I’m on my way to Doctor Who. It’s a Sunday evening and I’m writing this longhand, in an exercise book, on the Manchesterto-Cardiff train. My bags are packed, I look like an extra from Carrie’s War. Because tomorrow, it starts. The fields slip by and I keep thinking about the times that Doctor Who has cropped up in my career. When I was a young researcher in 1987 or so, I dressed up as a Cyberman for Why Don’t You…? The same year, I presented an episode of Play School (yes, I really did, but let’s move on) with Chloe Ashcroft, who was so horribly gunned down in a Dalek adventure. In the early 1990s, I storylined a lurid daytime soap called Families, starring the soon-to-be candidate for the Eighth Doctor, Harry Van Gorkum. Lovely man! He played Dex, the male stripper. For 80 episodes, Dex had no surname – I just never got round to thinking of one, the ‘Dex’ bit made me laugh too much. And behind the scenes on Families, the actor Carl Rigg was on the writing team. Everyone was very impressed by his appearance in the opening sequence of a James Bond film, but I secretly thought of him as a Swampie on Delta Magna. And Shirley Cooklin was one of the writers, too. One day, she sat in the story conference recounting her days as an actress, excited by the BBC’s discovery of the long-lost Tomb of the Cybermen (my head secretly fell off. Sorry, Shirley, they’ve what? They’ve found it? Really? Sorry, that’s my head, it just fell off, just kick it to the side, have they really found it, Shirley, have they really, HAVE THEY???). Then, Eileen Way starred in one of my very first dramas, Century Falls. Old Mother! And I spent many, many days filming on Bob & Rose wondering if I could sneak the word ‘Marshall’ past John Woodvine. (True story: he told me to stop smoking, with such dark gravity, that I actually did.)
I finally came a cropper at the 2002 BAFTAS. I infiltrated the At Home with the Braithwaites table – oh, I love that show – and found myself carousing with Sir Peter Davison. I was good. I behaved. I talked about the Braithwaites, and the state of telly, and how we’d been robbed, until I couldn’t maintain the pretence any longer. I just broke. At 2.30 in the morning, in a crowded bar of brash telly folk, I whimpered, “I love Doctor Who.” There was a silence. The great man looked at me with such wisdom and sadness, then said kindly, “Yes. I thought you had that glint in your eye.”
ILLUSTRATION: BEN MORRIS