There are notable male companions such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as well as Jamie. The Brigadier is one of the best Doctor Who characters, a military man who is adaptable and can deal with strange situations.

The Brigadier got some great lines:

* (To other soldiers) "Chap with the wings - five rounds, rapid."

* "Most of their work's so secret, they don't know what they're doing themselves."

* "Look, just tell me this: Are you or are you not the Doctor that I met during the Yeti business and then later when the Cybermen invaded?"

The problem with a lot of current companions is that they get dragged into soap opera. I have always seen the doctor as pretty much asexual and as a father figure to the companions, not a lover. (Or mother. I didn't take to Jodie Whittaker but I've never had an issue with a female doctor as such.)

The BBC can be very pigheaded, i.e. offering no incentives for people coming forward.

Even without losses, they have a trackrecord of stockpiling a lot of old content but not making it available to the public. I doubt this would happen to Doctor Who but it would elsewhere. You would think with streaming that the BBC could make a lot of obscure old content available, but they don't.

Brett's Sherlock Holmes is definitely the definitive one in my book.

There is a Soviet version of Sherlock Holmes which is surprisingly good starring Vasily Livanov. The locations sometimes don't quite look like England etc, but I really enjoyed it.

Sherlock Holmes is great. Tinker Tailor was repeated through my childhood, so I saw it a few too many times. I watched it again recently and found it slow... However the cast of it and Smiley's People are great. Karla is a notable early appearance of Patrick Stewart.

There were some great period dramas at the time, if a little set bound (like I, Claudius)