This changes everything. Again. (Doctor Who, Season 2)

Like the iPhone 4, Doctor Who's second season was not without its problems. However, 1965 saw the series' popularity reach even greater heights than the previous year. Even the Beatles wanted to be on Doctor Who, and they sort of were. I think Doctor Who handled its success rather well - pushing the boundaries of what stories it could tell, while not straying from the formula that everyone loved. (Really, Season 2's only big failure was that it couldn't produce a monster to come close to the Daleks' popularity.) But things had to change, if only because of personnel changes. On screen there was, of course, the replacement of Susan with Vicki, and then the departure of Ian and Barbara. Off screen the biggest change was Dennis Spooner taking over from David Whitaker as Story Editor. And there were other decisions, which might have seemed quite minor at the time, that were as responsible for the Doctor Who we know today as anything that happened in Season 1.

Dad, dig this new mod fad. It's a gas!

So proclaimed an advertisement for mop-top wigs so you could look like the Beatles at weekends. Obviously I'm not going to expect readers of this blog to have watched everything I'm talking about, but if you've never seen the first ever episode of Doctor Who, "An Unearthly Child," you really should watch it here.

Part of the point of this project is to align my timelines. What do you think of as old? If someone talked to you about an old piece of music, you might imagine it being from the 14th Century, but an old song might be from the 1950s. An old play could be from 400BC, but an old copy of a play is more likely to be from the 1980s. And old person, depending on your age, might be from the '30s, but old meat is probably from last week. An old TV show is unlikely to be from before '60s, and old Doctor Who can't be from before 23 November, 1963. But to a lot of people these days, "old Doctor Who" refers to anything from what's also called the "Classic Series."Doctor Who starring Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker doesn't seem "old" to me - it seems "middle"! But to Sarah (my girlfriend; get used to hearing about her), who at the time