My earliest memory in life is of my baby brother peering up out of his cot, having been brought home from the hospital aged 3 days. He was a troublesome baby, always mewling, always wanting to eat whatever I had in my hand, whatever it was.

My second earliest memory is of my Father saying in a very confused and outraged tone “What the bloody heck is this?” as Ian and Barbara pushed their way into the TARDIS for the first time. The ensuing row between my parents over language in front of little me drowned out the next few minutes ( thank God for that repeat a week later or I would have waited a while to know what TARDIS  meant ) so my earliest memory of Hartnell’s era is this : confusion, a juxtaposition of the ordinary with the bizarre and a sense that I never had any idea what would happen next. How apt.

At first, I found Hartnell scary, authoritarian, a spooky mean teacher/scientist who favoured girls over boys. I did not think we would get along. But I wanted to grow up to be Ian and I wished Barbara was MY teacher…

Susan never really worked for me. I just knew no one like her and no one who liked her, even the girls in my school did not like her. None of us called our Gramps or Pa or Pop or Poppa or Grand-Dad, Grandfather – she seemed so…weird…

Both my Grandfathers were dead by then – I still had both Grandmothers, but no Grandfather. So the whole Susan/Grandfather experience was intensely foreign to me.

After that first episode, I would go and sit on the front steps and look at the stars at night and see if I could detect a flying Police Box. Often, my mother would find me there asleep and have to carry me in.  I was obsessed with finding it – because, obviously, if it was on Telly it was real. That American President had been shot and that was “real life” as my Mother put it and something I needed “to get used to”. I got so angry with myself that I was too silly to find the TARDIS in the sky.

In that first year, every week’s episode was like a month of holidays. It utterly transported me to strange and wild places – I totally believed that Daleks were real, that I could meet Kublai Khan ( and therefore every historical figure I wanted to meet) and just have the most blazing bizarre adventures – because nothing like that happened in my street or to anyone I knew. And it was all safe – you might get into tight spaces, but no one who travelled in the TARDIS died. Exciting fun.

It is difficult to explain now, in this world full of Star Wars and Alien and Star Trek reboots and the Battlestar Galactica reimagining and Buffy and Fringe and Star Gate franchises and Grimm and Once Upon A Time and Games of Thrones and Firefly and Revolution – but Hartnell’s Who took the place of all of those then – because there was nothing else like it.

When I realised that Hartnell could simply not get Ian and Barbara home, that he was not as smart as he seemed, I was very upset. How could he be so mean to them? It is a testament to the skill of Ian Russell and Jacqueline Hill that they made me like, understand and admire the Doctor – they shaped him into someone I came to adore.

For me, it was never about the Daleks. I never got why everyone went mad over them. I just thought they were stupid looking aliens who were bad – what was the fuss? I never understood why they did not shoot enemies on sight always rather than just sometimes. No, for me it was the permanent sense of having no idea what would happen next, how they would escape the cliff-hanger or what would happen the following week or where or when they would be. The weeks flew by, but the only thing on my mind was – what is happening?

It thrilled me like nothing on Television has before or after. And I fell madly in love with the TARDIS…

When Susan went, I was a little sad but, honestly, I was glad – she was whiny! And Vicki was prettier, smarter and cooler – I liked her a lot and she seemed to make the Doctor more at ease. ( Decades later I came to realise that this was my reaction to the acting; Carole Anne Ford irritated me because she was not very good; Maureen O’Brien capitalised on every thing she did. Hartnell responded to her certainty of performance. But, as a child, I only knew what I felt…)

These days, everyone knows months in advance that a companion is coming or going – but then, the departures were actually shocking. Susan staying behind with David Campbell in Dalek Invasion of Earth broke me and I didn’t even like her! It broke me because Hartnell clearly conveyed his sense of loss. I just wanted to tell him it would be okay.

But, from the start, my connection with the show was first the adventures and second Ian and Barbara. I remember particularly loving Marco Polo, Sensorites,  Aztecs and even Keys of Marinus.

When Ian and Barbara left, I thought I would die. I was SO upset. They were the heart and soul of the programme for me – and I went from ambivalence to the Daleks to actively hating them, because they had taken my Ian and my Barbara.

But Vicki made me see the good scientist hero that by then Ian and Barbara had made the Doctor – and her episodes in the TARDIS  rank as some of my favourite Hartnell episodes because it was through her I came to “get” him. I loved Galaxy Four and The Romans and Space Museum ( really the first attempt at timey-wimey stuff) and Web Planet. ( I used to make my brothers play Zarbi games) The Time Meddler was just outstanding in that time and the excitement I felt when Vicki and Steven discovered the Monk had a TARDIS…well, that was my first squee I am sure!

I was very upset when Vicki left – I think she is often underestimated. She was the one who made the template of the independent girl who was not Susan work – the seeds of all the great female characters are sown by Vicki and the fact that we, the audience, accepted her created one of the enduring format points for the programme: young women, substitute figures for his grandchild, travel in the TARDIS and have adventures. Vicki was the first substitute companion – and I thought she rocked.

Steven was fine but bland. I liked the Daleks for the first time in Dalek Masterplan, probably because of Kevin Stoney’s wonderful performance and the re-appearance of the Monk. The Daleks were the first and, then anyway, only recurring villains; the Monk was the first and only member of the Doctor’s race we knew then. It was Peter Butterworth’s masterful turn which set the scene for the opening of Pandora’s Box in a few years in War Games.

The other thing about Dalek Masterplan was, for the first time, people who flew in the TARDIS died. This seriously changed the game. From now on, no one who flew in the TARDIS was automatically safe. This really frightened me.

I still can see Katarina being sucked into space…very clearly. It was harrowing.

It was Hartnell’s time, too, and this is often forgotten,  which set the format point of doing adventures in wildly different styles and tone from story to story. This was unheard of and almost unfathomable back then – and it made the programme all the more exciting.

I never clicked with Dodo really, but I really liked The Ark, The Massacre, Celestial Toymaker and Savages – wildly different stories where Hartnell shone.

The arrival of Ben and Polly really enthused me- I liked them very much. They were cool, tough and nice – and their adventures seemed somehow scarier. Maybe that was because the Doctor seemed to be getting more erratic. ( Much is made now of how Hartnell fluffed lines and was unprofessional, but as a viewer I had no sense of that til I went to University. He seemed the same as a lot of television actors at that time- mistakes were things you coped with. Alone)

Then came the Cybermen in Tenth Planet and, literally, everything changed. They terrified me. And they killed the Doctor – or so it seemed. I never forgave them for that – and they have always had a special place in the terror chamber in my heart as a result.

I have never bought this revisionist notion that Hartnell was a “crotchety old man”; he was both never just that and vastly more than that. He was a scientist, a meddler, self important, slightly amoral, inquisitive, a liar, proud, secretive, manipulative, sometimes silly but always willing to take a stand for what he thought was right – if he could be bothered. He had a Universe view of the affairs of men and monsters, and he was unafraid to express it. And he knew how to get his own way.

He taught me self-confidence and a real sense of right and wrong. And – that knowledge is power – I will never forget him curing the common cold in order to save Steven’s  life – he was smart and protected his friends. He worried that Ian and Barbara would not make it home in the Dalek time machine, he really worried.

My top five favourite Hartnell stories?Tenth Planet,  Dalek Masterplan, Aztecs, Time Meddler and Galaxy Four. Top ten? Add Web Planet, Marco Polo, The Ark, Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Massacre.

It was a wild time those Hartnell years!