These images were carefully scissored from issues of Doctor Who Weekly. This was a brand-new magazine that was entirely devoted to the programme, and while I missed the first issue, I must have started buying it the very moment we returned to the UK. Here are, variously, a portrait of the Second Doctor and an Ogron monster; Zygons attacking the Doctor; a pair of Sensorites; Davros’s head and a colour poster for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (how the hell did that get in there?); a Krynoid in various stages of development (three of these) and a 1960s Dalek lurking under a bridge.
The pictures in this scrapbook do prove one thing, though. Despite what my mum would have you believe about my short-lived infatuation with Star Wars …
Mum: And Battlestar Galactica. You loved Battlestar Galactica.
Despite brief flirtations with inferior franchises, I remained faithful to Tom Baker and Doctor Who.
*
Tom Baker’s final season introduced some radical changes to the programme’s format, chief amongst them the demise of Tom Baker’s Doctor. A new producer named John Nathan-Turner was now running the show. Out went the 1970s diamond-shaped logo and time vortex title sequence, and in came bent chrome and a glittering star field – this was a new decade. Out went the wide-eyed innocent face of Tom Baker and in came the knackered, jaded face of Tom Baker, who had now been in the role for seven years. Out went the classic theme music and in came a much brasher version, with less mystery and more sparkle.
Not that I knew anything about it. I was too busy watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on the other side.
Sue: Ooh, a new title sequence. The theme music is very techno. Why is Tom Baker snarling? Is he in pain? Is someone torturing him? Hmmm … It’s very eighties, isn’t it? It doesn’t get any more eighties than chrome neon tubing. I’m sure it will grow on me. You have to move with the times. What did you think when you saw this episode’s titles? Were you shocked?
Me: I didn’t see it.
Sue: Were you still living in New Zealand?
Me: Erm … not quite.
Sue: What do you mean, not quite?
Me: I decided to watch something else instead.
Sue: You must be joking.
Me: I still feel bad about this but I switched to ITV. They were showing Buck Rogers in the 25th Century at exactly the same time, and because we didn’t have a video recorder well, let’s just say it was a very big decision.
Sue: Buck Rogers? Are you taking the piss?
There’s a funereal feel to Tom Baker’s final season and a sombre tone permeates every frame. It didn’t matter if the Doctor was fighting vampires, marsh men or time-sensitive lions, he didn’t seem to be his old self. Resigned, almost. Spent. Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with him.
Buck Rogers, on the other hand, was fun. It had a disco-dancing hero in tight-fitting Lycra, there were exciting dogfights in space, just like in Star Wars, and the actress who played his sidekick, Wilma Deering, made me feel funny inside.
But on Doctor Who, we had long scenes of a grumpy Tom Baker staring at a BBC Micro computer while the universe was crushed to death by the grinding wheels of entropy – this really was the plot for every single episode of that series. The jokes that had replaced the violence had in turn been replaced by actual po-faced science.
Doctor Who was either growing old or growing up.
But that was OK. I was growing up, too.
*
Tom Baker’s final story was called ‘Logopolis’. At the end, the Doctor is forced to regenerate when he falls to his death from a radio telescope, or if you want to be really cynical about it, when somebody drops a Gareth Hunt doll off an Airfix model.
I cried.
Of course I cried.
I knew Tom was leaving long before he fell. But it wasn’t my mum who spoiled it for me this time. Tom Baker had been on Nationwide, where he had looked very sad indeed, and he told me his time was up, but I mustn’t worry, because Doctor Who would go on without him. Doctor Who would go on for ever. He promised.
And because he was Tom Baker, I believed him.
Five Faces
When I was growing up in the 1970s, I never thought I’d ever see an episode of Doctor Who with William Hartnell in it. They were in the past (even the ones set in the future). So when, in 1981, the BBC screened a trailer for something called The Five Faces of Doctor Who at the end of an episode of Blake’s 7, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, or at the very least back to New Zealand.
BBC Announcer: Starting in two weeks on BBC Two, The Five Faces of Doctor Who looks back in time to previous journeys of the TARDIS … The Doctor returns in five complete adventures over five weeks running from Monday to Thursday, beginning with the first episode of the first ever Doctor Who.
As noted above, in the days before the internet and VHS tapes or DVDs, it was almost impossible to see old episodes of Doctor Who, barring a few black-and-white clips which might accompany a feature on, say, Blue Peter. What few people knew at the time was that the BBC had wiped numerous episodes of the programme in order to reuse expensive videotape and save shelf space. So this season of repeats was, by some distance, An Event.
Only one thing stood between me and It: rugby practice.
I didn’t like rugby. I couldn’t even tell you what kind of rugby we were playing. I definitely didn’t want to play it for the school team. But this was my first year at Big School, and I desperately wanted to fit in. So when I was plucked from a PE lesson to try out as a winger, I neglected to say, ‘No thanks, I’d rather try out for basket weaving.’ (Not an exaggeration, I really did weave baskets, and in fact I was the only boy at school who studied Home Economics.)
Actually, I was pretty good at rugby. But my ability to run like a Thal from a Dalek was fuelled entirely by a disinclination to being clattered into the mud by Ogron-like adolescents surely too burly and bloodthirsty to be called ‘children’, though they were all the same age as me. Plus none of them knew what Ogrons were.
On Monday 2 November 1981, the day of the first episode of The Five Faces of Doctor Who, I made sure I was the first player back in the changing room, out of my kit and into my clothes as speedily as if I were being pursued by a grunting prop forward. The programme began at 5.40 p.m. If I ran all the way, I could make it home in time.
