ON Saturday night, nine million people tuned into the nail-biting season finale of Doctor Who - but one man, remained unmoved by all the excitement.

He was John Smithson - whose early career as a cameraman would be the envy of most fans of the travelling time lord.

For John, of Green Hill, High Wycombe, filmed the very first episode of the global phenomenon and designed the iconic title sequence.

He told the Free Press: "We never realised that it would catch on."

Working as part of a 20-strong TV drama crew, John said the first episode of what is now the longest-running science fiction TV show in the world was just another day at work at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherds Bush, west London.

He said: "We were told to go to a studio on that day and we never knew what we were going to work on.

"We never knew when we made programmes whether they would or not. This was just another programme in the schedule - a very ordinary, routine day.

"It was just sort of something that came in, but everybody's interested in science fiction."

But the pensioner does recall that the small, cramped studio looking surprisingly different to normal that day in 1963, when Doctor Who, Episode one, An Unearthly Child' appeared on his schedule.

He added: "We'd never seen anything like it before. It was fantasy, which the Beeb had never been too much into until then.

"But we had quite a job to get it to look like the inside of the TARDIS. We did lots of close up shots so that they didn't show how flimsy the set was.

John thinks Doctor Who's early series - which were made without any editing and very few special effects - were popular mainly because they followed sports fans' favourite Grandstand in a Saturday evening slot.

Despite having a permanent place in Doctor Who history, Mr Smithson - who now runs Wycombe Film Society - has never followed his TV adventures, and didn't watch Saturday night's explosive season finale.

Watching a recording of the first episode this week he said: "Some of these scenes are my shots. The quality is better than I remember it actually - but the script is pretty basic stuff."