In the week that the new trailer for Doctor Who included Peter Capaldi in cool shades, here is the original cool Doctor, Jon Pertwee at a school summer fate in Cambridge in 1970.
Fresh from his first season as the time lord, his mission was to raise money to buy a colour TV for Gilbert Road Primary School, which he did by signing autographs at "a tanner a time". A tanner, for those too young to understand our pre-decimal currency, was sixpence; there were twelve pennies in a shilling, which made it worth half a shilling. There were twenty shilling to the pound, which meant Jon Pertwee had to sign forty autographs to raise a single pound. With colour TVs costing around £300 in 1970, Pertwee's fund raising efforts must have seemed as impossible as asking current viewers of the show to accept that the moon is not cheese but a giant egg.
I didn't treasure my tanner's worth of Pertwee's handwriting, which got lost in the vortex soon after, but the photo, taken on my instant Polaroid camera, recently came out of the other end of a wormhole when it was found in one of my mother's boxes of old photographs.
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