Yesterday was, as many of you will be aware, the forty-eighth anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. This means that next year, 2012, is the fiftieth year of Who’s existence.

Over the next year or so, on a roughly-weekly basis, I’ll look at one story from each of those fifty years, from 1963 to 2012. To start with, let’s travel back to that time just after the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky”