“I am the Doctor!” Jon Pertwee knew how to make an entrance. He would burst on stage in full costume, eyes wide, arms outstretched with his trademark cape spread between them. The silhouette of a hero. He knew how to connect with his fans in an instant.

I was a bit too young for Pertwee to be my Doctor. But my lifelong obsession with Doctor Who had begun in the 1980s, so I got to enjoy his stories on VHS. Spearhead from Space and Day of the Daleks were early favourites.

And I had started to stick my toes into the world of fandom. In 1989, I saw Pertwee on stage in The Ultimate Adventure at Wimbledon Theatre. Daleks, Cybermen, songs, and Mrs Thatcher. A fun-packed rollercoaster of a show pivoting on Pertwee’s magnetic portrayal. Even the fight scene was choreographed to give the audience what they wanted – Pertwee, centre stage.

But the fight scene was also choreographed to allow for a certain limitation. Pertwee was not a young as he once was. His early years riding stunt motorbikes had left him with severe back problems. A friend involved in a video production with Pertwee was banned from shooting as he struggled climbing stairs. It would break the magic.

He could also be tetchy on occasion. His career from the 1950s to the early 1980s had been lucrative, popular, and encompassed a challenging range of roles from radio comedy to Doctor Who to Worzel Gummidge. He also hosted TV shows and was in demand for cabaret. By the late 1980s, things had stalled and the man who “liked the best in everything” was forced to trade on past glories.

In 1994, I got to see him make a personal appearance in full costume performing some of his one-man show. This wasn’t in a theatre, but at a rather rundown Victorian gentlemen’s club in Bloomsbury. The building, and I suspect the club, was on its last legs. Pertwee’s easy charisma drove away all thoughts of the dingy surroundings on a grey Saturday afternoon.

Pertwee started the Q&A by asking the audience if they were Doctor Who fans. About half raised their hands. He was delighted to discover that there were also fans of radio comedy and his favourite role Worzel Gummidge. He seemed energised by being able to reach beyond Doctor Who fans. But there was no question that Doctor Who was his main business by the 1990s.

In 1996, The X Files and the Star Trek series were big. Doctor Who was coming back to TV. I had formed the idea of starting a sci-fi TV fanzine. Or more likely, a website, because I loved the openness and reach of the internet. Who wanted to mess with dead trees anyway?

I got the addresses of the agents of a whole bunch of Doctor Who stars and wrote asking for an interview. To my amazement, I got a letter back from ‘The Tardis of Jon Pertwee’ with a number to ring to arrange a time during April.

Now, to be honest, I was very young, my social skills were a little limited, and my competence didn’t match my ambition. When I rang to arrange what would be a telephone interview, it’s fair to say that Mr Pertwee did not need to be the greatest judge of character to realise this. Realise it he did, but, to his credit, the interview was arranged.

When the day came, I rang him with a great deal of trepidation. There proceeded some telephone faffing as he attempted to transfer me to the correct extension in his house (in the 1990s, telephones were not as user-friendly as they are now). I got to hear him exclaim, “Oh, God. Why did I agree to this?” He was possibly not in a good mood; I had possibly caused it. Ouch.

So, the interview commenced. He told me stories of his early life and his expulsion from RADA. He was undeterred: he told me, “Charles Lawton, the famous actor, said, ‘I understand you were thrown out of RADA?’ I said ‘yes’, and he said, ‘you’re bound to do well; so was I’”. He was certainly a young man with more confidence than I had at that moment.

He was then in the Navy for six years.  He came back to the UK and worked in the Naval Broadcasting Service and got his first break with the radio comedian, Eric Barker. If you know even a little about Pertwee, then you will have heard the stories before. It felt a little like he was on automatic pilot.

We moved on to Doctor Who, and I asked him why he had played the character straight, given he was known for comedy and variety. Being able to show his creativity and versatility as an actor was important to him. “I wanted to prove to myself and others that I could do things other than comedy,” he said. “I had done eccentric comics in theatres and pictures. I did the hideous Carry On series. I did quite a few of those. I wanted to prove that I could be a successful actor by playing straight. I played it straight. Right down the middle for five years.

“When I did Doctor Who, I wanted to make him into a kind of science-fiction James Bond because I’m an adventuresome twit. I like motorbikes and I used to race cars. I race speed boats. I liked incorporating this into the show, and my producer, Barry Letts, mercifully let me. It was a good idea. It was a different approach to it.

“But remember though, that no matter what one says, one’s input into Doctor Who was virtually nil. You didn’t have time for any input because I’d be working on a show that had been worked on by producers, set designers, etc, for maybe five months before. So one couldn’t have any input into each show. The only chance you got of having any input into Doctor Who was for about ten minutes on the first day of rehearsals.

“I enjoyed the filming because it’s active. I like being out in the fresh air, but it’s very, very hard work. It’s an immensely difficult series to do. You have to spout pages of scientific claptrap which one didn’t understand at all. It was only the writers that knew what the hell the thing was all about. You couldn’t understand it unless you were a sci-fi buff, and I wasn’t. I was a working actor, but I had a lot of fun in it.

“I decided to leave because Roger [Delgado, who played the Master] had died. Barry Letts was leaving. Terrance Dicks was leaving. I thought it looked like the end of an era. I thought, ‘well, I may as well go’. Sean Sutton, the Head of Programmes, said, ‘Would you like to stay on and do another season?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll do one more if you pay me a bit of extra money.’ He said, ‘Like what?’ I told him and they said, ‘We’re sorry to see you go.’

