Friends of boffin Stephen Hawking have admitted that his Doctor Who marathon weekend was “probably not a good idea” and may have clouded his judgement. The hyper-intelligent space guy spent the entire weekend watching box sets of Doctor Who, starting with the William Hartnell days, and interjected with Matt Smith episodes on BBC iPlayer.

“It’s like watching all four Die Hard films in a row,” said friend Professor Alain Tropfort, head of Rocket Science at MIT in Boston. “I did that once, and instead of leaving my apartment by the front door, which I do 999 times out of a 1000, I jumped out of the window, did a triple roll-over in the street, drop-kicked a granny in the chin, and I’m still paying the compensation today.”

He shuddered before continuing: “So you can imagine how Stephen feels this morning after watching the Daleks invade Earth about twenty times, the Cybermen – both Mondus and alternative world versions – invading and killing people, and then you’ve got the Silurians and the Sea Devils, and all these things flying through the skies. I’d be pretty shaken by it. He really shouldn’t have been left alone with the remote control, frankly.”

Hawking allegedly started his Doctor Who marathon with William Hartnell, before moving on to his favourite, Jon Pertwee, who he calls more of a “kick-ass” Doctor. A huge fan of the Unit days with the Brigadier, Hawking went through every Pertwee episode before zig-zagging through the disappointing early McCoy days, some Troughton and then some Tom and Colin Baker.

“He’s much more of an old-school Whovian,” said Tropfort. “All that hugging, crying and kissing of recent years is not his thing. About one hour after an episode with Billie Piper, he had managed to compose a rather eloquent rant about how they should stick to saving the Earth from aliens, not snogging.”

Having spent the Sunday afternoon watching the Peter Davison episodes, Hawking apparently became ever more convinced that Earth was about to be attacked by an alien life form “sooner rather than later”, telling friends that “thank GOD we’ve got the Doctor, otherwise we’d be f-cked.”

Next week, Hawking has promised friends that he will keep his feet on the ground, having scheduled an entire weekend watching Last of the Summer Wine.