Our Guests
Adam Richard was born between parts 2 and 3 of Terror of the Autons, and the first episode he remembers seeing was the last episode of Planet of the Spiders (he was 5!) His fave story is Ark in Space, because his old favourite is considered racist now…or lacist as John Bennett would say. When he was 12, Adam queued up to meet the 5th Doctor at Myer, and then again some 30 years later (though not in Myer this time) — such fun! Adam has been a stand-up comedian, gossip queen, writer and actor for over 20 years. In 2012 he co-wrote and starred in ABC comedy Outland, about a group of gay science fiction fans. He is currently a senior writer on the ABC’s Hard Quiz, and was a regular panellist on Whovians.
Following a family trip to Bali when he was seven years old, Adrian Phoon wrote a short story called Doctor Who and the Rangda about the Doctor crossing paths with a demonic Balinese goddess.
Decades later, he returned to Bali and wondered how Tegan would fare with Bintang.
Bjay Hobbs fondly remembers watching Doctor Who after school with her much older brother from the age of five. She would always get upset whenever the Doctor regenerated — especially when it was one of her favourite Doctors like, Tom Baker or the Doctor with the celery stick (Peter Davison, of course). Years later, while living with her sister, Bjay re-experienced that joy, sharing the excitement of the Doctor’s return when the series kicked off again with Christopher Eccleston — her new favourite — and David Tennant. It’s a family thing, really — regenerating that joy across generations.
Col Sillitto grew up reading Targets and watching Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy after school in real time. After that, he had to get up at 4 AM every morning to hit record on his VHS player because the timer didn’t work — a selfless task he repeated day in and day out for the entirety of the classic series repeats on the ABC. His greatest achievement was meeting his comrades in arms Dan and Steve and creating the New To Who podcast with them. His second greatest achievement was meeting and striking up friendships with all of the lovely people the world over within this niche podcasting community. And his third greatest achievement is interviewing Christopher H Bidmead. He loves Flight Through Entirety and his turn-offs include bad feet and pushy people.
Colin Neal’s earliest memory is of Lalla Ward in a quarry trapped inside a clear plastic cylinder. When he mentioned this to her at a convention, she replied, “Oh, you never forget your first companion, darling”. His favourite Classic seasons are the Key to Time and The Trial of a Time Lord; his favourite New Who episodes are The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End. He has quite a fondness for Clara and Ace, he once ate some of Nicola Bryant’s lemon meringue pie, and he was not quick enough to find celery after spotting Peter Davison that one time in Marks and Spencer.
Conrad Westmaas’s earliest memory (of anything) is the Sea Devils emerging from the sea on a repeat of Episode Three. His formative TARDIS era was the Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry versus Giant Robots, Wirrn, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Zygons etc, which has resulted in a lifelong addiction to Weetabix, Typhoo tea and Saturday nights. Conrad served as a footsoldier in the Wilderness Years, working for DWM and Big Finish, and can often be found setting off the Ben Jackson Klaxon™ on Twitter at @hairofthehound_. He was recently put in a headlock by Marek Anton and is still recovering from the undercurrents.
Corey McMahon’s first memory of Doctor Who was The Horns of Nimon. Thankfully things improved from that point onwards (well, for a time) and he’s been watching Doctor Who ever since. He once dressed up as Adric at Whovention in 1990 and still regularly attends therapy in order to work through the issues that experience raised for him. Corey’s favourite classic series Doctor is Patrick Troughton and won’t hear a bad word said about The Underwater Menace. He lives for the day Matt Smith will coming knocking on his door. In his spare time he works as a theatre director and producer and runs a company called Theatre Republic.
Dan from New to Who was a small child in 1988 London, fearfully watching Sylvester McCoy juggle through a crack in the doorway, when he first swore his allegiance to Doctor Who and to juggling. He spent the nineties in Western Australia borrowing Targets from the library, repeatedly renting the same ten VHSes and waking up at 4 AM to watch cruelly scheduled ABC broadcasts. He still can’t quite believe the show has returned in such a wonderful fashion, and must often stop himself doomsday prepping for a second cancellation. Tragically, he never learned to juggle.
Erik Stadnik’s first ever Doctor Who story was the 1996 TV Movie starring Paul McGann. He didn’t watch Doctor Who again for about twenty years, though those two facts may not be causally linked. He has strong opinions about writing, characterization, dialogue, and theme, and generally doesn’t give a toss about bad CG or iffy CSO, and he thinks you shouldn’t either. He has been a co-host of several Doctor Who-related podcasts, most recently Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room (since regenerated) and The Real McCoy. He also contributed to the essay collections Queers Dig Time Lords and Outside In 2, in which he attempted to turn Daleks in Manhattan into a musical. He currently lives in Prague, where almost nobody has heard of Doctor Who.
