Tell me you love Doctor Who and I’ll tell you who you are. You are a man (probably). You are middle-aged. You don’t find it particularly easy to make friends and you were definitely not the most popular kid at school. You still get lonely, and sometimes you obsess about mistakes and wonder what you’d do if, like the Doctor, you could travel back in time. There’s a few things you’d change, definitely.

What’s happening, obviously, is I'm describing me, but you’d be amazed how often the pattern fits fans of Doctor Who; believe me I know. When I was a kid growing up in Aberdeen in the 1970s and 80s, the local Doctor Who group was a sanctuary for people who were different, awkward, and withdrawn: teenagers several tables away from the table where the cool kids sat. In some cases, the difference was too much; my friend Stephen for example, who committed suicide in his 20s. But the Doctor was always there and he was different as well, so we loved him.

And now he is 60 years old, or at least the programme is (the first episode was shown in November 1963) and the BBC is making a bit of a fuss. They’ve just put every single episode up on iPlayer and if you’re minded to dip in, I can recommend three of the best to start with. The Robots of Death (the one where the AI starts strangling people). Earthshock (the one where, oh my God, they turn up at the end of episode one). And Inferno (the one where the Doctor tries to stop the world ending and fails). Watch those and tell me this isn’t the greatest show ever made.

But I must admit even I struggle sometimes to truly understand why a so-called children’s programme (age: 60) is still the main obsession for a so-called adult like me (age: 53). I should have grown out of it by now shouldn’t I? Then I remember something the Doctor himself said: “what’s the point of being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes?” But mainly I remember an extraordinary conversation I had with the greatest Doctor himself, Tom Baker: in the Highlands, in Kingussie, in a caravan that was smaller on the inside.

Baker was in Scotland to make an episode of the TV show Monarch of the Glen and he and I talked for half an hour or so in the caravan about his remarkable conversion from monk (he trained for six years) to Time Lord (he was the Doctor for seven) and, as expected, he was compelling and hilarious and outrageous. I asked him how he lost his faith. “It vanished swiftly when I bumped into a couple of girls in Germany,” he said.

But it was when I asked him about the secret of Doctor Who that I really paid attention. “I’ll tell you what the secret is,” he said. “It’s that universal thing. This amazement. Suddenly, a box appears and a door opens and a fellow comes out and says ‘Hello!’ And then he can take you somewhere.” And I thought: yeah, that’s it: it’s the possibilities of a somewhere, accompanied by a someone who isn’t like all the others.

And the wonderful thing is Baker seems to apply the philosophy to his own life. “If your whole life is Kingussie or Newtonmore,” he said, “you know, nice place to be, but if you think that’s the world, you’re wrong” and I get what he means. He isn’t slagging off Kingussie or Newtonmore necessarily, he’s tapping into the feeling that people sometimes get in villages and towns and suburbs where nothing much happens, and the stuff that does happen isn’t to your liking: the feeling that there’s something else.

Some people find the something else – in a job, or a cause, or politics, or a girlfriend or boyfriend, or music, especially music. But for Doctor Who fans, it’s always in their favourite show. Travel back to 1974 and you’d find the four-year-old me being transported to somewhere else every time he watched the man in the scarf fight the worst the universe had to throw at him, and the same rule applies now I’m nearly 54. I am grown-up (so some people tell me). But the point is that sometimes, I want to be childish.