I had the misfortune of growing up with parents who, when the family television quit working (in 1976, when I was 10), decided that we were better off without it. I was effectively raised without TV, and I never even heard of Doctor Who until I was in my 30s and discovered the Internet. So … I don’t have much Doctor Who cred. I was in my late 40s when I discovered the rebooted series on Netflix, and started watching.
So, my first Doctor was Christopher Eccleston. I really liked him, and was disappointed that he only stuck it out for one season/series. His successor, David Tennant, is a bit over-the-top for my tastes. Fine actor, but … too much. And I will confess that part of the reason I like Christopher Eccleston is that his companion was Billie Piper (I seem to remember starting a thread about “instant boners”, and cited Billie Piper …)
ETA: Whoa, I just discovered that Eccleston was in Thor: The Dark World, and I didn’t notice him.
Tom Baker. First saw Doctor Who on the WOR cable superstation, in early '83, near the end of my senior year of high school.
When I went off to college (University of Wisconsin-Madison), the PBS station there played Doctor Who on Sunday afternoons. At that time, they were playing all of the Tom Baker shows in order, and (other than special showings of The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors) I didn’t see a non-Tom Baker episode until my sophomore year, when they went back to showing Jon Pertwee’s episodes.
I’d seen some Jon Pertwee episodes prior to Baker but it was Baker in the role when I really started loving the show. I stopped watching pretty soon after they changed to a new Doctor in '81 :mad:
I first caught an episode of “Genesis of the Daleks” out of the Boston PBS station (I had heard of the show) around 1980. Couldn’t get a good impression of it.
They started running it here in 1981, stripping it – one episode a day. I missed the first week, so the first episode I saw was the second one in “The Pirate Planet,” written by Douglas Adams. I immediately became a fan.
Sylvester McCoy. I know I would have seen most of them from the late 60s on (my parents were big fans of the local PBS station and it was one of the few stations we got well) on but it wasn’t until Seven that I really got into the series and stories.
Odd thing is Baker is probably the one I remembered the look of the best. There was something about that scarf that burned itself into my brain. Didn’t follow the show and I had to look up his name but that look really made an impression.
The very first episodes of “Doctor Who” I saw were the first two Jon Pertwee / UNIT era seasons. (I saw them on the Buffalo PBS station in the mid-70s.) I liked the show, but apparently nobody else in the area did, as it went off the air quickly. A few years later, PBS gave it another go with the first four years of Tom Baker’s run, and it proved popular enough that it stayed on air for several years.
When I began watching the Baker episodes, I missed the first serial “Robot” that showed the Doctor regenerate, so I didn’t initially know that the Doctor from this ‘new’ (Baker) series was the same person as the Doctor from the ‘old’ (Pertwee) series. Therefore, I always do think of Baker as my ‘first’ Doctor, even though I’d seen Pertwee first.
The Third Doctor, Pertwee. His run was repeated at least once on TV before we went to Fourth, which put us way out of schedule with the UK, they were always at lest one Doctor ahead of us which confused me pop culturally. Three is near the bottom of my list, though, as I find him prickly and pompous. I wish the Second Doctor had been my first, he was sprightly and whimsical.
My favourite Doctor from the original series is Seven, but I did enjoy Five’s run too.
Whoever was on whatever version came on in the late 80s on PBS (Maryland Public Television, more specifically). We could not get cable, so we were limited to the small-town CBS affiliate, the ABC station when the weather was perfect, and PBS. When I got tired of Rescue 911 or Jake and The Fatman, I would turn on PBS. I vaguely remember the most boring thing ever, and my dad explaining it was Doctor Who. Imagine my surprise 20 years later when it seemed to become some widespread cultural phenomenon and discussed on message boards, even among U.S. residents with cable and modern audio/video technology.
Tom Baker, but I could never watch any episode all the way through - they really dragged in those days. I think each episode was three hours, divided into two parts playing over two weeks, and they didn’t start in my market until 10:30 pm. Even then I didn’t like staying up that late, especially not with their cardboard and string monsters and the slooooow story lines.
I did like Tom Baker though, enough to keep trying, until I saw the transition into Peter Davison. I didn’t like him enough to keep at it, and I lost touch after that, until #10.
My first Doctor was David Tennant (I was a latecomer to Who fandom, but made up for it by becoming pretty much obsessed with it afterward). I was familiar with Tom Baker growing up since Doctor Who was on PBS, but I never watched an episode–it was just another weird British PBS show.
Tennant is tied with Peter Capaldi for my favorite Doctor. My favorite classic Doctor is Jon Pertwee’s Three.
I think that, in those days, the actual episodes (as they ran on the BBC) were only 30 minutes, but each “episode” was a serialized part of a story, which would run over the course of several weeks, 30 minutes at a time. When the PBS stations in the US started running the series, it seems like many of them would run one story at a time (which might run for several hours).
The PBS station in Madison ran the show at something like 1pm on Sunday afternoons, though the end time was variable, as they would show all of the individual episodes from a story back-to-back. A lot of the Pertwee stories seemed to be six or seven episodes long; my roommate and I would watch the show every week, and “complain” when it became clear that the story wasn’t going to be done until 4 or 5pm, as it was delaying us actually getting down to doing homework.
The first I ever saw was Tom Baker…but I never managed to catch a full serial, so his episodes never made sense, so he never left a good impression on me.
The first I ever caught a full serial of was Pertwee…but the PBS channel we got the episodes on played holy hell with the schedule, so I was never sure when it was on.
So, my first actual Doctor, the one I actually followed, happened a couple years later, when YTV started showing Doctor Who, with the beginning of Sylvester McCoy’s tenure.
Myself, I first saw the Tom Baker episodes on PBS back in 1978. At about the same time, I discovered Monty Python’s Flying Circus, also on PBS. That was a good week.
I technically saw some Who before, but only just looking at that weird stuff on PBS that I didn’t understand. So my first Doctor was either Eccleston or McGann–I can’t remember which I saw first.
The first one I saw was Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor), on a dodgy little black and white screen, as I recall. Like one or two episodes of a Leela-era serial.
But after that I got to know Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor), sort of, through the novelization of one of his stories. We didn’t typically get Doctor Who on television in my area. Actually, since I fell in love with Doctor Who through books, I think maybe my first Doctor was really Terrance Dicks, who did so many of those novelizations. (Especially of Three and Four.)
Then I had comic-book adventures of the Fifth Doctor. Years later, I watched some serials of the Seventh Doctor. And then much later got back into it with the Ninth Doctor (Eccleston) and Billie Piper (who is amazing, yeah).
Ecclestone. First and favourite, hands down. Capaldi rapidly becoming the second-favourite over Tennant. But I like all the Nu-Who Doctors, which is more than I can say for the Old Who ones.
