The answer to the oldest question in the universe was certainly hidden in plain sight when in the 1965 adventure The War Machines, the computer Wotan and others too called the Doctor, Doctor Who. But if that's the case, why the big secrecy? On the many occasions on which the words Doctor Who have been uttered in irony, not once has the Doctor followed the lead of the knock, knock joke and replied "yes, that's right." There have been various attempts to explain this away, e.g. as the computer's default name for the unknown Doctor, as an assumption based on a lie propagated by the Doctor. Thank goodness authorial intention can be easily dismissed in the post-modern world, because Ian Stuart Black certainly never intended it to mean anything other than the Doctor's true name. As for his actual name. Well, that careless tongued Steven Moffat has given that one away too. In reply to a reader's question in the official Doctor Who Magazine last year he said: "No-one can know the Doctor's name, except each successive showrunner. We're taken into a special room far beneath the BBC and given the ancient and special runes that spell his true and awful name. We're commanded never to reveal what we have learned, because then the show would have to be renamed Mildred. Oh bugger."