To be fair, you could hardly blame Colin Baker for telling the BBC to shove off - refusing to make a transition story and regeneration scene - after the pretty appalling way he was treated.

Colin was still prepared to continue as the Doctor, even after being told that he was no longer required. He suggested doing a season's worth of stories and leave in a regeneration story at the end of that series. The BBC however was only prepared to offer him the first story of the 1987 season. Sylvester McCoy's first story was originally written for Colin's Doctor, with the regeneration taking place after he is caught in an explosion at the climax. Colin declined, arguing that this relatively short period of work could hamper his chances of finding other acting roles, and the regeneration was moved to the beginning of the story and staged in Colin's absence.

My 'first' was Jon Pertwee. I can recall seeing the first episode of his Doctor's debut 'Spearhead from Space', when it screened in NZ in March 1975. I was 6 years old. In the late 1980s I started up a Doctor Who fanzine called 'Time Space Visualiser'. This publication gradually evolved over many issues, taking on an international following. Some of the new series writers (including current executive producer Steven Moffat), count among its former readers and contributors to my fanzine. In 1999 I helped find a missing Doctor Who episode in Auckland and returned it to the BBC. I am currently writing a book about Doctor Who for a UK publisher, and regularly work on the BBC Doctor Who DVDs as a 'production information subtitle' scriptwriter. So what began as a childhood fascination with a television programme has now become my job.

I was working the Sunday shift on the customer orders counter at Whitcoulls's Queen St store. Sundays were good for catching up on paperwork and shelf tidying as there were few customers and phone calls to deal with, but on this one particular day I started getting a large number of phone calls around midday, all asking for whatever books we could get about Princess Diana. We didn't actually have any in stock and most were out of print. The notorious Andrew Morton biography was the most requested and we'd had trouble shifting that book when marked down on the bargains table a few months earlier. It wasn't until later in the day that I learned why there was this sudden flurry of interest in Diana. By the time we did manage to get some Diana books into stock though, the interest had diminished, and they gathered dust on the shelves.

Hey any word on when Prime will show the third season of Doctor Who???

Prime have apparently scheduled Doctor Who to return on Sunday 19 August, 7.30pm.

Paul

Craig - apparently the new series of Doctor Who will begin screening on Prime around mid-August.

Although I'm sure Prime will be disappointed at losing out on Torchwood to TVNZ, the connections between Torchwood and Doctor Who are not so overt that viewers who watch one but not the other will be too confused. Although both series are set within the same universe and feature a few overlapping characters and situations, Doctor Who in particular is not at all dependent on viewers watching Torchwood. The BBC has deliberately structured the two series in this way because Torchwood is aimed at an exclusively adult audience, featuring swearing, sex, blood and guts - all of which are taboo on family-friendly Doctor Who. There are references to Torchwood seeded throughout various episodes of Doctor Who, but these were largely explained and resolved in __Doctor Who__’s second series two-part finale.

I was going to post about the Doctor Who connection but David Ritchie got there first... However I can add that Lalla Ward's suggestion in The God Delusion that Shakespeare could have been prevented from writing Hamlet might have actually been inspired by an incident in one of Lalla's Doctor Who stories. City of Death (by the late great Douglas Adams) 'revealled' that the Doctor wrote Hamlet on Shakespeare's behalf...!