“Worzel Gummidge was a vastly, vastly more interesting character than Doctor Who. Any actor would just jump at Worzel Gummidge. It was the most magical part. It ran the gamut of emotions from A to Z in 24 minutes. I managed to add one little quality to it which made it take off better than it would have done. Doctor Who always travelled in his TARDIS and never stayed in one place for too long. I tried to think how we could get around that with Worzel Gummidge and we decided on the changing heads. All he had to do if he wanted to be a singer was put on a singing head. If he wanted to be intelligent, he would put on a thinking head. A handsome head for his love life. That worked like a dream.

“He ran so many emotions. He was a very irascible chap and at the same time he was endearing. There’s nothing better than having somebody who’s villainous and wicked and evil and yet being loved.

“It was like Aunt Sally. There was Una Stubbs playing the worst b*tch who’s ever been on television. She was horrid. She was rude. She was beastly to Worzel, who loved her dearly. Yet the public adored Aunt Sally. This is the great secret. If you can do that, you’ve cracked it. You could let Worzel do what he bloody well liked!

“When I went to big functions where there would be Hells Angels, because I often went to motorcycle rallies, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God! I’m going to have a lot of trouble here with a load of hairy, leather-coated Hells Angels.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong. They were endearing in the extreme, and they were saying, ‘Hello, Worzel! How you doing, mate? How’s Aunt Sally, then? Give her one for me.’ I realised, with amazement, they were watching the programme. They knew all the characters and so on.

“Doctor Who was supposed to be for children to begin with. They quickly realised that it was for the whole family. Sci-fi audiences are vast all over the world. That’s why it’s so popular in America, everywhere, Australia, and so on. Worzel was originally purely a children’s show and we were on at a children’s time on a Saturday. Literally within a week or two, we were a cult. We had enormous viewing figures. We realised about 65 percent of our viewers were adults. There they stayed and we got more and more and more. When I did personal appearances as Worzel, we got an enormous turnout of people and it wasn’t just children.”

We had also discussed how Worzel Gummidge had developed and grown after the first episode: “The first one is always the hardest for the writers and the actors and everybody. You don’t know, really, which way to go. We overdid it to begin with. It was too scary. Lots of children were screaming at that scene where the water melts mud off his face, he comes off the post, and comes lumbering down the field. That frightened the sh*t out of hundreds of children, which was rather a mistake. From that moment on, we softened up.”

I did finally feel I had connected with Jon. He was able to celebrate his successes, but there was a sense that he wanted more, and he had more to give. He appreciated the love of Doctor Who fans and the opportunity to be creative, even if it was tinged with a little frustration.

“When I was in Doctor Who,” he said, “I worked on a story called The Spare Part People. All I can tell you is, keep your eyes open because it’s coming up again. I think, in book form. I’m not going to go into it too deeply because it’s always bad luck. It’s not dead by any means. It was something that I wrote with another actor [Reed De Rouen, who played Pa Clanton in The Gunfighters]. I showed it to Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, and they said, ‘Oh, yeah, wow, great, terrific.’ I said, ‘Are you pleased with it?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, but we’re not going to do it. It would be far too expensive.’ I don’t think it would, actually. I think they went off on the wrong tack with it. I think it will work as a book. I hope so. It’s being written by Jonathan Ray and I.”

A first volume of Jon’s autobiography, entitled Moon Boots and Dinner Suits, had been published a few years earlier. A second was due to be released the following November. Jon told me: “Well, it’s not really a second volume. It was supposed to be. I wanted to do it that way, but it’s worked out as being a Doctor Who book interspersed with things about me and my life. This is because the man who is writing it with me is very orientated towards Doctor Who. He has written lots of other Doctor Who books. His name is David Howe. I’m correcting it at the moment. It is not written in the style that you would say was my style; it’s more a collaboration between an expert biographer and me.

“Do I mind being remembered as Doctor Who? Well, I can hardly be otherwise because I have never stopped working. I was doing things on television last month. I was doing things on radio last month. All of which are connected in a way because it’s BBC Science Week. They think of sci-fi, and they think of me.”

By the end of the interview, we had actually started to gel a bit. I had got to speak to a hero. He had got to relive some past glories. He was every bit the charismatic, kind-hearted man he had appeared to be.

He generously offered to help me if I needed any more material for my article. Sadly, it was not to be. The interview was eventually published in a fanzine in New Zealand and on my website. The website kickstarted a career in online education platforms that I still enjoy nearly 30 years later. But my exams got in the way. Before I had a chance to write up the interview, Jon had passed away.

The tragedy is that he still had plans for his books. Given the success of the BBC Radio serials, he would undoubtedly have got great pleasure from working with Big Finish on their audio productions had he lived a few years longer. An animated version of Worzel Gummidge was also on the cards.

I found out about his death coming out of a very long session at university. His death had been announced on TV the day before, and I had been too busy to notice. I picked up a couple of newspapers with obituaries filled with anecdotes from friends and colleagues.

Fitting tributes to the man who had given up a little of his time to help me — when his health was probably not at its best; when he really didn’t need to.

You can read more of my interview in Just Sarah: More Than Fifty Years of a Doctor Who Companion, available to pre-order from the Candy Jar website now.