Roger Moroney: Good doctor is enshrined in time

Peter Capaldi is at the helm of the Tardis as the latest series of Doctor Who continues on Prime this Sunday.

Time is a most interesting thing as it determines what happens and, apart from the annual tweaking of daylight saving, cannot be altered.

You can take the battery out of the clock on the wall but time will continue to move on, as it has done since ...forever.

Because it never started and it will never end.

And that's where I got lost in science at school so took solace in watching Doctor Who when it was produced in the shades of its time.

Black and white.

Dear old William Hartnell, who barely smiled, had a wary respect for the Daleks which appeared to have been made in a garage out the back of the BBC studios.

Move time on many decades and consider what Weta Workshop would create if asked to build a Dalek. I daresay the thing would have the ability to fly.

Like a telephone box, which is what the doctor uses to hurtle through space and time, and which also messed with our young minds. Because, while it was the size of a telephone box, once inside it became a grand and spacious landscape of technology.

And time has changed it also.

When William Hartnell pressed the buttons and pulled the levers, it was very definitely a mechanical device of its time ... that time being around 1963.

But we didn't spot the wobbling and rippling panels and hardware made on the budget available.

We just got lost in time, and the adventures of a doctor and his often yelling and screaming colleagues who lived such a strange life.

And what was he a doctor of?

I don't think that was ever explained.

Not that it mattered, although in one episode further down the track, when the timelord had morphed into another profile, I do remember him wrapping the injured arm of one of his cohorts, so he must have at least had a first-aid certificate ... probably from another galaxy but, hey, as long as he can stem the bleeding.

The time it has taken the Doctor to get this far in his televised travels is remarkable and, apart from Coronation Street, I don't think anything else has endured so long.

The Tardis was launched by the BBC in 1963 and here we are in 2015, 52 years down the time track, and it is still making that eerie lift-off sound.

Peter Capaldi is at the helm now and the latest series has set forth on Prime on Sunday evenings.

He is No12 in the line-up and, oddly enough, has a slight William Hartnell look to him, which is a good thing because, for a while, the doctors started getting a tad street smart and had, in my eyes, just a little too much youth on their sides.

When Hartnell called it a day after three series, Patrick Troughton, who had an equally gruff and abrupt style, took the helm.

Then Jon Pertwee stepped in and he later became (through the magic of timelords) Tom Baker.

These two chaps were slightly more cheerful, even in the face of danger, and smiled a lot more.

And then time showed its face with the adoption of an almost youthful Doctor in Peter Davison.

Then there was (briefly) Sylvester McCoy, who looked more like a circus clown, and then the moody Paul McGann, whose stint was even briefer.

In terms of time, the record goes to Tom Baker, who raced through the great landscape of our imaginations for six years.

Capaldi has set sail on his second season and, like his recent contemporaries, has the benefit of superb special effects on his side and, while the show is still about basic old good versus evil, there has been a stronger move to more graphic horror element.

Doctor Who is a science-fiction success story that few would have imagined would have endured so long.

Back in 1963 when the BBC boffins sat down to discuss funding this out-of-the-ordinary series they would have considered many things before one probably leaned forward and declared "time will tell".

Dr Who, Prime, 7.30pm, Sunday

It would be interesting to hold a vote at this time (as they seem to be very popular lately) to find out what viewers associate most with this show.

Would it be time travel or the Tardis?

I actually suspect it would be the Daleks. When they chant "Exterminate, exterminate," shivers run up and down spines all over the galaxy.

And while we are five decades down the path and there have been hundreds of scripts and imaginative aliens created, the Daleks are still out there.

And as the doctor will discover in this latest series ... they will return for another shot at him.