When Fiona Tomney was a little girl, she wanted to be a scientist, and so when she grew up, she became a scientist. SHE lives on a farm on the edge of the South Australian outback with her incredibly gorgeous husband and two sons, three horses, three dogs, two cats, three chooks and 6,000 sheep. Her favourite Doctor is Matt Smith, and she will defend Malcolm Clarke’s theme for The Sea Devils to the death.
It wasn’t just Sylvester McCoy that the Daleks terrified when they flew up the stairs in Remembrance of the Daleks: eight-year-old Frazer Gregory had a change of underwear moment as well. Naturally, a fan was born in that very moment – just in time for the show to be taken off air. Frazer was then raised on a diet of VHS, BBC repeats and DWM, until Paul McGann’s shoes became the BEST THING EVER!!! (This explains a lot about him, we think.)
Frazer has not knowingly missed an episode of Doctor Who since that night in October 1988, and has not knowingly let an opinion on Doctor Who pass him by without disagreeing with it. When he’s not on Twitter or WordPress, putting out his own strange opinions for all to see and hear, you’ll find him in the Northeast of England, desperately trying to find people to talk to about Quarks.
Greg Miller is older than Doctor Who. He watched the Show from The Tomb of the Cybermen through to Vengeance on Varos, before retiring in distress at what the Show had become. He returned to the fold to buy the Show on VHS (also in books and on audio). Favourite story (today, just watched for the first time since 1968) is The Abominable Snowmen and least favourite (always) is Attack of the Cybermen. He has retired from the world to a highland hermitage, to work on his magnum opus in iambic pentameter, Padmasambhava on Raxacoricofallapatorius.
Hannah Cooper was enticed by the 2005 trailers for new Doctor Who and quickly realised that the first decade and a bit of her life had been deprived. This swiftly led to UKTV Gold’s weekend omnibuses and eBay bids on deleted Peter Davison videos (still livid at being fleeced of £11.40 for The King’s Demons), as well as a slippery road towards lots of 1970s TV — some great, some awful, all of it fascinating. Her favourite story is The Caves of Androzani, and she still wonders if anyone else first encountered the Second Doctor via the BBC website’s Photonovels.
Jack Shanahan has been at the top of Australia’s most wanted list for 13 years. Ever since he started sneakily watching the latest Tennant episodes ‘On The Internet’ instead of waiting months for the ABC broadcast like everybody else, he has been charged with impatience, an outrageous lack of self-restraint, and large-scale corporate embezzlement. He has done himself no favours in subsequent years by asserting that Hell Bent was actually good and you’re wrong to think otherwise. Shanahan remains at large and — by the left frontal lobe of the Sky Demon — will not be sent to Shada without a fight.
Jeremy Radick’s earliest conscious memory is of Jon Pertwee’s Season 11 title sequence, so Doctor Who imprinted on him like he was a baby chick. A professional actor since the age of 11, it all came full circle when Philip Segal decided Vancouver was an acceptable stand-in for San Francisco, and Jeremy appeared as Gareth in the 1996 TV Movie. He also appeared in dozens of film and television projects such as The X-Files, Psych, and Reaper, and once co-starred in a Sasquatch movie with Lance Henriksen called, imaginatively, Sasquatch. He also appeared in stage productions in New York, Vancouver and Toronto. But obviously none of this tops being given a jelly baby on-screen by Paul McGann, which he still has and can produce on demand.
Joe Ford has become synonymous with the words Doc Oho Reviews for over ten years now. He has written over 3,000 reviews, gotten most of it wrong, and then written most of those reviews again. He moved into podcasting after discovering his true talent: never shutting up. Some insane people enjoy listening to his podcasts, so if you wish to join them, you can catch him hilariously flinging obscene observations at his much politer podcast husband Jack Shanahan over at The Nimon Be Praised, or flirting outrageously with everybody else on his commentary podcast A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife. He loves all Doctor Who, especially the stuff he really doesn’t like — that’s the most fun stuff to talk about. He’s 44, gobby, and according to podcast legend Nathan Bottomley, very pretty.
John Dorney has written nearly as many Big Finish audios set within the Whoniverse as there are serials in the classic series, and he’s just as horrified by that statistic as you are. He started watching the show with An Unearthly Child… but when it was shown in the Five Faces of Doctor Who season, not on its original transmission, because he’s not that old. He once told an ex-girlfriend that Doctor Who was the love of his life and he’s still not sure he was joking — that’s not why they broke up though. He sometimes writes other things and sometimes even gets to act with credits ranging from plays at the National Theatre to comedy on Radio 4 and a truly terrible stage version of The Usual Suspects. He quite enjoys ice skating.
Johnny Spandrell spent about forty years watching, reading and thinking about Doctor Who. Then he wrote it all down on his blog, Random Whoness, which former DWM editor Gary Gillatt called “stupendous” and “essential”. At this stage in his many lives, he has a pleasant, open face and frequently makes a wheezing, groaning sound. He lives on the NSW South Coast with his wife, two kids and about a thousand Doctor Who books.
