“Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the Fourth Dimension?” 

 The First Doctor, An Unearthly Child

First broadcast on 23 November 1963, Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction television series in the world whose leading role has been played by twelve different actors. 

Aquinas College in Stockport is offering an evening class in the history of Doctor Who, starting on Tuesday 14 April and lasting 11 weeks.

This course will look at the creation of Doctor Who by BBC’s head of drama, Sydney Newman, and producer Verity Lambert, in the early months of 1963. 

The course will then follow its history over the following five decades, including the Twelve Doctors from William Hartnell to Peter Capaldi; the many companions from Susan to Clara; and the role of producers, writers and script editors such as Terrance Dicks, Barry Letts, John Nathan Turner, Andrew Cartmel and Russell Davies . We will discover why Doctor Who was taken off air in 1989 and how, against all the odds, it returned in 2005 to critical acclaim and is now watched by millions, both in Britain and abroad. Each week the course will view a number of episodes from each Doctor’s era. 

 The course will be led by historian and researcher Michael Herbert who watched the first episode, aged 8, and has been watching ever since. His pamphlet “Doctor Who and the Communist” : the television career of Malcolm Hulke was published by Five Leaves Press in January 2015. Paul McGann (the eighth Doctor) tweeted; “Michael Herbert has nicked the title of my memoirs”.

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