Teddy Bears' Picnic was a regular choice on the Saturday morning radio programme, Children's Choice. This was introduced by a character called Uncle Mac, and I was terrified of him as well.

Uncle Mac was a severe old curmudgeon (I say old, he was probably about 35) without an ounce of humour in him, and as appealing to we nippers as a double dose of cod liver oil.

When that dried-up voice came over the airwaves I imagined him wagging a finger, or worse, brandishing a cane.

Two more songs were regularly featured on Children's Choice which frightened me.

One was The Laughing Policeman, a character whose great gales of mirth always seemed underscored with a dark malevolence, and The Runaway Train whose seemingly endless and unstoppable journey was the stuff of nightmares.

Whenever any of these songs came on I would scrunch up my eyes, and suck hard on an aniseed ball.

All in all, those Saturday mornings were pretty traumatic stuff, and the wonder is that I grew up to be such a sane and balanced individual (really? – Ed).

I never enquired whether the effect was the same on my young Nottingham contemporaries, wherever they might be now. It was some time later that the first Dr Who came on our TV screens.

In those days Dr Who, despite being a big part of our lives, was a bit of a joke. Foreign planets were obviously a brickworks near Sudbury, the monsters clunked about hoping their costumes didn't fall apart, and there was an amateur cosiness contrasting greatly with the slicker, if more cynical US sci-fi efforts.

Some of those early Doctors were hit and miss too. Tom Baker seems generally the favourite; I remember Jon Pertwee as mainly a clown, and Patrick Troughton just dull.

This new series has been served with a relentless publicity machine, a lot of it self-congratulatory stuff by the BBC itself.

To be fair David Tennant is probably the most rounded Dr Who ever, funny, complex, a touch of pathos, an improvement even on his excellent predecessor Christopher Ecclestone.

One myth this publicity machine has been keen to confirm about the first generation of Dr Who watchers, is what I call the false sofa syndrome (and you'll see the relevance soon to teddy bears and picnics).

The Dr Who false sofa syndrome is now so firmly embedded in our national psyche that I am loathe to be the iconoclast who knocks it apart, but needs must.

This is what the syndrome says. We were all so frightened by those early Dr Who episodes that we would scuttle off behind the sofa in terror. Endless minor celebrities have been trundled out by the programme's PR people to confirm this.

I wish officially to state that in my evidence not a single soul ever went to hide behind the sofa when Dr Who came on. Did you? Did any of your family?

According to myth, the following would be the scene at the average UK household early on a Saturday evening.

After the football results and early evening news, as those distinctive sounds of Ron Grainger's theme music sounded, and the tardis revolved rapidly mid-screen, a thunderous noise would be heard nationwide – the sound of ten million children hurtling behind the sofa from where they would not emerge till the music was repeated with the closing credits.

And when these ten million children did emerge, they quivered in terror, despite not having seen a single minute of the programme.

It is of course bunkum. No one ever hid behind a sofa. It is as neat a piece of PR myth as you could come across. The Daleks may have sounded scary, but anyone with an average IQ knew only people in bungalows need be frightened of them. Everyone else could simply walk upstairs and be out of danger once they started their (frankly hysterical) "Exterminate!"

Children's fears are more complex than we suppose. Which is why it's not Dr Who, but the Teddy Bears' Picnic, or that disturbing bloke, Uncle Mac that produces the cold sweats.

PETER MORTIMER