THE MAGICAL MR T

"Which Doctor Who is your favourite?" is one of those questions which keeps getting asked, not necessarily of me, you understand, but it does get asked.

Okay, they might not use those exact words, but the question does remain... Hanging there... Just waiting for an answer...

Or, because it is me, a fence-sitting fudge of the highest order.

They all have their merits of course. Mr Jon Pertwee was the gentleman who happened to be holding the keys to that magical Space/Time capsule the TARDIS when I first started watching, so he'll always be highly regarded, and Mr Tom Baker was definitely the actor who transformed something I found mildly enjoyable distraction into something approaching an obsession, and so he would probably be my "favourite" if I was forced to admit to having one at all.

The late, great Mr Nicholas Courtney used to fall back on a quotation from his character as the Brigadier and say "Splendid chaps. All of them!" which is always the most tactful of responses and, to a certain extent, that's also true for me too, because over the years I have enjoyed all of the various "incarnations" in most of their episodes.

Mr Peter Davison brought a lot of youthful energy and damned fine acting to the part when he came to the crease and Mr Colin Baker's brash bombast made a refreshing change after that, and he was kind enough to write to me when I wrote to him to empathise with the sorry and rather shabby way that he was ousted back in the 1980s.

Mr Sylvester McCoy brought another kind of magic to the part when he took it over during the "dying days" of the late 1980s, when the show seemed particularly unloved by the powers-that-be and the public alike and, whilst his portrayal has come in for a lot of criticism, I found those three brief years to be mostly rather magical at a time when perhaps others might not have found it so.

Such is my admiration for the show itself (despite its many shortcomings which those with an appreciation for so-called "quality" TV can be quick to point out, forgetting that they are part of its charm...) that the various resurrections of the show, including the one with Mr Paul McGann, have never yet produced an actor playing the role whose performance I did not like. You could argue that this shows a distinct lack of discernment on my part, or that I'm just blind to their faults, but, for the past half decade and more, I've still managed to sit down and watch Mr Christopher Eccleston, or Mr David Tennant, or Mr Matt Smith and enjoy each and every one of them, and I am struggling to contain the anticipation of what Mr Peter Capaldi is going to show us.

However, by popping into the world as I did sometime during the second half of 1964, a good eight months after the first Doctor emerged from the fog on a cold November evening, I was perhaps slightly too young to appreciate the earlier Doctors, as played by Mr William Hartnell and Mr Patrick Troughton although, as the fan in me blossomed, and those as-yet-unseen and perhaps slightly mythical episodes started to be released into the world on video cassette, I began to appreciate the sheer brilliance of the former and the mercurial magic of the latter, and now they are indeed some of my very favourite episodes to sit down and enjoy.

I really do think Mr Patrick Troughton's performance in "Doctor Who" is both magical and legendary. "The Seeds of Death" was the very first VHS I ever bought, back in the days before I even possessed a video player, perhaps due to the fact that I thought then that it might be the only chance I'd ever have to see it and it was almost bound to be deleted after what would obviously be very poor sales.

Back then, I believed that I was still destined to become the archivist of old television that I saw myself as some day being, an ambition now frustrated, but not before the house became filled with literally hundreds of  old videotapes of the sort of tat that the "Reality shows and soaps" devouring public would really not give house room to.

I don't know what it was really that was so appealing about Mr Troughton's pixie-like space hobo (although I do think that his character was particularly well served by the Target Books range which I read at an "impressionable" age...) because, prior to that, I'd only seen the "5 Faces of Doctor Who" repeat of "The Krotons" in 1981, and "The Three Doctors" when it was actually first broadcast back in the day (as well as various clips shown on "Blue Peter" and the like, I suppose), but there was something about this version of the character that really was utterly mesmerising, and I still enjoy watching a good old-fashioned Patrick Troughton story to this day.

In fact, I will confess to being one of those folks who's still more likely to put in a 1963-1989 DVD rather than a post-2005 one when given the choice, to be perfectly honest with you, because he really is a splendid fellow...

All of them.