The boys I went to school with were football crazy, football mad. All they wanted to do was talk about Saturday’s goals and swap Panini stickers. All I wanted to do was swap Doctor Who Weetabix cards and speculate about how the Doctor might escape last Saturday’s cliffhanger. Even the boys who did watch Doctor Who didn’t want to talk about it. But then again, what do boys talk about? Even as adults, most of our interactions tended to consist of: ‘Got … Got … Need … Swap … Got’ and ‘Tag! You’re it!’

So I defected to the girls, who were a much more chatty and imaginative bunch. When we played Doctor Who in the playground, I was always the Doctor and the girls were always Sarah Jane Smith or, better yet, one of the monsters. I am still warmed by the memory of Bethany McKenna and Beverly Sharpe crushing me to death between their chests as they pretended to be the robotic bear-hugging mummies from ‘Pyramids of Mars’. Bethany and Beverly, if you are reading this, please be aware that I am hoping to restage this event in 2015 as part of this classic story’s fortieth anniversary celebrations. Do get in touch.

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Tom Baker was my Doctor. I forgot about Jon Pertwee within the first ten minutes of Tom’s debut. With his wild staring eyes and insane toothy grin, he was some way from the suave dandy played by Jon Pertwee, but by the time the Fourth Doctor had donned his floppy hat and wrapped his inordinately long multicoloured scarf around his neck, I was hooked. Mum thought he was ‘much too silly’ but she was wrong.

As much as I had loved the Third Doctor, he had silver hair, which meant I thought about him the same way I’d think about a grandfather or a kindly uncle. The Fourth Doctor was different; we didn’t know anyone like him. He looked like a nutcase, behaved like a nutcase, and, I would later learn, was being played by a nutcase. But what a nutcase.

In his second story, ‘The Ark in Space’, the Doctor has a famous speech about the indomitable spirit of mankind as a species. Tom Baker plays it like he’s onstage at the Globe Theatre, and when I watch it now, it makes me profoundly grateful that the BBC happened to cast an actor who saw no reason not to take the part of a time-travelling extraterrestrial extremely seriously. He had all the mischief and all the heroism and wisdom of previous Doctors, but he was, perhaps, the first actor who really believed he was the Doctor.

I remember two things about watching ‘The Ark in Space’ as a child. One, it scared the willies out of me, and two, I couldn’t wait to reproduce the terror I felt in the school playground the following Monday.

The monsters in ‘The Ark in Space’ – the Wirrn – were giant insects, and as you will have realised by now, giant insects always gave me trouble. This lot were a swarm of intelligent wasp-like monstrosities who wanted to impregnate you with their babies, and you knew you were in trouble if your flesh started to break out in green weeping pustules, an effect the cash-strapped BBC special effects department achieved by wrapping the actor’s hand and lower arm in painted bubble wrap.

Body horror translated well to the playground. Everyone knew how the dreaded lurgy worked. I remember Beverly Sharpe walking around with her hand stuffed in her pocket – a sure sign that she’d been infected by the Wirrn – and when she tried to strangle me with it later, I was impressed to find that she’d gone to the trouble of wrapping several layers of Sellotape around it. Beverly was the first girl I ever kissed, by the way. On the lips and everything.

I never hid behind the sofa when I watched Doctor Who. For a start, we called it a settee, not a sofa, and it was pushed right up against our living-room wall. So I’d sit on the floor with a cushion in my lap, and if things got too frightening for me, I’d bury my face in its folds. And if the sound effects were too disturbing, I’d press the corners into my ears.

I did this a lot when Tom Baker was playing the Doctor, especially during the end-of-episode cliffhangers. Like the time Sarah Jane Smith fell from some scaffolding at the end of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, part 2. I was so convinced that she couldn’t possibly survive this fall, I ran into the kitchen to find Mum.

(I didn’t feel cheated when part 3 began with Sarah Jane falling safely onto a gantry that wasn’t there the week before. She was still alive. That’s all that mattered.)

The playground games fizzled out by the end of 1976 and our last hurrah was a homage to ‘The Hand of Fear’, which was ideal for the girls because all they had to do was walk around in a trance, a palm face up in the air, repeating the phrase ‘Eldrad must live! Eldrad must live!’ over and over again. Even I could have done that.

