It’s Saturday 3 February 1973. A silver-haired man and a young, pretty woman are hiking through a swamp when an unfamiliar sound stops them in their tracks. They hear it again: a plaintive, mournful cry. They scan the horizon for the source of this strange noise when suddenly, without warning, the landscape explodes with a blood-curdling scream. ‘Look!’ cries the woman, as a ferocious dog with an impossibly long neck rises out of the mud to tower above them, marsh water dripping from its razor-sharp fangs.

The woman stares in wide-eyed horror as an identical monster forces its way out of the ground to join its kin. But wait … That isn’t its neck … That’s its body. The head of a vicious dog on the body of a giant, hairy slug.

This isn’t just my first memory of Doctor Who; it’s my first memory of anything.

*

My name is Neil because I was born on Monday 6 October 1969. For a while, my parents Sandra (a nurse) and Michael (a welder) seriously considered naming me after the second man on the moon, which means you might now be reading a book by Aldrin Perryman. I would have preferred Buzz. Either way, it would probably be quite a different book from this one.

The details of my early childhood are frustratingly vague because, perhaps fortunately, Mum seems to have forgotten nearly everything. We may never know what really happened on the Swiss border that day in 1970. There’s no actual proof that the woman in question was a lesbian; according to my mum, she just ‘dressed like one’. And as Mum correctly surmises, I don’t remember any of it, since I was only a few months old and full cognitive powers were still some way off.

A few weeks shy of my second birthday Mum and Dad gave me a baby sister. Her name was, and is, Joanne. I don’t recall her arrival chez Perryman, but there is a black-and-white photograph taken the day she was brought home from the hospital. I am wearing black leather lederhosen and grizzling – I look like a resentful member of the Hitler Kindergarten – so we can assume I was unhappy about either (a) the lederhosen, (b) Joanne or (c) both. But who knows? It’s pure guesswork.

So, the first three years of my life are mysterious to me. But this all changes on Saturday 3 February 1973 at 6.13 p.m.: the precise moment that my brain’s inbuilt recording equipment finally whirrs into action, just in time to capture an image of a silver-haired man in a green velvet smoking jacket traipsing through a swamp.

My wife isn’t convinced.

She does have a point. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have thrilled to the cliffhanger of ‘Carnival of Monsters’, episode 2. I definitely saw it again at the age of twelve, thanks to a BBC Two repeat; when it was released on video cassette; again in 2003 when it came out on DVD (I took the day off work especially to watch it). And because you can never own too many copies of ‘Carnival of Monsters’, I happily bought it again when the BBC re-released it as part of a box set, carefully remastered for optimum glove-puppet clarity. And that doesn’t include all the times I’ve seen it in trailers, documentaries, YouTube mash-ups and, of course, my dreams.

As an adult – of sorts – I know practically everything there is to know about that scene. I know that it was filmed at Tillingham Marshes in Essex, for example, and that the monsters’ name – Drashig – is an anagram of ‘dishrag’. I am also fully aware that they are not real monsters, and that the effect employed a technique called CSO, or colour separation overlay, today known as blue screen, although in those days they used a yellow backdrop (in reality a curtain), which would often result in a fizzy Ready Brek line around the monster. I also know that this era-specific technical phenomenon has its own name – fringing.

But I don’t remember only the fringed Drashigs. I also recall the colour of our carpet in Lavender Avenue (brown), its walls (dark pine), and its curtains (orange). I can see myself sitting bolt upright in an armchair (black-and-white stripes) clutching a beaker of squash in one fist and a half-eaten Farley’s rusk in the other. But there’s more: Auntie Angie is there. She might have been babysitting, or she might have come to say goodbye. It’s my last memory of her for a very long time, because she emigrated to New Zealand the following week. When we finally visited her six years later, I was elated to discover that New Zealand TV showed daily vintage episodes of Doctor Who.

