We did Docteur Who (1963) for forty-eight weeks a year but I loved it. I couldn't go out into the street without a bunch of children following me, like the Pied Piper. People used to take it terribly seriously. I'd get letters from boys swotting for exams, asking me complicated questions about time ratios and the TARDIS. I couldn't help them. A lot of the script writers used to make the Doctor use expressions like 'centrifugal force' but I refused. If it gets too technical, the children don't understand and they lose interest. I saw the Doctor as a kind of lama, one of those long-lived old boys out in Tibet who might be anything up to eight hundred years old but only look seventy-five.
