It’s no secret Peter Capaldi was a big Doctor Who fan before taking controls of the Tardis in 2013. As a young boy he wrote to Radio Times to express his passion for the show and went autograph hunting for any Doctor he could find.
In fact, his search for autographs led Capaldi to model his own signature on one Doctor's in particular – but probably not the one you were expecting. The Time Lord in question? Peter Cushing, the Star Wars actor who played the Doctor in two TV movies in the 1960s.
After Cushing signed a large black and white photograph for Capaldi, the young Whovian went out mimicking the style for his own name. "I was such a fan that I modelled my own signature on his, because we have the same initials," Capaldi revealed to The Sydney Morning Herald. "He had a rather florid P, which I copied."
However Capaldi did something rather silly to all his Who collectables years later: he burned them. After heading off to art school (and briefly appearing as the frontman in punk bank The Bastards from Hell), he threw out his childhood memorabilia. "I didn't want to be a geek any more so I threw out all my geeky stuff. I had a sort of bonfire of the vanities where I got rid of all this stuff that would be great fun for me to have now. Isn't that terrible?" he recalled.
Lesson learned: never throw away your Doctor Who souvenirs. Even if a superbly-named counter-culture rock band comes knocking.
Doctor Who returns to BBC1 this autumn
