“My brain is scattered. You can be Alice, I'll be the Mad Hatter.”

I’ve alluded to the tall, felt hat worn by Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in a handful of Doctor Who episodes a couple of times in this newsletter already. I’m likely to do so again, to be honest. Because I love that hat, and how Troughton looks in it. I also love that despite being disposed of less than three months into Troughton’s television reign of Doctor Who it was still appearing in his comic strip adventures months after he’d left the series. I once baffled an entire newsagents by making an audible squeak of delight when it featured on a newly painted cover of a reprint of one of them in 1994.

That eccentric, and quickly discarded, headgear hat is usually referred to by fandom as a stovepipe1 and a fascination with it, and hats of all kinds, was regarded as a key part of the characterisation of the New Doctor Who2 in the earliest episodes in which he featured. So much so that he had a passion for absconding with and trying on others people’s headgear, an action often accompanied by (a variation on) the phrase “I would like a hat like that!” 

At some point in the 00s I tried to persuade a group of fairly hardcore Doctor Who fans that this was the case, but none of them believed me. They knew about the big hat, of course. That photograph of Troughton in the mercury swamp of Vulcan from The Power of The Daleks Episode One has always been the stuff of fan legend. But the general milliner-ian cult behaviour? Nope. The absence of video copies of any episode in which he did it, and the different way we tend to absorb audio only drama meant the whole thing had passed even many committed fans by.