Joseph Lidster is a writer who has written for lots of things Doctor Who-related but never the TV show. One of his earliest memories is being terrified of handshakes because of the Vervoids. His favourite films are Speed and A Matter of Life and Death. He enjoys socialising with friends and dislikes writing bios for things like this. His favourite Doctor Who hunk is Dibber and he once made friends with a guy who tried to mug him. Is that enough words, James?
Josh Snares , the CEO of the Nyssa Appreciation Society, has been watching the show for far too long. Like all Doctor Who fans, they can’t stand the programme, but sometimes has something nice to say. They work as a digital marketer, videographer, YouTuber and practise homosexuality. One day they dream of being abducted by aliens and getting punched in the face by Jodie Whittaker (hopefully at the same time!)
Karen Carpenter was introduced to Doctor Who when she was just two years old, when her mother sat her in front of the television in a desperate attempt to keep her quiet for half an hour. It’s a technique that still works today: well, most of the time — well, nearly most of the time — well, no, it doesn’t work all: she talks all the way through it, but she still loves Doctor Who to bits. She has a sneaking suspicion that she might be the love child of Peter Davison.
Kate Orman is best known for her Doctor Who novels, many co-written with her husband, Jonathan Blum. Kate still loves writing for Doctor Who — her Second Doctor audionovel, The Dead Star (2023), is available from Big Finish — but her big ambition is to publish an original science fiction novel. Kate’s interests include topics from space exploration to Ancient Egyptian mythology: she wrote the Black Archives volume on The Pyramids of Mars. When she’s not scribbling, Kate helps rescue street cats and messes around on Bluesky (@kateorman.bsky.social). Kate’s favourite story is probably still Ghost Light.
Kevin Burnard ’s introduction to Doctor Who was the final minutes of Love & Monsters at age ten, but he doesn’t hold that against it. Incredibly, he went on to then watch the rest of the new series, fall head-over-heels for the Moffat era, binge the classic series, and devote far too much time and brain space to the endless novels and audios. Take that, fan wisdom. Clearly the paving slab worked. He is currently pursuing a writing career, and in the meantime can be found being far too opinionated on Twitter and taking most of his clothes off on Instagram. He even has a bit of a love life, but let’s not go into that.
Lizbeth Myles accidentally grew up in the decade and a half when Doctor Who wasn’t on the telly. Luckily VHS (olden times DVDs) had been invented and she made everyone give her Doctor Who stories for her birthday. She tries very hard not to judge people who don’t understand the true genius of The Time Monster. Her favourite robots are the Quarks.
Mark McManus first saw Doctor Who at the age of eight when he unwittingly tuned into the first episode of The Happiness Patrol. Immediately hooked, he became a lifelong devotee of the series and spent the wilderness years assiduously catching up through Target books and then videos, watching his final classic series story, The Time Monster, a week before Rose was broadcast. Mark didn’t meet another fan until joining Twitter. He started the Trap One Podcast in 2017, and has made some great friends through podcasting.
Mathew Hounsell was raised by Highland Al’teema Wolves. He learnt how to be human from a single BBC archive crystal full of Classic Who and The Goodies. His earliest memories involve terrifying giant mind-controlling spiders and a massive monster rising from the Thames to attack Westminster Palace. He still has vivid memories of Leela’s pragmatic approach to removing obstacles. As such, he knows the audio of Genesis by heart. He also found a damaged crystal featuring circuses, code breaking, and kitlings, before being whisked off by a Timewyrm to the last days of human civilisation. So now he works to feed himself and his kitten Fluffy, who is growing quickly and is already ten nacs tall.
And yes, he still likes Doctor Who, and that includes all of the Whittaker/Chibnall Era. If you wish to argue Not My Doctor, he is happy to debate you using the Leela method.
Max Jelbart is happy to be taking the mantle as the youngest sod on the podcast. He likes writing screenplays and has been doing so since he read Russell T. Davies’s lurid accounts of procrastination and tedium in The Writer’s Tale. His first Doctor Who story was Aliens of London, because a spaceship crashing into Big Ben is the best thing a 7-year-old can possibly imagine. His favourite episode is definitely Midnight, maybe Listen, truthfully The Robots of Death. No, City of Death. Wait, The Invasion. Okay, Love & Monsters. Seriously. Finally. Gotta love a bit of ELO.
Maxwell Coviello is a longtime fan of Doctor Who, both modern and classic. Bill Potts is still his favorite companion. Maxwell hosts the history/mystery-based Relic: The Lost Treasure Podcast, and is currently working on a new podcast on role playing video games, which is set to launch fall 2021. In his free time, Maxwell plays video games, Twitch streams, writes, and throws giant men around for sport. He is a resident of Sydney, Australia and a part-time resident of Houston, Texas.
