Here are some brief quotes from William Hartnell, talking about his fear of travelling to the moon and the fan letters he’d get from children asking for help with their maths homework.
“Space travel? Quite honestly, it scares me to death. I haven’t the slightest wish to get in a rocket and zoom through the stratosphere. Somebody else can be the first man on the moon. It doesn’t interest me at all. I do, however, believe that there is life on other planets – and that they know we’re here but haven’t got the technology to get through.
“We did ‘Doctor Who’ for forty-eight weeks a year but I loved it. I couldn’t go out into the street without a bunch of children following me, like the Pied Piper. People used to take it terribly seriously. I’d get letters from boys swotting for exams, asking me complicated questions about time ratios and the TARDIS. I couldn’t help them. A lot of the script writers used to make the Doctor use expressions like ‘centrifugal force’ but I refused. If it gets too technical, the children don’t understand and they lose interest. I saw the Doctor as a kind of lama, one of those long-lived old boys out in Tibet who might be anything up to eight hundred years old but only look seventy-five.”