There were only three of them—Ringo was on sick leave at the time and a lad named Lennie Nicol had his Warhol fifteen minutes as stand-in drummer. They rode about the airport tarmac on the back of a truck while a cyclone wire fence and a line of police strained to hold back a sea of screaming, ecstatic girls. A few days later, when they flew on to other cities and were rejoined by Ringo, the lone forlorn figure of Lennie Nicol was seen at Essendon airport, utterly unregarded by anyone except a sharp-eyed photographer as he made his has-been journey home. Fame is so fickle.

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Each day I skimmed the newspaper—rarely was the main body of news interesting to me but I never missed the section on new TV programs. Rewards for this persistence were rare, but one night the headline was a certainty. WHO’S Dr WHO? it asked. Who indeed! It appeared to be science fiction so I was in. A funny looking little old man, but he had a time machine and was therefore irresistible. But alas—the new program was on the ABC (which Horrie disdainfully declared was for posh folk, not us real people) and at 7.30pm on Saturday night—an impossible time. Only on those rare occasions when everyone except me was out of the house did I get to see it, and it’s serialised form did not lend itself to such piece-meal viewing. Still I hungered for it.
  A decade or so later, the ABC was good enough to repeat the whole thing at a more civilised hour and I watched it all in awe. William Hartnell was an old ham actor who over-played painfully, the special effects teetered and wobbled and the monsters were never convincing, the story lines desperately dodgy and repetitive. In other words, it was just plain wonderful.