Quote Originally Posted by dps View Post
Yeah, my local PBS station normally only did the big fund-raising pledge drives a couple or so times a year, but sometime around 1980 apparantly they were getting good ratings with Doctor Who, so they decided that it would be a good program to use for fund-raising on a regular basis.

It probably wasn't quite as bad as I've made it sound. I may not have the details exactly right--after all, it's been 30 years--but I think what was happening was that they were showing an episode of Doctor Who in the afternoons after school, and that episode wasn't interrupted by fund-raising except during their big pledge drives. But they were showing a big block of episodes all day Saturday, and started interrupting those for fund-raising all the time. The thing was, that happened about the same time I went away to college. I didn't get to see the episoded shown on weekday afternoons, but I usually came home on the weekends, so I would get to see the episoded shown on Saturdays, which were the ones being butchered. I gradually lost interest in watching them that way. I can't even remember exactly when I stopped watching, but it was sometime during Davison's run. I do remember watching a few episodes that had Turlough in them, including The Five Doctors, but I don't remember watching any with Peri (and as a straight college-age male, I certainly would have remembered Peri) so it guess it was sometime in 1984 (by that time, the local PBS station had caught up with current episodes--instead of being a couple of years behind, I think we were getting stories just a couple of months or so after the UK).
Peri showed up in Planet of Fire, the where the Master died (at least apparently) as the Peter Davison Doctor let him get burned up after the healing fire turned back into regular fire, and where Turlough and Kamelion departed. At the end of the next episode, the Caves of Androzani, the Peter Davison Doctor died and regenerated into the Colin Baker Doctor, so Peri didn't actually travel with the Peter Davison Doctor long.

Peri was one of the generation of Doctor companions who was basically may age: she was born in 1962, about two years after me. Sarah Sutton, who played Nyssa, and Matthew Waterhouse, who played Adric, were born in 1961. Technically, since the Baby Boom generation ran from 1946 through 1964, Janet Fielding, who played Tegan, is part of my generation too, about the same age as the older of my two brothers. Oddly enough, I always though of Tegan as being a bit younger than I was, and Nyssa and Adric quite a bit younger. Even Peter Davison, who was born in 1951, would qualify as a Baby Boomer if he'd been born in America. The same can be said of Louise Jamison, who played Leela, and Lalla Ward, the second Romana, both born in 1950, and Mary Tamm, the first Romana, born in 1950. Heck, even Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant, was born in 1946, but in America at least, the Baby Boom lasted so long that by the time it was done, some of the first Baby Boomers were having some of the last Baby Boomers. Oh, I see that Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, is roughly my age too, having been born in 1962, but even though she's two years younger than I am, I thought of her as being significantly younger.

I just went to look up Sylvester McCoy's birth year (1943--too old for the Baby Boom) and discovered that he's going to play Radagast the Brown in The Hobbit!! Awesome! Outstanding! Bravo!!

Ah, I see Paul McGann is almost exactly a year older than I am, making him the first Doctor to be basically my age. Eccleston is a bit more than 3 years younger. Tennant, at nearly 11 years younger, is farther from my age than Peter Davison, and Matt Smith, at 22 years younger, if the first Doctor young enough to be my son.