Although there's a lot to be said for the simpler, less media-intensive times in which the likes of Doctor Who, Monty Python and The Kinks put in their earliest appearances, the unfortunate flipside to this is that there's very little reliable or detailed evidence of just how they were recieved and discussed at the time, or what early fans' favourite song or episode was or... well, anything that would nowadays be indelibly all over Twitter within seconds. Just occasionally, though, you'll stumble across something rather revealing in the most unexpected of places, like this letter printed in the Radio Times dated 6th February 1964 (and presumably written while the first Dalek story was airing):
Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman would doubtless have been delighted to read that his intention to fuse family-friendly sci-fi hijinks and heavy-handed educational hoo-hah had proved such a success with at least one viewer. Less impressed, however, was one Lillian Roberts, who wrote to make her feelings known in no uncertain terms. And right in the middle of Doctor Who And The Inside The Spaceship to boot:
This tedious outbreak of proto-columnist sniggering at nothing in particular in a programme that they were mysteriously still watching despite professing so vociferously to dislike then prompted one Jean Glazebrook to submit a further missive, basically saying "put a sock in it, you're not funny":
And, ladies and gentlemen, nothing much has changed from that day to this.
