If you've ever called in a pledge to public television in Albuquerque during a Doctor Who marathon, there's a fair chance the man who took down your name and address was wearing an eighteen-foot striped scarf. That was me. Richard Rabon, 51, land surveyor for the State of New Mexico, and a Doctor Who fan since about 1982, when I came across the show by accident on a Saturday night and stayed up past one in the morning to see how a man in a hat was going to get out of a room full of mummies.

I've worked the phones at every pledge drive since. My wife Sue knitted the scarf in the winter of 1985 from a pattern printed in a fan club newsletter. It took her four months and most of the yarn in Bernalillo County, and she has said, in writing, that she will never knit another one. I wear it twice a year, to the pledge drives, because it's Albuquerque and the other three hundred and sixty-three days it's too hot.

This page is for Americans. The British fans have had thirty-six years, the books and the magazines and each other. Over here, most of us found the show on our own, late at night on our public station, with nobody to explain it. So I'm going to explain it.

What it is. A science fiction program made by the BBC in Britain. The first episode went out on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy was killed, and with the country glued to the news a lot of people missed it, so they showed it again the next week. It went on from there for twenty-six years.

Who the Doctor is. He looks like a man, but he isn't one. He's a Time Lord from a planet called Gallifrey, and he travels through time and space, mostly helping people out of trouble, usually by being cleverer than whoever caused it. He almost never carries a gun. That's not a small thing in a TV hero, and it's a lot of why I love him.

The TARDIS. His time machine. The name stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It's bigger on the inside than the outside, which is the first thing every new companion says something about. On the outside it looks like a blue police telephone box, the kind London had on its street corners when the show began, because it's supposed to change shape to blend in wherever it lands, and that part broke early on. So it's been a police box ever since, in ancient Rome, on alien planets and in the far future. You get used to it. Then you love it.

The companions. He nearly always has someone along, usually from Earth, who asks the questions you would ask. Some of them are wonderful. Sarah Jane Smith is the best. I will hear arguments, but she's the best.

Regeneration. This is the clever part. When the Doctor is about to die, he can regenerate: his body renews itself, and he gets a new face and a new personality, while staying the same man underneath. That's how they changed actors, and why there have been eight Doctors. A Time Lord can do it twelve times, so by the show's own rules there are five lives left. I'm only counting.

The villains. The Daleks, first of all: cruel little creatures in armored shells, with a plunger and a gun stick, who want to wipe out everything that isn't a Dalek. The Cybermen, men who replaced their bodies with machinery until there was nothing human left. The Master, another Time Lord, the Doctor's old friend and worst enemy, played best by Roger Delgado with a beard and perfect manners.

The look. I'll be honest: it was made on very little money. The sets wobble now and then, and an awful lot of alien planets were filmed in the same English gravel pits. That has never mattered one bit. The ideas were bigger than the budget, every week.

How it was shown. In Britain each story was told in half-hour episodes with a cliffhanger at the end of each, four or six parts to a story. Over here, some public stations showed the parts one a night, and others spliced each story together into one long feature, which is how a lot of us first saw them.

The BBC stopped making Doctor Who in 1989. The last regular story went out that December. They never exactly said it was cancelled; it just didn't come back, year after year. Then in 1996 there was the McGann movie. It did well enough in Britain, but not on Fox over here, and no series came of it.

That's where things stand, as of this writing. I'm not going to repeat rumors on this page, because I've heard a new one every year for ten years and none of them has come to anything. When the BBC announces something, I'll put it at the top in big letters. Until then the Eighth Doctor carries on in paperback novels from England, and the old stories carry on, on videotape and at three in the morning on public stations, and that's not nothing.

Jon Pertwee died on May 20, 1996, just six days after the McGann movie was shown here. He was 76, and he died in this country, on a visit to Connecticut, which seemed fitting to me. He came to American fan conventions for years and gave them everything he had.

I saw him once, from the back of a hotel ballroom, years ago. He told stories for an hour about his navy days and his cars and his time on the show, and nobody in that room wanted him to stop. He was a showman and he knew it, and he was kind to every fan who came up to his table, including a surveyor in a scarf who could barely get a sentence out.

His Doctor was a dandy and a man of action, but he was also the one who always tried to talk first and fight last. I watched his stories again the week he died, and I've been grateful to him ever since. Thank you, sir.