Doctor Who – Every Doctor’s Catchphrase

If you conducted a street poll in the UK and asked the participants what is the most famous catchphrase from the TV show Doctor Who, the most likely answer would be “Exterminate!”, the phrase screeched out by daleks whenever and wherever they threw their collective rattle out of their metaphorical pram.  Whether on Earth, Skaro, Spiridon or Vulcan*, it wouldn’t be long before they resorted to extermination to get what they wanted which was often, truth be told, the extermination of one thing or another, so at least the daleks could be trusted to get down to business fairly quickly.  So their cataclysmic catchphrase (often repeated in the homes and streets of the UK by young children with cardboard boxes over their heads) is something almost every adult born in the UK would recognise.

And every adult born in the UK has one actor they call “my Doctor” which usually refers to the doctor they were first exposed to – usually at the ripe old age of four or five when they could safely scuttle behind the back of the sofa if anything got too scary for them.  For me, Tom Baker was “my Doctor” – he took over the reigns of the role in 1974 when I was nine.  Although I can remember Jon Pertwee’s doctor from first broadcast, Baker’s incarnation was the one that properly and thoroughly hooked me on the show for many years to come.

I won’t be giving much away by telling you his best known catchphrase (you can see it on the thumbnail of the video below!).  “Would you like a jelly baby?” has to be one of the more memorable of the Doctor’s catchphrases, surely.  I did not particularly like it as a child – I thought it was terribly childish, to be honest (even at that age, I must have had some subconscious desire for Doctor Who to be treated as serious science fiction).  You have to remember that Doctor Who, at this time, was one of the few TV shows for kids that didn’t treat its audience like children. Yet on mature reflection, it’s a completely brilliant catchphrase.  After all, how best to undercut the tension of a situation than by offering your enemy a sweet?  Food is, after all, a universal language…

The video below covers the catchphrases of all the Doctors (although the claim that Hartnell’s is “mmm?” is rather weak, despite the fact that @whoooob, who created this video, only had to use four episodes to get enough clips of Mr Hartnell doing this).  It was fun watching them all in a single video and being able to compare and contrast.  Like one of the commenters on the video, I hadn’t realised how often 12 (Peter Capaldi) told people to shut up!  However, if I run through the lot that might present too many spoilers (sweetie), so press play and get nostalgic for whichever Doctor your heart claimed as your own as well as enjoying the rest.

*Vulcan does not refer to Spock’s home world, although a crossover between Doctor Who and Star Trek might be fun.  It was the name of a colony planet in The Power of the Daleks, the first story of the Doctor’s second incarnation.