The defection of Doctor Who from the ABC to Disney+ has generated an outpouring of grief to rival that of a recently deceased monarch, but for many of us, the Gallifreyan nomad left the TARDIS eons ago.
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We're the same cohort who are now too exhausted to stay up for Rage; we're the group who used to roll our eyes at Diana Fisher on The Inventors, we're the group which has spent years trying to deny a grubby sense of humour as seeded by The Kenny Everett Video Show; we're the group which still has a cassette soundtrack of Sweet and Sour somewhere in the garage, and we're the same sad lot for whom the ABC has lost a certain ineffable magic that not even Frankly has been able to rekindle.
Doctor Who, is, of course, British, not Australian, yet the sci-fi series' relationship with its antipodean Aunty began all the way in 1965 when the national broadcaster's Perth station, ABW-2, aired the show barely two years after it premiered on the BBC in 1963.
Thanks to Doctor Who, we spent much of the '70s and '80s in a state of low-level trauma, often hiding behind the couch fairly wetting our school pants in fear.
From an early age, we knew all too well about the constant threat of genocide ("Exterminate!") and our sweaty slumber was haunted by myriad visions of clunky creatures coming to kill us, like those robot slug things which went for your throat.
Seriously, we were 10, no wonder all we want now is the quiet life.
It was announced this week that the BBC had struck a deal with streaming service Disney+ to take on Doctor Who from 2023, which will mean the end of free viewing for millions of fans around the universe and the end of a special - and many thought quite wrongly, as it turns out - inalienable bond with the ABC.
The apparent slight seems all the more severe given this custodial transferal will serve as a perverse 60th anniversary for the show. Sort of like when the Chinese got Honkers back.
On top of this, the actor who made the reworking of the franchise such a success, David Tennant, will be reprising his role briefly for his new masters, making him an accessory to the crime.
These days, fans of Doctor Who call themselves, cleverly enough, "Whovians".
Once, they were just called people.
It's a fair bet anyone who wears the Whovian badge of pride already has a Disney+ account and spends much of their day dissecting the Marvel universe via their phones while sorting out their cosplay outfit for this weekend's whacky convention, which, let's face it, always seem a bit exploitative and gross.
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The abiding complaint about the BBC "selling out" to the crass, cashed-up Yanks is they will smother Doctor Who's British, folksy charm with Disney dust the same way the mega-stable is steadily ruining Star Wars.
George Lucas also "sold out" to Disney, yet George Lucas and George Lucas alone was responsible for the Ewoks, so how much worse can things get?
For decades, the comforting thing about Doctor Who, and the ABC, was their intimacy; they felt like ours even though we knew they belonged to everybody.
The difference back then was you kept it to yourself. You didn't have to vomit it all out to the world in a desperate bid to be the first authorised ticket-holder to post something online before the inevitable pile-on of fawning, febrile, fellow appreciation.
Talk about smothering.
Back then, when Tom Baker pulled that scrunched-up paper bag from his pocket and offered a jelly baby to a fellow thesp labouring under dodgy make-up and a low-rent costume, that was the end of it. You smiled and got on with the rest of your night (usually a tea-time combination of sausages and mashed potato), only vaguely aware that somewhere, someone else might have witnessed the same thing.
It was genuinely surprising if the incident was raised by a classmate the next day and usually good enough for the foundation of a lifelong friendship.
For us, we lost Doctor Who when it was rebooted in the mid-noughties, coincidentally about the same time social media began its charge for our egos.
Twitter killed the time lord, not Mickey Mouse.