‘The Hand of Fear’ was also Sarah Jane’s last story.

I didn’t see it coming. One minute the Doctor and his best friend are running rings around Eldrad on a planet made from ice, the next minute he’s dropping her off in Croydon because he isn’t allowed to take her to Gallifrey. It didn’t seem fair, not after everything Sarah had been through.

Sarah Jane’s departure hit me for six. I wasn’t used to companions leaving, and while I could vaguely recall her predecessor, Jo Grant, I had been too young to form any meaningful attachment to her. Sarah Jane was my first proper companion. She was the big sister I never had, the one I wanted to baby-sit me.

I wanted the Doctor to change his mind and return for her the following week, but he didn’t. It was at these moments that Tom Baker really made you believe he wasn’t quite human because a human being would have gone back for her.

There was one thing more frightening than watching Doctor Who, and that was missing Doctor Who.

Take Saturday 6 December 1975, for example. It’s 5.55 p.m. and I should have been settling down to watch ‘The Android Invasion’, part 3 at home, but instead I was playing pass-the-parcel at some kid’s birthday party. Seriously, what kind of idiot throws a birthday party when Doctor Who is on?

And then there was ‘The Ribos Operation’, part 1. Dad had taken me to see a non-league football match. I remember that it rained the whole time, there were no decent seats, the roof was leaking, neither team scored a goal and I was bored to tears. The only thing that made this treat bearable was the knowledge that a brand-new series of Doctor Who was due to start when I got home.

The match finished at 4.45 p.m., which gave us a good hour to make it home in time. However, because Dad didn’t drive, we had to wait for a lift from his friend, Bob. Bob couldn’t have been a Doctor Who fan; he wanted to have a quick pint instead. I stood in the cold, draughty corridor with a packet of pork scratchings because I wasn’t allowed into the bar. The quick pint wasn’t quick enough.

I knew we wouldn’t make it back in time when, after several more quick pints, Bob finally decided to leave. I sulked all the way home about missing Doctor Who, which at least took my mind off being driven home by someone who must have been over the legal limit. Maybe, his judgement clouded, Bob actually put his foot down because in the event I only missed the first quarter of an hour. However, in the age before repeats, videos or the internet, I would not actually get to watch those missing minutes of ‘The Ribos Operation’ for another seventeen years. Thanks, Dad.

And then I saw Star Wars.

My mum is half-right here.

When Star Wars was released in 1978, I, like every other small boy in the entire country, thought it was the most mind-blowing film I had ever seen or was ever likely to see. By the end of the 1970s, my bedroom had become a shrine to Kenner’s range of Star Wars action figures. It was a drop in the ocean compared with what was out there, but enough for me to stage some very impressive battles at the bottom of our stairs. My favourite action figure was Bossk the bounty hunter (a crocodile in a yellow jumpsuit), but I had a soft spot for Luke’s Landspeeder too, until Joanne stepped on it and snapped its wheels off.

However, I still liked Doctor Who and Tom Baker – a lot. Although the programme couldn’t compete with the lavish special effects of Star Wars – no noticeable bubble wrap in sight – its lead actor, four years in, was still unassailable. The programme had grown noticeably sillier in recent months, in an attempt to appease an old lady named Mary Whitehouse, but Tom remained as exciting, weird and mercurial as ever. And Doctor Who could still satisfy some part of my imagination that nothing else could. The only reason I was playing Star Wars on the stairs is because the Doctor Who franchise didn’t have anything like the same amount of toys available, and by this stage of my life, I’d moved beyond the realm of pure imagination and I needed some props.

For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a red Palitoy Dalek; for my ninth, I got a Denys Fisher Fourth Doctor doll to go with it. I now know that a manufacturing cock-up meant that Tom Baker’s head had to be substituted at the last minute with Gareth Hunt’s from The New Avengers. This didn’t bother me at the time as the head in question looked about as much like Tom Baker as it did Gareth Hunt (quality control on the New Avengers toys must have been half-hearted at best). There was a Denys Fisher TARDIS, too, but at £5.95 it was probably too steep for my parents’ budget, and I never got the Denys Fisher Cyberman either – the only Cyberman with a nose.

