Watching Classic Doctor Who in America during the 1970s and 1980s was a completely unique experience. While UK fans knew the Doctor as a Saturday evening staple, American audiences were often discovering the TARDIS late at night on local PBS stations—sometimes catching feature-length omnibus edits instead of the traditional weekly cliffhangers.
In this video, I cover both the objective differences (delayed seasons, late-night time slots) and the highly subjective feeling of being an American sci-fi fan discovering the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Doctors. Whether you were catching broadcasts in a college dorm room or discovering it on a chunky old-school television late on a Saturday night, the American broadcast era had a completely different vibe.
Were you watching Doctor Who in the US during the 70s and 80s? Let me know your own memories and which Doctor you started with in the comments!
#DoctorWho #ClassicWho #TomBaker #DoctorWhoHistory #SciFi
Watch the Doctor Who: Classic channel! Travel in the TARDIS with full episodes dating back to the Doctor’s first incarnation on SloppBoxx.Com.
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Did you watch Doctor Who in the “PBS era”? Who was your first Doctor?
Late night Doctor Who on PBS was my experience, somewhere between 6th and 8th grade. Tom Baker was the first one I saw. And there really was no one else in school to talk to about it except one friend that would routinely wear a the Baker scarf to school.
Watched it on Saturdays during pledge drives for WUFT TV Channel 5 back when I was growing up…PBS Affiliate broadcasting out of Gainesville, FL. That station gave me not one but TWO First Doctors as they took to showing Tom Baker and Peter Davidson serials back to back. You would watch one full serial, then pledge drive push for donations, then a serial from the other Doctor, rinse, repeat, spit, fluoride and floss…😅😂🤣🤣🤣🤣
I actually kinda miss the old Doctor Who pledge drives as the interviews could be rather interesting (way more so than interviews these days tbh) and the “thank you gifts” were things I would’ve begged Mom for had we had the funds but the show was so barely known that even I began to think of it all as a fever dream as I got older…
Until I realized it wasn’t…
And became an obsessed fanboy…
That now knows more about Doctor Who than most Brits…😳😬😵💫😅
I do remember pledge drive breaks in Doctor Who, though I can’t recall any of my stations showing two full serials in a row.
PBS, yes. Usually at 4pm, Saturday afternoon. Tom Baker. Also, all the eps were spliced together like a movie. I really liked that!
@MatthewMFoster WUFT didn’t stop with two…mind you, this was also during the early 90s so Doctor Who wasn’t producing any new episodes anyway by this point. But yeah, you’d have a Tom Baker serial, pledge drive, Peter Davidson serial, pledge drive, then another Tom Baker serial, pledge drive…on and on until WUFT decided they wanted to switch to something else. Typically on Saturday’s when they had nothing else to fill the slot, order of serials being completely random so imagine this is your first experience with Doctor Who and the PBS affiliate couldn’t even settle upon which Doctor they wanted to feature, let alone what order they wanted to show these serials in…
Might be watching Tom Baker and Lalla Ward one serial, the Peter Davidson w/ Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson, then the next might be Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen…and then 5, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan and then 4 and Leela and K-9 then…oh and the ship doesn’t look like it should fit inside of that strange blue phone booth…and who’s the main character again? OMG NO IT’S THE ANGRY SALT SHAKERS AGAIN!!!! 😅😂🤣🤣🤣🤣
Any surprise that I settled on it all being a fever dream for many a year? 😵💫😅
I was on the young side. 13 when it hit my PBS station. The 10pm timeslot was somewhat mitigated by the fact my parents were super cool with me being obsessed with a show on PBS. If it had been on one of the networks, I don’t think I would’ve had the same experience. One more reason to support your local PBS station… viewers like us.
0:31 this definitely didn’t happen
My first experience was, like you, Peter Cushing’s movie. I watched it on the old b&w TV my parents let me have in my bedroom. It was … ok.
Back in and around 1981, my PBS station showed the Baker episodes in order on Saturday afternoons.
but…the new Silurians SUCK.
My first Doctor was Tom Baker. Our local PBS station showed Dr. Who on Saturdays at 10pm. Most of the time my mom let me stay up to watch, but not always. (I was a high schooler, but my mom was strict about weird things.) I always find it strange to hear Dr. Who talked about as a kid’s show.
When my friend first told us about Doctor Who it was well into Tom Baker’s run, but I couldn’t watch it because on the Connecticut PBS station it was on at dinner. Eventually the one we got out of Massachusetts aired the movie-edited versions on Sundays, then the CT station and our eating schedule stopped clashing, so I came in during the E-Space stories (maybe a little before so I got a good sample of K9, my favorite Companion). I saw more of Peter Davidson, which might be why he’s my favorite Doctor. Didn’t have to watch it on the black & white small TV by that point (though I did have one in my bedroom, which is how I watched TV for the early years), but for the most part this was my experience.
Later they showed the early episodes for a while after the first season of Sylvester McCoy, the last new Classic Who we got until stations like the old Sci-Fi Channel aired reruns, so I got to be introduced to the earlier Doctors eventually. We also got color reprints of some of the comics through Marvel US. The Meep was always blue to me until his TV debut.
KVIE! KTEH! KQEH! KIXE!