I read this during November 2023, sixty years on from the events described in this book. Pull to Open charts the development of the Doctor Who TV series between 1962 and 1963, concluding with the broadcast of the very first episode on the 23rd of November 1963. This isn't just a book for those devoted to Doctor Who, however - it shines a light on the whole process of making television drama during the 1960s, which I have found to be utterly fascinating, and I'm sure that it's something that anyone with an interest in the history of the BBC and TV production generally will find to be of enormous value. The author's style is meticulous, but never dull. Hayes has clearly gone above and beyond in his research and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the annotations present on the various documents held on Doctor Who's development in the BBC's written archives, most of which seem to have come from the hand of Sydney Newman himself. Hayes also takes care to give us a comprehensive biography of each of the pivotal figures involved in Doctor Who's conception (Newman, Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein, Donald Wilson etc.) before moving on to describe their contributions to the series itself. These biographies of their lives and careers pre-Doctor Who are of just as much interest as the sections dealing with the series itself. It is very easy to become engrossed in the world of the BBC's Drama department, it's Serials/Series/Plays divisions, and it's script unit as you make your way through this book. Hayes does an excellent job of relating the series to the wider world at the start of the 1960s, describing how Doctor Who was influenced by factors both internal to the BBC and external. As noted in the book's foreword, the formative years of Doctor Who have long been a subject of analysis and research and if you are already familiar with this period, you could be forgiven for thinking that there couldn't possibly be anything left to learn about it. Paul Hayes absolutely proves this wrong, debunking one or two myths and bringing new information to light on several occasions during this book. "Pull to Open" is an excellent resource which I have already happily recommended to several friends.