Joe Bennett: A lifetime of popular television show Dr Who

Joe Bennett says Dr Who's diverse casting in the latter years must be helping to "lessen prejudice a bit". Photo / NZME

OPINION

Pension day and I was driving back from the shops with a brace of lovelies clinking on the seat beside me, courtesy of the government, when the radio announced that the BBC had, for the first time, cast a black person as Dr Who.

"Dr Who!" I bellowed, "is that still chugging along?" For, ladies and gentlemen, way back when the world was young, I saw the very first episode.

It was on an unreliable black and white TV and all I now remember of it is a wet suburban street and the doctor and the girl who was to become his sidekick running into a police box and closing the door behind them and then that music starting, the spooky Dr Who music that everybody my age knows but nobody can sing (go on, try it. You'll find yourself hooting like an owl).

Home later with the lovelies safely stored in the valuables cupboard, I googled Doctor Who and found that the first episode was broadcast on an early Saturday evening in November 1963 when I was 6 and a half years old - and I would have been insistent on the half - and it went to air one minute 20 seconds later than scheduled because of coverage of - have you guessed it yet?

Come on, come on, November 1963. Yes, that's right - the assassination of Kennedy. Everyone of my generation is supposed to know where they were when they heard of Kennedy's death. Now I know I was waiting for Dr Who to start.

That Kennedy died at the same moment Dr Who was born is the sort of thing that the internettists these days would have great fun with, but I don't think anyone made anything of it back then, it being, if not a saner world, at least a world in which the lunatics were less conspicuous.

The actor who first played Dr Who was white and male and old, of course, because that's what powerful people looked like.

Today the white and male and old have still got a scrawny grip on most of the levers of power, but at least the entertainment business has tried to change things. I gather that in recent years there's been a female Dr Who, and now there is to be a black one, and though such castings individually make little difference, cumulatively they must help to lessen prejudice a bit, so good on them.

But that is not my point. My point is Daleks. Daleks were the seminal alien on Dr Who and at 6 and a half years old they scared me to my core. I both had to see them and was terrified to see them so I knelt behind the sofa with a cardboard box on my head - I am not making this up.

I watched the screen through a handle in the cardboard box, but the moment the Daleks appeared, normally at the end of an episode, sweeping forward on invisible castors, like free-wheeling chest-high shuttlecocks, crying 'Exterminate, exterminate' in a nasal tone that was shared some 20 years later by my driving instructor, I would twist the cardboard box around and simultaneously duck down behind the sofa, a belt-and-braces defence against the threat the Daleks posed.

Why they scared me, I don't know, but they leaked out of the television into my actual world. Daleks lurked at night just round the bend of the stairs, and, when I turned the light off, under the bed.

And now I discover I was not alone in my method of dealing with my terror. In 1991 the Museum of the Moving Image in London staged an exhibition celebrating Dr Who. They called it Behind the Sofa. We are all more similar than we imagine.

Two years later the Daleks were replaced with Cybermen and I remember being disappointed that they didn't scare me. They looked like what they obviously were which was men in costumes, whereas Daleks had been hatched from the burrows of the nightmare. But Cybermen and succeeding monsters must have frightened others because Dr Who has run and run.

What it says about our species that a television programme whose sole purpose is to frighten little children should have gone on for over half a century and been the BBC's most profitable global export and become, and I quote, an icon of British culture, I can't tell you. But I think it justifies the cracking open of a lovely.