He's clearly a Time Lord

 In the Look and Read series Sky Hunter (1978), Geoffrey Bayldon plays Mr Trim - or rather, he actually plays Doctor Who, doing a note-perfect imitation of William Hartnell's performance!

Look and Read is intended for seven-to-nine-year-olds, so the audience wouldn't have been familiar with William Hartnell's era, but the director and actor very clearly were! Apparently the Doctor Who team were considering him to play the First Doctor in The Five Doctors in 1983, but John Nathan-Turner thought he'd be too familiar to viewers from Catweazle and Worzel Gummidge - which I think is a great loss to the series, with all respect to Richard Hurndall.

I definitely watched at least one episode of Sky Hunter, even though I was below the target age when it stopped being shown - I distinctly remember the "Welsh telegram" episode, which I quite probably saw in the autumn half-term immediately after my sixth birthday. I don't recollect anything about Geoffrey Bayldon's role in it, though, so it was a great delight to watch it today and see him.

Really, he should have been the First Doctor. I mean, they let Jon Pertwee be in it, even despite Worzel Gummidge!

Fair's fair at the fairground

Here's a YouTube channel everybody should be following: Look and Read Fans!

It probably works best if you went to primary school in Britain, although there's a long period of time you could have done it, because Look and Read went on for many, many years. There were two series each year, telling an exciting adventure story interspersed with a friendly presenter and a flying alphabet-festooned orange creature called Wordy teaching the viewers all about reading and writing.

Having spent this weekend watching The Boy from Space, Dark Towers and Fair Ground (the fault lies entirely at the door of my brother for dredging up these old memories), I can safely say that the only bits I remember are the songs - both the theme tune for each series and the educational songs in it ("Think big, big, big at the beginning; put a capital first and you're winning!"), but the stories themselves are excellent! You can see why it was a highlight of Friday mornings in Mr Cook's class.

I still need to watch Badger Girl, to complete the quartet that were on the screens in my day. That's one I don't even remember the theme tune to, so it must have been less memorable than the others. Still, I'd like to know if it's the series that inspired an epic dream I had around that time, which could have made a whole BBC series in its own right, and feels like it must have been inspired by one. I'll describe it in more length some time, and see if it rings any bells with anyone.

Last night, though, I just had a dream that I was a wrestler. This happens surprisingly often, and I don't know what it says about my psychology...