I never got caught-up in the Dr. Who frenzy even though Dr. Who has been the longest running science-fiction television show in the world. It first screened on 23 November 1963 in the UK, the day after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. On 22 November 1963 I re-enrolled at McMaster University in a first year arts course as I was coming out of my first serious depression in my first experience of bipolar disorder, an illness which has had an incapacitating effect on me periodically since that autumn of 1963.

Dr. Who was not screened in Canada until January 1965, three months before I graduated from that university arts course with a B.A. This fictional time-traveller has been popping up in my visual field off and on for the last thirty years since my only child, Daniel, was born in 1977 and since I finally bought a television set due to the enthusiasms as well as the gentle and not-so-gentle pressures of my wife and two step-daughters. They would often watch programs at the homes of friends and neighbours since we did not have a TV and were not able to “amuse themselves to death,” as Neil Postman argued in his 1985 book by the same name.

And so it was that when David Tennant, time-traveller and latest incarnation of Dr. Who, appeared on a BBC program: Who Do You Think You Are? which my wife taped for me here in Tasmania on 12 October 2008 at 7:30 p.m. on SBS TV, I had the funny feeling I had seen this chap before. And I had as I had wandered through the lounge-room on the way to or from my study in recent months as Dr. Who was being screened on Saturday evenings here in Tasmania Australia.

This now famous and popular program has provided over the last several decades an experience to millions of viewers that is now part of “the quintessence of being British,” or so wrote Caitlan Moran the TV reviewer for The Times. Steven Spielberg even went so far to say that: “the world would be a poorer place without Doctor Who.” –Ron Price with thanks to “Doctor Who,” Wikipedia, 17 October 2008.

Your story, David, like mine, like
the Baha’i story I have been part of
since 1953, is long, so very complex.
Fathers, grandfathers, mothers and
grandmothers, back and back to the
year 1819,1 mirabile dictu,2 the birth
of the Báb and the beginning of new
cycles, ages, epochs, stages, phases,
plans and programs that would and
did change your world and ours......
There were several milestones in
this story of yours: 1832, 1912,
1916, 1968, 1972 and they were
milestones in the story I’ve been
writing to figure out who I think
I am. I hope you had some luck,
David, figuring out your identity.

1 David Tennant’s great-great grandfather was Donald McLeod was born in 1819 in rural Scotland where his family had been for centuries. But by 1900 the MacLeod family were based on Scotland’s industrial heartland, cities like Glasgow. David Tennant’s story also became an intimate part of the story of Ireland in the 20th century.
2 A Latin expression meaning ‘marvellous to relate.’ It is like annus mirabilus meaning ‘wonderful year, year of wonders.’

Ron Price
17 October 2008