Can you remember the first time you ever watched a program on a television set?  I can.  It was in Geoffrey Hunter's house, and his mother gathered some of us kids in from the street and we sat in a little semi-circle on the floor and were instantly enchanted by the screen, with the black and white images imprinting on our brains like words on a page, or maybe more like the type set for ink to press onto the paper.  And the voices and music!  This was better than radio, and almost as good as a book!

We didn't have a television set in our house, of course.  Few people did -- they were expensive for a young couple with children, and it was a while before one arrived and took up residence in the corner, on a hall table brought in to serve as a stand.  I loved a program called Jackanory, because it told a story every day, the readers had warm, story-tellers' voices, and there were pictures to ilustrate the narrative: pictures from the very books that the readers were holding.  I felt transported right into the book, as if I had it right in front of me to read for myself only better.    Programs such as this sound simplistic today; we have been programmed to receive much more complex visual detail and are hungry to be overwhelmed with images, as if the words were not enough, and the images have to move, and be rich with color and vibrant with life.  Back then, the words and pictures of a storybook pulled off the shelf were enough to hold me spellbound. 

Alice in Wonderland was one of my favorite books when I was a kid (still is, actually); my mother read it to me more than once, bless 'er 'eart, and my love was born for fantastical worlds created with the wondrous lexicon available to the English language. Fantastical worlds and wondrous, witty language. I was a prime candidate to being morphed into a science fiction lover, and alone came a crusty, authoritarian old man who got into a police telephone box and was transported to other worlds. I can still hear the noise the Tardis made when the central hub of the engine cranked up. The first Dr. Who was played by William Hartnell, and he was a Time Lord who appeared on Earth in !963, making himself such a part of the consciousness of children who watched that we were no strangers to concepts such as wumphing wormholes (never mind the astrophysics!) -- we'd already seen the Tardis wooshing through space and into infinity. . . . Watch the clever video of the title sequences below by ReverseThePolarity, and you can see why we were ready for Star Trek and Star Wars and every other science fiction show since. What do you think Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy watched when he was young? (Adams went on to write nine episodes of the series between 1978 and 1983.)

The fact that every few years the Time Lord took on a new body was not only a great way to keep the show from becoming stale, but was a good sci fi strategy to enchant us kids with this concept that we now take for granted: putting someone's entire set of memories and "essence" into another person. Mary Shelley would have loved it. Her fictional Dr. Victor Frankenstein would be envious of the facility with which the Time Lords could "regenerate" into a different doctor with different tastes (long scarves, jelly babies for Tom Baker) and a different spin on the vastly compendious knowledge of this superior being who could often be impatient with us mere mortals (his many companions all have to face the fact that while they will age and die, the Doctor would still be leaving and having more adventures without them). Patrick Troughton, the witty Tom Baker, boyish Peter Davison, Sylveste McCoy, the incredible dignity and feeling Christopher Eccleston brought to the part -- Who's your favorite Who?

I do remember being petrified by the Daleks until my dad explained that there were only three or four of them, and that they were going out of one doorway (in the wogeously underfinanced BBC studio set) and back round into the other again. He convinced me when he pointed out a scuff mark on the third Dalek that did indeed reappear. Phew! We weren't going to be overrun with machines emitting the ominous word "EXTERMINATE!" over and over in electronically altered tones. But then the Cybermen came along. . . and I was back behind the sofa, almost too scared to peek at the screen but too addicted to quit. Yep. That's when I became a scifi geek.