Aged three, I wasn’t afraid of the Drashigs. Doctor Who didn’t scare me – yet. The fear would come, but I was still too young to fully understand it. In another memory I can see a group of angry lizard men shouting at the Doctor. Nothing else. Just that. The image is in black and white, so I probably watched it on my nana’s TV. I can also work out when I first saw a Dalek – Saturday 14 April 1973: ‘Planet of the Daleks’, episode 2. I still wasn’t scared, but I remember feeling sick: my head resting on my mother’s lap and her telling me not to worry – ‘Your tummy ache will go away soon’ – as she gently stroked my hair. When I watch ‘Planet of the Daleks’ now I still wish someone would stroke my hair and tell me that everything is going to be OK.

No, fear arrived a few weeks later. Icy cold tendrils of pure terror first wrapped themselves around me during a story called ‘The Green Death’.

You may have heard of this one. When people talk about old episodes of Doctor Who they often talk about ‘The Green Death’ – or ‘the one with the giant maggots’, as it is often referred to. And these maggots – created not with CSO but by inflating some condoms – are pretty scary. But for me, aged four, it was what those giant maggots were destined to become that traumatised me.

In ‘The Green Death’, ordinary maggots have grown huge after being irradiated by poisonous sludge, so when they emerge from the larval state they metamorphose into giant toxic flies. Like normal flies, they vomit to aid digestion. However, because they are giant, irradiated and toxic, their spew is green and noxious, and if just the tiniest amount of it touches your flesh, you’ve had it. Painfully. It’s my first memory of watching Doctor Who that brings up feelings of genuine dread and terror: that giant fly, squatting malevolently on a coal slag in Wales, with its ruby red eyes and twitching antennae … Just thinking about it now makes me feel a little uneasy. When push comes to shove, you could easily outrun a giant maggot, or just step over one. The maggots crawled around aimlessly, hissing, and could probably be popped with a pin anyway. But I was convinced the fly had a personal grudge against Neil Perryman, and it was coming to spew its toxic, green vomit mercilessly over me.

That summer, the suburb of Coventry where we lived was invaded by a colony of flying ants. I was too scared to go outside for three days, convinced that I would die screaming if one of them landed on me. I had glimpsed mortal terror in a handful of glowing CSO vomit. My mother, not unreasonably, didn’t let me watch Doctor Who for ages after that.

The next story I remember vividly was ‘Planet of the Spiders’, which was broadcast a year after ‘The Green Death’, but not much had changed. Once again I was reliably and predictably terrified of the spiders.

Is ‘Planet of the Spiders’ responsible for my acute arachnophobia? When I jump on tables to avoid them, or scream in public places like that woman in the swamp, is it Doctor Who’s fault? Or did Doctor Who unknowingly compound an already inbuilt fear of the eight-legged creatures? If it’s the former, then this story has caused me more missed heartbeats, more embarrassment and more nightmares than I care to recall. But if it’s the latter, I don’t hold it against the writers and producers. They were only doing their job.

When I was four, I didn’t just like Doctor Who. I liked playing in the park on the swings and roundabouts; I liked sticklebricks, Lego, Play-Doh, Play School, Andy Pandy and playing with the kids next door. I liked scoffing Curly Wurlys, bathing with toy frogmen and sleeping with stuffed Wombles. But the thing I loved more than anything else – and probably still do – was being scared by Doctor Who.

For me, though, what I remember most about ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is that the Doctor was scared.

This horrified me at the time. The Doctor was never scared. It didn’t matter if he was faced with Daleks, Ice Warriors or savage dogs with impossibly long necks, the Doctor was always in control. Even when things looked really bad (usually towards the end of an episode), I was never that worried. The Doctor would sort it out in the end. Those were the rules.

But in this particular episode, the Doctor has that look on his face. The look that says: someone has poured me into a tight pair of leather lederhosen against my wishes. The Doctor looked like he was going to cry. And with good reason. At the end of the story, the Doctor died.