My first episode was Destiny of the Daleks all the way back in the 1980s, which I think was a good episode to start on.
Tom Baker is also my first doctor. The first story I watched was Robot, which I didn’t realize until much later was also his first story. Of course, I didn’t understand anything at that point, except it was fantastic.
I’m in the U.S., so I was watching on PBS. Due to the weirdness of our cable system at the time, I could never reliably figure out when it was on again. Life was different then.
We couldn’t even see it on PBS because our local station didn’t show it. My (much older) brother had a friend in another state who would send us VHS tapes and he would hook one VCR to another VCR and copy them and send the tapes back. He had mostly Three and Four episodes, but he sent a few Five ones before my brother went off to college.
I also watched it on PBS via antenna though. 2 seasons over and over. There was no nerd culture then, just nerd. My mom knitted me a scarf just like his
When I was in college, a friend gave me a complete run of Five that he had taped from his PBS station and every single time, there was a break and the announcer would say, “we’ll return to the Doctor Who movie in just a moment…” and it drove me crazy because, you know, it’s not a freakin’ movie!
I’ve got the scarf my mom made hanging in my laundry room waiting to be very, very gently washed (for the first time ever, so I’m a bit nervous).
In high school marching band I would roll it up and bring it with to football games, then unroll it on the aluminum bleachers and let the majorettes sit in a row on either side of me. Did that until I got a girlfriend who played flute in the band. Then we’d use it.
