28. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...DOCTOR WHO

The absolute very first time I watched Doctor Who was with Jon Pertwee in the 1970s. They say you can tell someone’s age by their favourite Doctor and mine were the suave silver fox and Tom Baker, the nutter with the scarf and the jelly babies (although I was fond of Matt Smith recently but that would make me c.10 years old). JP must have been distraught when he found out he was regenerating into a buffoon but he turned into a scarecrow himself a few months later so be careful what you wish for.

I love how JP epitomised his era – frilly shirts, velvet smoking jackets and capes - a combination of late 60s Kinks, early 70s prog rock and Liberace. TB, on the other hand, was timeless (yes I know, literally), meaning there was no era where his car crash of fashion styles (and I use that term loosely) would feel at home. I thought he looked pretty cool to be honest...but I was a big fan of tank tops at the time so probably not the best one to judge.

I never missed an episode when I was younger. You couldn't afford to. Not only were VCRs yet to be invented but the BBC was so cost-conscious that they wiped the tapes two minutes after broadcast so that they could reuse them and save licence payers' hard-earned money. How things change.

Even when I was poorly (that's what our mums called 'being ill' in the old days), I'd watch the latest episode lying on the couch with a big orange bottle of lucozade - in the 70s the advertisers told us to drink it when we were sick in bed rather than halfway through the cycling leg of a triathlon - and some tablets which looked like spangles with the dent in the middle but didn't taste quite as nice. If that didn't perk me up, the threat of castor oil and my older brother rubbing Vicks on my chest invariably did.

In the 70s, the BBC was focussed on making quality programmes (I know, who'd have thought it?) and left magazines & merchandising to others. They published the Radio Times though and the Xmas bumper issue was the family bible for festive viewing. We were all allowed to mark our preferred options with an asterisk but clashes fell in favour of mum & dad who tended to forget that Xmas was meant to be a time for children. So did the Beeb too because Doctor Who Xmas Specials, at that stage, were but a glint in the eye of Russell T. Davies and he was only our age so not much use really.

In terms of merchandising, Palitoy managed the Doctor Who catalogue. How I would have killed for the K9 toy they brought out in the late 70s. It said "affirmative, master" when you pressed the button, for pete's sake!! In the old days, parents steadfastly refused to buy us anything expensive for birthdays and Xmas no matter how much we tried to guilt-trip them. I was lucky enough to catch mumps one winter and, as a result, the action man commando with realistic hair and gripping hands was underneath the tree. It would have needed to be smallpox for them to put K9 in my stocking though.

I always felt Doctor Who was the scariest show on telly. When the sea devils emerged onto the beach (on the Isle of Wight for some reason), you really did hide behind the settee and, even when the cybermen sported crap helmets made out of cloth and silver foil, like something Valerie Singleton had shown you how to make on Blue Peter, they still managed to give you nightmares later on, even if they didn't threaten to 'delete' you in those days.

That said, you really shat your pants when the Public Information Films came on. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, these were truly terrifying – kids being drowned by Donald ‘Grim Reaper’ Pleasence or electrocuted trying to retrieve their frisbees or being mangled on motorbikes under the wheels of a Ford Cortina to force our parents to think once, think twice, think BIKE (cue karate chop). Jon Pertwee himself got the Green Cross Code gig prior to Darth Vader and tried to teach us road safety with a bizarre acronym called SPLINK which was so complicated and convoluted that we’d have crashed through the windscreen of an Austin Allegro before we’d reached the letter ‘L’.

After Tom Baker left in the early 80s, the show slowly went downhill and was taken off air altogether in 1989 until its revival in 2005. In the innocent days of those first few series, we hadn’t worked out that Doctor Who may not have been his real name or that you could escape the daleks by walking up some stairs so I must admit to loving Russell's reboot of the series (and his Xmas Specials) when he referenced most of the things we enjoyed about the show in our youth and wove them into the new stories.

Production values were even improved too (slightly). In our day, the special effects weren't particularly special and the gizmos looked like they’d been borrowed from the set of Tomorrow’s World (the ending of which most of us watched every Thursday because it was on just before Top of the Pops).

The new series gave me a chance to introduce the scariest programme on TV to my kids who, having been weaned on Alien vs Predator, would simply snigger at how unrealistic and tame the Daleks & Cybermen were while I took up my customary position behind the settee. I had the last laugh though when the Weeping Angels turned up and scared the shit out of them. They’re both grown-up now and tell me that the experience traumatised them for years but at least I got to prove my point so it was worth it obviously.

Once I'd got them hooked and we'd all sit round the TV as a family to watch the show like we used to do in the old days, the bastards at the BBC decided it would be a good idea to stop entertaining us & start lecturing us instead and we all lost interest again. Kids have got their teachers and parents to advise them about the moral standards they should set themselves. They hardly want or need a TV programme based on a thousand year old time-travelling alien to do it as well.

In the Beeb's desperate quest for diversity and moral re-education, it seems to have forgotten that the most important aspect of Doctor Who, and indeed any entertainment show on TV, is to come up with wonderful stories which excite, intrigue and amaze the viewer. That’s what they used to do – naively, crudely and without today’s polish and clever wit perhaps...but without much of an agenda either. We really don’t care what sex or colour the Doctor and his/her companions are so we’re a bit non-plussed why this should form a central plank of every single storyline while presenting us with a decolonised re-writing of history which none of us actually asked them for.

I assume I’m straying into hate crime territory here and I guess it's at this point that I'm supposed to apologise for my privilege and promise to re-educate myself in order to change for the better. But, as Elton John once said to me (and the rest of the TOTP audience), sorry seems to be the hardest word and I just don't think I can give an apology the sincerity it deserves. Expect my facebook page, in true cybermen style, to get deleted tomorrow.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME......LIFE OF BRIAN

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