@dlowan,
some interesting reading
i was looking for information on a segment called After The Doctor (that's how i remember it), i think the bolded section is what i remember
The Beginning
Doctor Who had an early Canadian connection. The series was conceived by Canadian expatriate Sydney Newman while he was the BBC's Head of Drama. The series may have been inspired by a short-lived segment (canceled because parents complained that it was "too frightening" for their children) on the Canadian version of Howdy Doody. It featured a surprisingly similar character, a puppet called Mr. X who traveled through time and space in his "Whatsis Box" teaching children about history. Newman oversaw this series while working as a programming head for the CBC. Newman maintained a guiding influence over Doctor Who until he left the BBC in 1967.
The series made its North American premiere in January 1965 on CBC with the broadcast of William Hartnell's first 26 episodes, fourteen months following their first airing on the BBC. The CBC did not renew the program and it would not reappear on the network for 40 years.
The 1970s: Doctor Who comes to the United States
The BBC series was originally sold to television stations in the United States in 1972, with Time-Life Television syndicating selected episodes of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor. Unfortunately, the series did not do well, despite an interesting write-up some years earlier in TV Guide. Apparently, program directors of the commercial television stations that picked up the Jon Pertwee series did not know that the program was an episodic serial, and so it was constantly being shuffled about in the programming schedules.
In 1977, Tom Baker's first four seasons as the Doctor were sold to PBS stations across the United States. At least five commercial stations (WOR in New York, WSBK-TV in Boston, KUHT in Houston, WTVQ in Lexington, KY and WVEC in Norfolk, VA) also aired the show for a few years. This time, though, Time-Life was ready to have the Doctor poised for American consumption, by having stage and screen actor Howard Da Silva read voiceover commentaries and teasers for the next episode which would inform the viewer as to what was going on. To accommodate the teasers (which were made out of clips from the next episode), up to three minutes of original material was cut from each episode. Originally mistaken for a British comedy (along the lines of Doctor in the House, Good Neighbors, Benny Hill, and Monty Python), PBS program planners took the show at face value, but it soon achieved cult status.
Return to Canada: TVOntario
In Canada, TVO aired the program starting in 1976 with The Three Doctors and continued with the rest of the original series on a weekly basis until 1991 with series airing two to three years behind the BBC. TVO was also available to many viewers in the United States living in states bordering the Great Lakes.
In order to fulfill the network's mandate as an educational broadcaster, TVO's transmissions of the Third Doctor's stories were hosted by Dr. Jim Dator while the first season of Fourth Doctor stories were hosted by science fiction writer Judith Merril, who called herself the "UnDoctor". Both hosts would fill out the show's half-hour time slot introducing each new episode and, afterwards, discussing it critically for several minutes often explaining how a story was at variance with scientific concepts or how it related to science fiction genres.
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