Our next claim to 'Doctor Who fame' - after last week's City law firm that acted in the sale of a power station that doubled as a set in a recent Cybermen episode - is a slightly less tenuous one (albeit only just) from Simon Nicholls, head of the criminal department at Norfolk firm Belmores. 'I cannot pretend for a moment to have defended either the Doctor for improper use of police property or a Dalek for malicious communication,' he writes, 'but I do have two connections.'


First of all, his father served with Jon Pertwee during the war, and a 14-year-old Mr Nicholls was introduced to the Doctor's third incarnation when the family bumped into him at Ibiza airport in 1970. Mr Nicholls has happy recollections of how charming the so-called dandy Doctor was, in particular his 'stunningly curly' hair. Then, some years later, he was having dinner in Hollywood with a friend who was then the accountant for Iron Maiden (hitting our recent musical claims to fame theme too, in an admirably tangential way). Also at the table was a certain Kit Pedler, one of the two creators of the Kings of the Bacofoil, as Mr Nicholls disrespectfully puts it - better known as the Cybermen.


Were Mr Nicholls more au fait with matters of time, space, and heavy metal, he would know that Iron Maiden included their own homage to the good Doctor on the illustrated cover of their futuristically themed album 'Somewhere in Time'. The TARDIS can be seen on the back, while there is some debate as to whether the T-shirt that drummer Nicko McBrain is pictured wearing, bearing the legend 'Iron What', is also a tribute, as the style is similar to the 'Doctor Who' logo of the era. Not a lot of people know that, we think it is fair to say.