I worked in a school yesterday as a visiting author. I do this a few times a year and it is of course an utter privilege to be asked. But this one was unusual.

Instead of meeting writers from half a dozen schools, I was working only with pupils from one. Instead of a whole day with the same group, I had three separate sessions, and instead of a primary school, it was a secondary one. Plus the three sessions had to be like a greatest hits of the kinds of workshops I’ve done before. One was to be about scriptwriting, one about journalism, and then the last one, that was the most unusual.

While it’s easily ten years since I’ve done this one, I was booked for that last session expressly to do a workshop about writing a Doctor Who play in an hour.

But of the twenty pupils, one knew the show well, one didn’t like it, and the rest had not one thin clue what this was about. One of them thought it was to do with Doctor Doolittle.

Now, okay, scratch that idea, do something else, and we ended up spending 90 minutes writing an absurd play about either killer clowns or killer cows, depending on your preference. The Doctor wasn’t even in it.

It went well and I like when I have to change things, but the fact that Doctor Who is totally absent from this audience mostly shocked me. I can’t say it totally did because I had a concern going in, even if I didn’t know why. But still, here is this massive show, this beacon of British television, here is this series that at its best I think is unequalled, and they didn’t know it.

You’re thinking that’s because school-age pupils don’t watch television any more, and you’re right of course, but there were quoting films like Ratatouille.

Doctor Who has run for sixty-odd years yet it can be as if it never existed.

I think everything we do is fleeting, which is not a reason to give up on it all, but sometimes the sheer scope of what fleets away gives me pause.