Tom Baker was labouring on a building site in 1974 when the phone call from the BBC came. Fifty-two years later he is 92, the eldest of the classic Doctors still living: the fourth to take the TARDIS, and the one who kept it longest, seven years.

This video follows the original run of Doctor Who, from its first Saturday teatime on 23 November 1963 to the end in 1989, and the people who carried it: seven Doctors, two much-loved regulars, and two women behind the camera.

Three of those Doctors are alive besides Baker. Peter Davison is 75, and by marriage he is David Tennant's father-in-law. Colin Baker, 83, is the only Doctor the BBC ever sacked, and has spent four decades campaigning on cot death since losing his son in 1983. Sylvester McCoy, 83, is still working; even his name was borrowed from a character in a stage act.

William Hartnell died in 1975. Patrick Troughton died in 1987 at a fan convention in Columbus, Georgia, and Jon Pertwee in 1996, also in America. Elisabeth Sladen, forever Sarah Jane, died in April 2011 while starring in her own spin-off; Nicholas Courtney, the Brigadier, eight weeks before her.

And none of it would exist as we know it without Verity Lambert, producing at 27, and Delia Derbyshire, who built that theme from tape and oscillators and never received a credit.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Regeneration, the idea that has kept Doctor Who alive for sixty years, was invented because the first leading man had become too ill to go on. The most famous device in British television began as the answer to a casting problem.

Which Doctor was yours?

This channel uses a synthetic narrator. Ages are correct as of September 2026, and we would rather be told about a mistake than repeat one.