Melvin Peña has a lifelong history of being obsessed with television programs. It all started with DuckTales and Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. Then it was on to The X-Files and Lost before Doctor Who took the wheel. Melvin’s favorite classic Doctor is usually Peter Davison and he takes comfort in the inevitable and immutable fact that, during any given month, someone somewhere will put out a new podcast about Frontios. His favorite contemporary Doctors are Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker. TV Doctors to one side, the one he’s spent the most time with is Paul McGann on audio, and his ideal TARDIS team is the 8th Doctor, Liv, and Helen. Melvin appears regularly on the Trap One and Gallifrey’s Most Wanted podcasts.
Pete Lambert first got the Whobug during the BBC’s multifaced repeats of ’81, and first announced he was officially done with this nonsense when Tegan left at the end of Time-Flight. (I mean — SHE WAS THE MAIN ONE!) He relented and is still Whobuggering about, and since he never did get banged up for smuggling Scotch E240s past Mrs Miggins at the village post office for Australian pirate exchanges, he expects an Arvo Show ident to pop up at the end of most 70s episodes.
Robert Valentine is a writer and director who was born the day before part one of Shada failed to materialise on our screens. He’s done quite a bit of Doctor Who stuff for Big Finish and has seen just enough of the TV show not to get his fan licence revoked. To be fair, though, he has watched City of Death lots. He can often be found loitering on Barnes Common in the fog, and appearing on Flight Through Entirety is a life achievement unlocked. Excelsior!
Back in 1979, Si Hart’s Mum sat him down to watch Destiny of the Daleks, hoping it would be 25 minutes of peace for them both. Little did she realise that 42 years later he’d still be loving the show just as much as he did as a four year old. All these years later, his parents’ warnings that he’d never get anywhere thinking about Doctor Who all the time were proved to be entirely wrong, as now he can think and speak about Doctor Who on podcasts! How’s that for development?
Stacey Smith? first watched Doctor Who in 1978 when she was five years old, because her dad had been a fan of William Hartnell, so she has some claim to being the earliest second-generation fan. Since then, she has written episode guides to the show (“Who is the Doctor”); edited the Outside In series, with three Doctor Who volumes; and written a Black Archive on Doctor Who and the Silurians. Oh yeah, and she’s also an internationally renowned professor, world traveller and Guinness World Record holder. But really, it’s her Doctor Who credentials that she’s most proud of. Don’t tell her colleagues.
Steven B grew up solely on 1970s Target novelisations and ABC afternoon repeats of Tom Baker stories in the 1980s. He was sufficiently traumatised by those memories to keep being a fan for longer than is sensible or polite, going on to identify a bit too readily with Peter Davison’s Doctor during his adolescence during the 1990s before morphing into a David Tennant clone in his twenties last decade. Now approaching 900 years of age, he’s very much a fan of Peter Capaldi and is in love with the idea of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor as, appallingly, he nears on his fourth decade of fandom. Honestly, you get less for murder.
Toby has always been one of the best known actors and comedians on his road (except that time Tim Minchin was his neighbour: thank God he moved!). He has an award winning podcast in which he watches every episode of the TV series Howards’ Way but only comments on the jumpers and the moments when characters swig whisky in the middle of the day. He is the country’s leading expert on Captain Zep: Space Detective, and has made 150 documentaries about people just out of shot in TV programmes you’ve never seen. He also spends his time worrying that self written biogs can be repetitive and self-serving and so occasionally writes some that are total bollocks (except that bit about Tim Minchin, that was true).
Tom Salinsky is a playwright, corporate coach, podcaster and producer living in London with his wife and too many cats. As well as being a lifelong Doctor Who fan, he has written books about Star Trek and Red Dwarf and a number of Big Finish audio dramas with his co-writer Robert Khan. Prior to his Star Trek project, he presented the podcast Best Pick in which he, John Dorney and Jessica Regan watched every film which had won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. His play about the Labour Party, The Gang of Three, will be performed at the Kings Head Theatre in Islington in May 2025.
Tom Spilsbury was born between Parts Two and Three of The Seeds of Doom, and although he was almost certainly in the room for every episode of Doctor Who transmitted after that point (his Dad was already an avid Doctor Who fan and never missed an episode), the first one he has a clear memory of is Destiny of the Daleks in September 1979. Barely a month later, little Tom was bought a copy of Doctor Who Weekly Issue 1 by his keen father, and a regular order was put in at the local newsagent from that day onwards. Of course, for ten years (between 2007 and 2017), Tom had to literally make the magazine himself, but he’s served his time now, and has been let back out into the community. Today, Tom’s three favourite things about Doctor Who are: Hell Bent, the incidental music from Battlefield, and the Archimandrite’s hat. But tomorrow, who knows?
