to a fictional Time Lord. The Doctor can’t claim the credit for the love, support and kindnesses shown by my friends and family who made me who I am. But it’ll do me the world of good to explore my relationship with this one particular friend.

So, how did this all begin?

CHANGED MY LIFE IN AN INSTANT

It’s 1997. I’m 9 and living in Portsmouth. Tom Baker is the Doctor.

The only Doctor.

My Doctor.

Specifically, it’s Tuesday, June 3rd 1997, at 7.20pm. That’s when UK Gold repeats “Robot” Episode 2. I’ve been watching Are You Being Served, one of many classic sitcoms to which I’ve become inexplicably devoted (one day I shall write about the crucial part in my development played by John Inman’s Mr. Humphries, but now is not the time). My mum watches it with me too, over dinner. We often watch old telly together. I’m sure she wishes we watched new telly too, but even at nine years old, I’m set in my ways.

I’m about to get up and go upstairs when the next programme starts. A tunnel. A box flies down it. A head appears, with lots of curly hair. Weird music. “Oh!” says Mum, “It’s Doctor Who! I used to watch this with your uncle when we were kids. You might like it.” “What’s it about?” I ask, sceptically. She replies, “It’s about an alien called the Doctor, except he looks human. He travels through time, and fights monsters.”

All credit due to my mum: that’s an excellent pitch. She should be at the BBC.

The episode opens on a big silver robot with clompy feet, so that’s an excellent start. I’m on board. And then we’re introduced to the Doctor: lying on a lab bench, with his hat over his face, trying to ignore an army chap asking him questions. I’m… intrigued. Then this man leaps to his feet, revealing a mane of wild curls and boggling eyes. He tries to solve the mystery of a missing death ray. When he talks, his voice - his voice!

This is my first encounter with the Doctor. I simply have to know more about him!

The Doctor and his friend the Brigadier visit a professor who may know something about the robot. The professor refuses to answer the Brigadier’s questions - but the Doctor persuades him to open up. How? By being friendly, and taking a cheerful interest in his work. No fists, or guns. Just natural charm, and a big grin.

In his next scene, the Doctor amiably discusses the situation with the Brigadier, describing sinister cultists and giant robots as if they were the most ordinary things in the world. Then he excuses himself by leaping up onto the laboratory bench, turning out the light, and having a nap. The Brigadier - the embodiment of authority - is not amused. But I am. I’ve never seen an adult behaving like this before.

These moments keep coming. When the Doctor meets the villains, he insults them with a disarming grin, and they don’t know if he’s being serious or not. When he picks up a telephone, he says, “Yes of course I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to anybody!” When at the end he’s confronted by a big scary robot, he looks delighted: “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you!” He tries to escape the robot using ball bearings, and his own scarf. Finally, the robot knocks him down and prepares to strike the killing blow - end credits! Theme music!

I need to tune in tomorrow night to see what happens. And the night after that. And the night after that…

I don’t know yet that Tom Baker is the fourth of many Doctors. I’ve got the rest of my life for that. Right now, on weekday nights, there’s giant wasps and Cybermen, Daleks and Zygons, Egyptian mummies and the Loch Ness Monster. There’s Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan. There’s an ark in space, a planet of gold, an alien jungle, and a mad millionaire who could play all day in his green cathedral. There are cliffhangers, and jokes, and explosions, and a fake English village being run by a rhinoceros (“Resistance is inadvisable!”)

And in the middle of it all, there’s the Doctor: long scarf, big grin, a bag of jelly babies. Incredible and impossible. The man who opened my eyes to the possibility of being different.

My hero.