#and if i remember correctly david tennant was one of the starers when he first met paul which is very funny

[silverfoxstole]

I love that photo. It's from the Shada recording in 2003.

Exerpt from the article it accompanied in DWM:

THE FAN GENE

DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE 328 2ND APRIL 2003

BY GARY GILLATT

“So, Paul…do people ever run up to you in the street shouting ‘Hello, Doctor!’?”

“Really, really occasionally. It’s my experience that the more ardent Whovians tend to go dry in the mouth. I think I twig when someone’s a Doctor Who fan, in a shop or in a restaurant, because they just stand there in silence staring at me. But generally speaking, because I’ve done other things as well, the attention I get and the conversations I have about my work in the street or wherever, it’s hardly ever about Doctor Who.”

“You get quotes from Withnail and I shouted at you, I imagine?”

“Oh, yeah. That and The Monocled Mutineer seem to be what people immediately associate me with. I get a lot more attention for those two. Hardly a day passes without someone offering up a Withnail quote – ‘Ice in the cider’, ‘Cake and fine wines’. Especially if I’m ordering drinks at the bar.”

“So you’ve never had a bizarre experience with a Doctor Who fan in a shoe shop, then?”

“Why, is that where they live?”

“Not especially. It’s just that I can imagine you trying on a new pair of trainers as a nervous assistant suddenly blurts out ‘These shoes! They fit perfectly!’”

“Oh, I said that in the movie, didn’t I? I get you. Is that a catchphrase for my Doctor now?”

“I suspect that much of his character in hundreds of novels, comic strips and audio plays has been based upon your delivery of that one line.”

“How funny… But no, I don’t get that from Whovians. They just stare at me. It’s the stare that gives them away. That and a general, um… physical appearance. The thing is, I suspect that when other people recognise me they think ‘Oh, look, it’s Paul McGann’. When a Whovian sees me, maybe their first thought is ‘Oh my God, it’s Doctor Who!’ Perhaps they freeze because they don’t see the actor who plays the character, they just see their hero walking down the street. That must come as a shock.”

I can imagine. In fact, it happened to me just a few hours earlier, but I’m not going to tell Paul McGann that. I’m in Bristol to talk to Paul about his work in the BBCi remake of Shada. I knew I would be meeting Paul, and I was totally prepared for meeting Paul, but when I first spotted him across the green room at the recording studios, for the briefest of moments, for half a heartbeat, my brain screamed ‘Oh my God, it’s Doctor Who!’ – before struggling to adopt a suitably cool, blasé attitude. At the time I put this down to that fact that Paul had grown his hair long, reoccupying his Doctor-ish silhouette. [Given the timing, presumably because he was playing Bush again in Hornblower] But perhaps this reaction is symptomatic of something more deep-seated.

Maybe my decades-long relationship with Doctor Who really has reprogrammed my character recognition software. Sitcom stars Andrew Sachs and Melvyn Hayes were also in the room at the time, and I didn’t find myself hopping from foot to foot shouting ‘Look, it’s Manuel and Gloria!’ Neither did I feel the need to ask Sean Biggerstaff how this year’s Gryffindor Quidditch team training was going.

…Such serious blurring of fact and fiction must surely be symptomatic of some kind of mental disorder, one feels. But if so, how does this square with my own fleeting confusion of Paul McGann and the Eighth Doctor, for example? Have all my years of watching Doctor Who, reading about Doctor Who and looking at pictures of Doctor Who affected my own perceptions? And Paul McGann says he gets this all the time. I can’t, therefore, be the only one with this bizarre affliction…

When I return to London I ask a group of fan friends if they have ever experienced a similar sense of confusion. One tells me of a time he introduced himself to Elisabeth Sladen with the words ‘Hello, Sarah,” while another recalls an occasion when, upon realising Tom Baker was walking down the street towards him, he ran into a branch of Somerfield out of sheer fright.

I’d hoped that Paul McGann, who is a relative newcomer to Doctor Who, would offer some fresh insights into fan behaviour. This theory is all very well, but it turns out he hasn’t actually met very many Doctor Who fans, as they apparently just stare from a distance. Only a few have ever plucked up the courage to speak.

“Of course, every now and then someone does want to talk about Doctor Who,” Paul told me. “What’s charming about that, though, is that it’s obvious that they don’t want it to seem like it’s Doctor Who they want to talk about. They go round the houses, and display and amazing knowledge of my CV, before saying, ‘And you were great in Doctor Who’. That isn’t so much the giveaway itself, so much as the finale of ‘And you still are, of course…’ which is always said with a twinkle in the eye.”