The Doctor has always been part of my life – and both are ever changing

Long before event TV earned itself a label, there was Doctor Who. Our favourite programme in my childhood home, tea time and bath time were scheduled around it so that the only interruption came from those pesky Saturday night notices for keyholders in the Ardoyne or the Falls Road to return to their premises. Otherwise it was just us, The Doctor and an ever-changing line-up of assistants and adversaries. My older sister’s favourite doctor was Jon Pertwee and I seem to remember that my younger sister’s head was turned by Peter Davison. But for Mark and me, it was Tom Baker all the way, with his wild eyes and hair and his huge teeth. He was, I think now, the first funny doctor: prior to Baker, they were all a bit brainy and superior.

We were a bit indifferent to the Daleks unless The Master was also involved in whatever evil caper they were at that Saturday. Mark and I preferred the Cybermen and I was afraid of the Mummy, and Mark was absolutely terrified of the character we called the Potato Man but who, we learnt much, much later, was actually a Sontaran, a relatively harmless alien, kind of the Daddy Long Legs of the Whoverse (which is an actual thing now.) Before I leave the Seventies behind, a special shout-out for the Brigadier, a recurring character who, when he appeared on screen in his khaki jumper, gave me a strange feeling that I didn’t understand then but recognize all too well now. I Googled him last week just to see what I was at back then, and all I’ll say is that it’s probably just as well that my Men Born In The 1920s phase was as short-lived and confusing as it was.

Anyway, then there was the Eighties when Doctor Who sucked and we were all too cool for school anyway. And although I still watched the brief dustings down of The Doctor after that, it wasn’t until 2005, when show runner Russell T Davies breathed brilliant new life into the character, that Doctor Who once again became the favourite TV programme in my family home.

There were no security notices interrupting transmission this time and the cast of small people hiding behind the sofa — we really did that, in both incarnations — had changed. But the biggest evolution was The Doctor’s own. In Davies’s masterful hands and in Christopher Ecclestone’s portrayal, the Time Lord had shed his two dimensional persona and had become a fully fleshedout character with emotions, weaknesses and a complicated back story. When Billie Piper’s Rose (best companion ever) first challenged The Doctor’s boast that he’d come from a different galaxy, pointing out that he had a Northern English accent, The Doctor explained simply that ‘every planet has a geographical north’, and I was sold. And after that came David Tennant who fell a little bit in love with Billie Piper and suddenly we were a wonderfully long way from the Seventies.

It was also on television seldom enough to still be a big occasion. The Small Girl was embarking on what would become an almost lifelong obsession with The Doctor, so those Saturday nights were serious business. We used to turn our long kitchen table around so that the five of us could all sit along the same side — a diminutive Last Supper — to make sure that nobody would have to turn in their chair or block anyone else’s view. I’d serve the steaming spaghetti Bolognese just moments before the show started and off we’d go, silent and spellbound, until the end credits rolled and my phone rang. Mark. Always Mark. What did I think, how did it measure up, what did we make of this latest Doctor or assistant or monster? When the Sontaran showed up again for the first time since he scared the daylights out of Mark, we shouted down the phone at each other in excitement about the Potato Man and the wonder of it all.

There was a huge, excited, evolving cast of us admirers and obsessives back then and I never imagined a time when I might watch Doctor Who alone. But Mark is gone and The Small Girl is in London and there’s only two of us in the house anyway and The Youngest wasn’t going to be around and she was never the biggest fan anyway.

She changed her plans. And even if she had half an eye on her phone, I didn’t watch the triumphant return of Doctor Who alone. But I still missed the children we were and the children I had. And most of all, the phone ringing even before the credits finished rolling.