Here are a few more Doctor Who toys and tie-ins that I did have:

In 1979, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who was arguably at his most popular. Just over 16 million people tuned in to watch the final episode of ‘City of Death’. It helped that, although ‘City of Death’ is a wonderful story and Tom is magnificent throughout, there was nothing on the other side owing to industrial action at ITV. It was during this period of Baker’s apotheosis that I went to live in New Zealand for five months.

We stayed with Auntie Angie and her husband, Uncle Mike, on their farm on the outskirts of Queenstown on the rural South Island. It was in the middle of nowhere – the nearest shop was miles away – but it was surrounded by beautiful countryside, there were gorgeous views of the mountains, and there were sheep. There were lots and lots of sheep. Plus, repeats of Doctor Who were on every day of the week.

I have so many wonderful memories of that time I spent in New Zealand: the tiny Honda motorcycle that I used to ride up and down the country lanes, pretending I was Poncherello from CHiPs; catching and killing my first fish (I cried when Uncle Mike told me to bash its head in); skiing on Coronet Peak; white-water rafting; flying in a helicopter for my tenth birthday. I was even a poster boy for a deer park while I was out there.

I kept a scrapbook of my holiday in New Zealand (and of the stopovers we made in Los Angeles and Singapore) and while the first half of this memento is filled with the sort of things you’d expect – sachets of thirty-three-year-old sugar from the plane that flew us there; a blurry photo of Jaws from the Universal Studios tour; a certificate that proves I successfully milked a cow – the second half is filled with black-and-white pictures of Doctor Who.

These images were carefully scissored from issues of Doctor Who Weekly. This was a brand-new magazine that was entirely devoted to the programme, and while I missed the first issue, I must have started buying it the very moment we returned to the UK. Here are, variously, a portrait of the Second Doctor and an Ogron monster; Zygons attacking the Doctor; a pair of Sensorites; Davros’s head and a colour poster for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (how the hell did that get in there?); a Krynoid in various stages of development (three of these) and a 1960s Dalek lurking under a bridge.

The pictures in this scrapbook do prove one thing, though. Despite what my mum would have you believe about my short-lived infatuation with Star Wars …

Despite brief flirtations with inferior franchises, I remained faithful to Tom Baker and Doctor Who.

Tom Baker’s final season introduced some radical changes to the programme’s format, chief amongst them the demise of Tom Baker’s Doctor. A new producer named John Nathan-Turner was now running the show. Out went the 1970s diamond-shaped logo and time vortex title sequence, and in came bent chrome and a glittering star field – this was a new decade. Out went the wide-eyed innocent face of Tom Baker and in came the knackered, jaded face of Tom Baker, who had now been in the role for seven years. Out went the classic theme music and in came a much brasher version, with less mystery and more sparkle.

Not that I knew anything about it. I was too busy watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on the other side.

There’s a funereal feel to Tom Baker’s final season and a sombre tone permeates every frame. It didn’t matter if the Doctor was fighting vampires, marsh men or time-sensitive lions, he didn’t seem to be his old self. Resigned, almost. Spent. Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with him.

Buck Rogers, on the other hand, was fun. It had a disco-dancing hero in tight-fitting Lycra, there were exciting dogfights in space, just like in Star Wars, and the actress who played his sidekick, Wilma Deering, made me feel funny inside.

But on Doctor Who, we had long scenes of a grumpy Tom Baker staring at a BBC Micro computer while the universe was crushed to death by the grinding wheels of entropy – this really was the plot for every single episode of that series. The jokes that had replaced the violence had in turn been replaced by actual po-faced science.

Doctor Who was either growing old or growing up.

But that was OK. I was growing up, too.

Tom Baker’s final story was called ‘Logopolis’. At the end, the Doctor is forced to regenerate when he falls to his death from a radio telescope, or if you want to be really cynical about it, when somebody drops a Gareth Hunt doll off an Airfix model.

I cried.

Of course I cried.

I knew Tom was leaving long before he fell. But it wasn’t my mum who spoiled it for me this time. Tom Baker had been on Nationwide, where he had looked very sad indeed, and he told me his time was up, but I mustn’t worry, because Doctor Who would go on without him. Doctor Who would go on for ever. He promised.

And because he was Tom Baker, I believed him.