Who, me?

I never watched Dr. Who at all during the 1960s. This is not strictly accurate: I remember hiding behind an armchair at the sight of the Daleks during their Invasion of Earth at the tail end of 1964, but this was probably only because some cousins had come round to the house and wanted to watch this week’s episode. I literally did hide behind an armchair, too, long before doing so became a ‘thing’ (I also did this whenever Freddie and the Dreamers came on TV, but that’s another story).

It wasn’t just the Daleks that were scary – the music was scary too. I can still remember experiencing a creeping sense of dread as the end credits of Juke Box Jury played out – I’m not sure I wasn’t scared of Juke Box Jury as well, or perhaps it was just David Jacobs, but anyway... JBJ immediately preceded Dr. Who in the BBC’s Saturday evening schedule, with the good Doctor typically taking to the air at twenty to six. This was when we switched to ITV, where the likes of Jimmy Clitheroe were to be enjoyed (or should that be endured?)

As the decade wore on, my awareness of Dr. Who didn’t extend much beyond this vague distrust of the programme, even when Patrick Troughton took over in the role. TV Comic ran a strip cartoon version of the series, but since we only saw TV Comic on rare occasions, this didn’t count for much. Strangely, I was not averse to the idea of Daleks as toys, and owned several of the small, ball-bearing equipped ‘Rolykins’ as well as a soft plastic Cherliea ‘swappit’ that came from the local newsagents. But they didn’t scream ‘exterminate’, so that was okay...

In the summer of 1969, the BBC began its long overdue first broadcast of Star Trek, which quickly became a Saturday night fixture in our house – and when this first season ended in December of that year, its vacated timeslot was returned to its rightful owner. I still remember seeing the trail for Jon Pertwee’s debut adventure, Spearhead from Space, that followed Star Trek’s season one swansong The Galileo Seven. It was a case of right place, right time(lord). Suddenly, Dr. Who looked like just the right kind of programme for me. I was two months off my ninth birthday...

Spearhead from Space was probably a very good place to start on Dr. Who: being a season opener, with significant changes in the format, a certain amount of exposition was required, most of it contained in a conversation between Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Cambridge boffin Liz Shaw who is about to be co-opted into the UNIT organisation. After just one episode, I knew more or less who was Who and what was what... with one notable exception: the Tardis.

Not having followed Dr. Who, I wasn’t entirely au fait with his status as a traveller in time and space, and with the dawn of the Pertwee era, the idea of the Dr. and his companions travelling from planet to planet across the millennia was no longer an option. This was all part of the big new game plan for the series: the Doctor would now be exiled to Earth, which was about to see an improbable spike in the number of invasion attempts by extra-terrestrials... from, well, zero, to about one every four weeks on average.

The Tardis was glimpsed, but only in passing, during Spearhead from Space, and as the series wore on, the iconic central console would be removed from the police box and located in a workshop at UNIT headquarters, where the Doctor’s tinkering eventually resulted in a trip ‘sideways through time’ in the serial Inferno (which may or may not have inspired the lyric in Hawkwind’s Silver Machine...) Either way, it wasn’t until 1971’s serial Colony in Space that I became fully aware of the Tardis for what it was. In the meantime, this hardly mattered, as there were plenty of adventures taking place on Earth.

If I had been left in any doubt about Dr. Who by the end of the four-week Spearhead from Space (and I wasn’t), then the next serial was guaranteed to grab my attention. Dr. Who and the Silurians was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see on television... reptilian monsters living in caves, where dinosaurs still existed. I mean, dinosaurs in Derbyshire... it was only twenty miles up the road! My birthday in 1970 fell on a Saturday and I remember some minor disagreement about being allowed to watch Dr. Who when I was supposed to be having a party. This was part six of the serial and things were coming to a head... how could I possibly miss it, birthday or no birthday?

One of the exciting aspects of watching the series at this time was when each serial came to an end, because the upcoming story would be trailed immediately afterwards. The Silurians was followed by The Ambassadors of Death which, at a weighty seven episodes feels like a bit of a trial these days: but those 175 minutes condensed very effectively into an action-packed trailer with guns blazing and motorbikes flying through the air as the UNIT dimwits allowed their space capsule to be hijacked by a group of baddies... to me, this looked like about the most exciting thing I’d ever seen on television.

Inferno brought the series to a memorable conclusion, with hairy monsters and an intriguing (for the time) parallel earth concept – the first time I had ever seen this idea presented in fiction. Interestingly, the totalitarian alternate reality trope had already been done in Star Trek, although the episode in question, Mirror, Mirror, would not appear on British screens until June 1970 where, coincidence or not, it aired in the week between the final two parts of Inferno. I can’t remember if I noticed the similarities at the time, or whether I naturally assumed that all parallel universes must be populated by ‘nasty’ versions of familiar characters...

By the end of the first Jon Pertwee season, I was firmly committed to Dr. Who. It’s not that it wasn’t scary any more... rather, that I was finally ready for the kind of shocks it had to offer... men transforming into ‘Primords’, intelligent reptiles with hypnotic lights in their heads... shop window dummies coming to life. 1971 would serve up more of the same, with the added bonus of The Master. That said, by the time that second year of Pertwee came to and end, it was becoming a case of ‘oh no, not the Master again!’ as the production team overplayed what had previously looked like a winning hand.

Having finally ‘committed’ to the series, I began to take an interest in its early years... the tenth anniversary in 1973 provided not only the ‘reunion’ serial The Three Doctors, but a Radio Times special which comprised a year-by-year guide to the series, most of which still resided in the BBC archives at the time. The same year also saw the appearance of Piccolo books’ The Making of Doctor Who, which was my first real insight into how such a television series is conceived and produced and, in retrospect, was a genuinely innovative and inspiring publication.

Every fan of the series has ‘their’ Doctor, and mine, without a shadow of doubt, was Jon Pertwee. His era probably peaked for me when the Daleks made their long overdue return in January 1972, but it was that first run, now fifty years in the past, that finally brought me on board. It couldn’t last, of course. The transition to Tom Baker was a novelty (the first changeover I’d seen), but I bailed out later on in the Baker era and never really came back to the series again, save for a ‘slight return’ during David Tennant’s tenure. Although my interest has waned, I still revisit those classic adventures, and have embarked on a somewhat belated 50^th anniversary re-run of the first Pertwee series. Which I like to think of as reversing the polarity of the neutron flow... to coin a phrase.