Lord help me, I remember seeing it first time round. William Hartnel, an old grouch if ever there was one, of many British army films where he was a sgt major, was her Grandfather then, an eccentric inventor, before they realised how successful the series would be, and that they'd need to replace him, thus engendering the idea of a timelord.

>What about Dr Who? I've just got the first episode with the Daleks as well as the very first episode ever, An Unearthly Child. For those who aren't familiar with Dr Who, the first episode is about a 15-year-old girl who lives in a Police phone box in a junkyard and is accidentally taken back to caveman times when the phone box is stormed by two of her teachers. That sort of thing used to happen all the time in Britain in the 1960s. ;-)

Don't be daft. Nobody went in police phone boxes; only coppers had the keys! :-)

>
>Despite the ham acting, overt sexism, BBC English spoken not only by cavemen from 10,000 years ago but also by alien creatures who have never visited Earth, and notoriously bad special effects, it's really enjoyable. I'm looking forward to the one where Dr Who goes exploring with Marco Polo and saves Kubli Khan, and the one where he gets trapped in Mexico in Aztec times and has to re-invent the wheel.

And they never had universal English in any other SF series? OK Star Trek has a universal translator that strangely manages to lip-synch the alien speaker, AND, in cases of reverse grammar, as in "You into jail tommorow go must", manages to predict the end of the sentence and put the words in the correct English order - before they've even been spoken! And even stranger, when an English-speaking Klingon, or Picard for that matter, suddenly decides to speak Klingon, the translator somehow knows to switch itself off.

And where the hell is it, esp. when they're on an alien planet? They hadn't even invented modile miniature cameras, although we have them now ("What can you see, Number One?").