Happy nine hundred and fiftieth birthday Dr Who. I cannot remember where I was when I heard of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember watching the first episode of Dr Who and the first event now seems so trivial in cultural and historical terms compared to the second.

If birth or accomplishment makes you an Eccentric Upper Middle Class Brit then you have indeed won first prize in the human race; and you become part of civilisation’s vanguard, and its protection.

I was so glad that the series made that perfectly clear to me, it set the course of my life.

The Doctor seemed like the best bits of all our wizards and scientists from Dee and Bacon to Newton, Maxwell, Mathers, and perhaps even a touch of Dirac, all rolled into one.

Armed only with good manners, superior knowledge, and an electronic screwdriver (magic wand?) the good Doctor sees off the Nazi Daleks and all manner of nasty cosmic riff-raff and catastrophe without unseemly violence. He carries nothing as inelegant and American as a gun.

I didn’t really buy into the comic superheroes apart from perhaps Dr Strange - we had a better and more quirky UK version, THE Doctor.