Simon Pegg, who played the Editor in The Long Game, has shared his memories of being in Doctor Who Series 1.

Pegg was attending a comic and sci-fi convention in Boston where he was asked about appearing in the show. He said:

“You know, it was in Cardiff and I saw Daleks and stuff there and it was very exciting. And [Ninth Doctor, Christopher] Eccleston is obviously a great actor. There was a real sense of excitement about it. We were trying new things with Doctor Who. And I remember it being a sort of really happy and exciting time. They dyed my hair, my eyebrows — everything blond. It was really weird but it was fun. It was fun to play a villain in a show I watched when I was a kid…

“I was a Tom Baker fan myself. I met Tom Baker when I was eight and he signed my copy of The Talons of Weng-Chiang; ‘To Simon Pegg from Tom Baker 888’ and he gave me a Jelly Baby — and we certainly didn’t know that I would be in Doctor Who!”

This would presumably have been the VHS of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a Fourth Doctor classic that also starred Louise Jameson as ‘savage’ companion, Leela. The six-part story also featured the cult classic pairing of Jago and Litefoot, respectively a showman and a pathologist living in 1800s London.

Pegg also narrated the accompanying series of Doctor Who Confidential.

Nonetheless, it’s really rare to hear Simon talk about Doctor Who, so this is lovely to hear. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I love The Long Game. It feels very much like a Seventh Doctor era story — showrunner, Russell T Davies, came up with the idea for it in the late 1980s — with the Time Lord taking on an empire that’s been manipulating the masses through propaganda.

Plus, I felt cool showing off to school friends that I can say “the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe”.