Five Years...

[Andrew Curnow]

It's exactly five years today (Friday 26th September 2003) that the BBC Doctor Who website added a tiny black box to its frontpage, with the news that Doctor Who was coming back!!!! That's five years in which Doctor Who as we knew it has gone through an almost unbelievable change, and is now one of the top shows in the country.

So do you remember where you were when you first heard the news that a new series was coming? What did you think? Did you expect anything like what we got?

For myself, I remember coming home that Friday, logging onto the BBC site as usual, and not reading the announcement properly at all. I saw the announcement that it was coming back, and kinda thought it was a web thing, or a repeat season, or yet another interminable movie rumour... it was a few minutes before it sunk in, at which point I emailed bruv with the tagline "HE'S BACK, AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!"

[Jeff]

I'm pretty sure I was at work and read about it here on PS. I seem to remember having to restrain myself from standing up out of my chair and raising my arms in victory in front of my co-workers...

[Logo Polish]

Got up and read the story on one of the Teletext services that morning. The headline was probably the first thing I noticed on the page.

[Captain Tancredi]

There's a big gap in my diary between July and October 2003 so I can't tell, but it would have been about ten days after I'd found that I was going to be made redundant so I can't remember how I was feeling. I did have the Saturday's Yorkshire Post for a couple of years, though, which had a Dalek on the front cover and an article inside.

[WhiteCrow]

I remember hearing about this, but the memories of the TV movie flopping were still too fresh and I thought "this is never going to happen".

Glad to be proved wrong!

[WhiteCrow]

Poo! Double post.

[Phillip Culley]

I remember it was my last day at work before going back to university, so I probably read it in the morning before going to work

Although I probably thought 'that's nice - not convinced it'll work'...

[Stuart Wallis]

I've no memory of it at all; I can't remember how or when I heard. Yet I can remember Colin being sacked nearly twenty years previously. (Mind you, that was about the time my memory went wrong in the first place. Not that I'm trying to be daft, it's just the way things turned out.)

[SiHart]

I remember it well. I was still at Longwater Road, and as usual I'd logged on to check PS and the OG news page. For some reason I'd gone to OG first and there was the news. OH MY! I thought, that can't be right, but there it was, Doctor Who coming back. So I came to PS, broke the news here (not knowing Nathan had already done so on one of the other boards on the forum) and bang, there we were.
I then sent a text to Steve to tell him. He probably found it hours later!

I was smiling all the way to work and there I read it in the papers. And all the excitement on PS! RTD! Oh my!

Si xx

[Andrew Curnow]

Oddly enough, Mr Wallis, I'm totally blank on when & where I found out about Paul McGann being cast in a genuine, it's-really-going-to-be-made-this-time, TV movie. Odd the tricks memory plays sometimes.

As for Colin's sacking, my Dad told me before I heard or read it anywhere. And it was my brother who told me that 'Peter Davison IS the Doctor' only he said 'that bloke from All Creatures' so I thought 'Christopher Timothy IS the Doctor'.

Oh, I appear to be rambling, sorry.

[Simon R]

I can still see it in my mind's eye. I was in bed as I was betwixt university and work at that time and Simon David Hunt bounded in like a big puppy and woke me up to tell me the news before he went off to work.

I think it was the same day we finished making our "Dark Dimension" thing funnily enough or at least the Blue Peter spin-off from it.

5 years. Golly gosh.

[Jonno]

Very scary to think it was 5 years (and a day) ago. I was unemployed and first saw the news when switching on the PC. My homepage has always been the BBCi Who site so of course I saw their announcement, but still wasn't wildly excited as they'd done something similar a few months earlier with Scream of the Shalka, saying that that was the return of Doctor Who - and indeed calling him the 9th Doctor!

I remember being both excited but slightly concerned as to what the show would be like and how it would fit in the 21st century landscape of soaps, reality shows etc. Litltle did I dare to dream it would hit the ground running and within 3 years become the number one show on TV!

[Stuart Wallis]

Oh, I appear to be rambling, sorry.

Rambling, forgetting things... You've not caught senility off me, have you?

[duncan]

I remember reading about it on the BBC website while at work. There was no point announcing it as there was nobody else there that would care.

Here's the page it was announced on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/.../26/7012.shtml

[Antony Cox]

I can't really remember it at all, or not where I was/what I was doing at the time, anyway...

I was pleased though!

[Stuart Wallis]

I remember reading about it on the BBC website while at work. There was no point announcing it as there was nobody else there that would care.

Here's the page it was announced on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/.../26/7012.shtml

The bit about six episodes trned out to be wrong - thank goodness!