Basically just curious. I started watching the show pretty young, and I know my relationship with it is sort of different from friends who started watching it older. Feel free to comment how old the show was when you started watching as well, and how you think it might’ve impacted how you interact with it now!
Technically I was 17 because of when my birthday lands, but it was close enough to 18 when I started really getting into it to count in the poll. First episode was Eleventh Hour when it aired on BBC America.
Before I can remember. My parents raised me on the classic series before the new series came out. The first story I can remember clearly is Remembrence of the Daleks.
13 or 14. I don’t remember the exact age but it was somewhere during middle school . I think it made a bigger impact on me since I was young and it shaped me into who I want to be in the future.
Wait, I just remembered something. I was in 5th grade so I was in my last year of elementary school which made me 11.
I was 19, it was just about 14 months ago. I fell very hard for this show.
Well, the first time I technically started watching was around 2006 or 2007; I would have been 10 or 11 years old. But that was just Series 1, and it never hooked me. So I count my second time, in 2013, when I was 17 because that’s when I watched the entire revived series and got hooked and haven’t looked back since.
I don’t know exactly but I was somewhere between 22-28.
I was just 3 years old when Rose first aired. My parents sat me down for it because they had fond memories of the Tom Baker years and the rest is history, a lifelong obsession begun…
I think that there is a difference between the UK and other people here. My parents have never heard of the show.
I was around 3 or 4. Some of my earliest memories are of Doctor Who. It imprinted on me when I was very impressionable.
Not really sure but my first definite memories of watching are of The Trial of a Time Lord. That would have been when I was 11 but but have mixed up memories of Castrovalva and Warrior’s Gate so must have seen bits and pieces throughout the early 80s.
I remember seeing reruns of Doctor Who on TV when growing up, but neither of my parents really watched it so it was only on if there was nothing else on, and I never actually watched an entire serial. I remember they were all Tom Baker, I think I thought he was the only Doctor Who.
Then when I watched Queer as Folk as it aired (show about gay men, by Russell T Davies, features a main character who is obsessed with Doctor Who), I learned a bit more about it. I was 14 at the time so I learned a few more things from that show as well 
But I first got into the show in 2005 when it came back, I watched it with curiosity at first, and was at uni so never watched it “live” as I was doing other things on Saturday nights (see above 
/j), but after seeing Dalek I was hooked and then “acquired” the previous episodes, watched them properly, and I was a fan from then on. I was about 20.
I need to see that sometime. Does it hold up?
It’s quite dated now. Some stereotypes. But I enjoyed it and it’s pretty accurate I think about how the gay scene was in Manchester at the time.
I like it, but mostly because I was pretty much the target audience at the time lol. You should try it!
Series 2 isn’t great though and the American version was pretty terrible iirc.
I started watching Doctor Who somewhere between the end of s4 and the beginning of s5, but that is a 3-year span of time. I think I got into it on the earlier end, as I recall rewatching the show over and over and over again while waiting for new content, including multiple failed attempts to get into Classic. I would have been around eight years old.
Oh…?
Oooohhhhh!!!
I know I watched Seventh Doctor when he was on the air, but I was so young I can’t remeber it. I really started watching when we got cable in the mid-nineties.
My first episode was The Lazarus Experiment at a friend’s house, and I hated it and decided to never watch the show again…
Anyway, I was bored at my nan’s a year later so put on BBC and watched Fires of Pompeii and here I still am! So I guess I was 12 when I first watched, but 13 when I became a fan
It was 2005 so I’ll have been 8. I do have a strange half memory of Terror of the Zygons being my first classic ep too, probably around a similar time
Memory’s a bit fuzzy now, but I think the pipeline for me was → being a big fan of Sherlock Holmes books → finding out about BBC Sherlock → checking out other stuff Moffat was doing, which happened to be series 5-6. And I was already a Star Trek fan, so it all just fell into place. Thinking about it, I probably committed many internet crimes to get my little hands on DW in 2010’s Brazil…
Anyway, it definitely had a big impact on me! I wrote my dissertation for my English course about DW. And it played some part in getting me to choose to study Physics in college and grad school. Yeah, thanks, Doctor 