But as I sprinted towards the exit, my right knee collided with the edge of a shower cubicle. My leg exploded with pain as a fragment of ceramic tile embedded itself in my flesh, right below the kneecap. I screamed, extremely loudly. A pool of blood formed around me and spread towards the door.
It must have been bad. Our rugby teacher, Mr Brown, not a man known for Florence Nightingale-like reverses of compassion, wanted to take me to A&E, although I could tell he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect – he probably had other plans that night, though I doubt they included the first episode of Doctor Who.
Mr Brown: Get your stuff together, Perryman. We’re going to the hospital.
Me: Do we have to?
Mr Brown: Why were you running on a wet floor without looking where you were going? A floor which is now covered in your blood, Perryman, and which will have to be cleaned. That wound needs serious attention.
Me: It’s not that bad. My mum is a nurse. She could fix it.
Mr Brown: Well, if you are absolutely sure. Take this plaster and get out of my sight before I change my mind.
I limped home as fast as I could, which wasn’t very, teeth clenched in agony. Hobbling into the front room, blood soaking through my new Farah trousers, I made straight for the television, which I switched to BBC Two.
Dad: And what do you think you’re doing?
Me: (out of breath) Doc … tor … Who.
Dad: Don’t be stupid. It’s Monday today. And what’s wrong with your leg?
Me: It’s … the first … episode … It’s … on … now.
Dad: I’m watching the news.
Me: (thinking fast, through haze of throbbing knee-pain) If I promise to clean o
ut the garage, can I watch it, please?
The Doctor Who theme music had already begun.
Me: Please, Dad. This is really important to me.
I could feel a river of blood trickling down my leg.
Dad: The whole garage? All of it? I don’t want to hear any excuses about spiders, like last time. Oh, go on then.
Relieved, I collapsed onto the sofa and we watched ‘An Unearthly Child’ together.
Dad: What a load of old rubbish. I missed the news for that?
Me: The next episode might be better. It’s on the same time tomorrow.
Dad: Oh no it isn’t.
Me: Oh yes it is.
Dad: Would you like to bet on that?
Me: But old episodes of Doctor Who are on every day this week. And the week after that. And …
Dad: Trust me, it isn’t. The news will be on. You can count on it, Son.
I didn’t have the strength to argue. The pain in my knee was now more than I could bear, so I shuffled off to the kitchen to find my mum. She wrote a very stern letter to the school about the damage sustained to both her son and his expensive – and now ruined – trousers, as soon as she’d finished stitching the holes in my leg and slacks with the same piece of thread.
I missed the second episode. But thanks to a stroke of good fortune – for me – Dad went back to working nights at his factory, and this meant he had to be out of the house by 5.30 p.m.
Actually, Dad had not been wrong. That first episode was too slow, too dark (as in we couldn’t see anything) and too talky. Worse than that, the First Doctor was a horrible man. He was nothing like the Doctor I’d grown up with. Yes, that Doctor could be a bit scary at times, but he was never this strict and unapproachable and unpleasant.
Sadly, the third episode was even worse than the first.
Sue: What a c**t! Are we supposed to like the lead character? Because the show is doing a terrible job if we are supposed to root for this git.
*
You never forget your first Kroton.
No, not crouton, though I do actually remember my first crouton too; it was floating in a chicken and mushroom Cup-a-Soup. No, I’m talking about the Krotons, the race of quasi-organic tellurium-based crystals who appeared in the Doctor Who serial that the BBC chose to represent the Second Doctor’s time in the TARDIS.
BBC Announcer: The evening news on BBC One now is followed by the weather and then, at six o’clock, regional programmes nationwide. Here on BBC Two now, ‘The Krotons’, an adventure that involves the second of the five faces of Doctor Who …
If ‘An Unearthly Child’ was a letdown then the ‘The Krotons’ was a kick in the teeth. It was boring and difficult to follow. I remember thinking to myself: if this is the best story the BBC could find to show off the Second Doctor, how bad must the rest of his adventures be?
What I didn’t realise then was that the BBC had thrown most of Patrick Troughton’s stories into a skip, and the only four-part Second Doctor story left on their shelves was this one.
Sue’s brother and daughter joined us for ‘The Krotons’ …
Gary: The robots have curling tongs and nutcrackers for hands. I just thought I should mention that.
Sue: I thought they were hiding the Krotons so they could ramp up the suspense; it turns out they were hiding them because they look dreadful.
Nicol: How do the Krotons get around?
Gary: They have a skirt made of waffles and that hides their legs. How can you watch this rubbish? The effects are terrible! Lost in Space and Star Trek were around at the same time and they looked better than this.
Sue: But Doctor Who didn’t have their budget, Gary. And besides, it’s part of Doctor Who’s charm.
When the Krotons are no more, the Gonds are ecstatic. ‘We are free at last!’ they cry.
Gary: Tell me about it.
Sue: It wasn’t that bad.
Gary: Are you serious?
Sue: It was only four episodes long and it moved.
Nicol: You should see some of the stuff Neil makes my mam watch.
Sue: Some of the episodes don’t exist and we still watch them.
Gary: You are both mad.
Two stories into The Five Faces of Doctor Who, I had to face facts: old Doctor Who – Doctor Who made before I was born – seemed to be absolutely rubbish. In fact, ‘The Krotons’ was so boring I didn’t even make it to the final episode.
The truth is that many old episodes of Doctor Who were better served by novelisations, and my young imagination, than the shabby, black-and-white reality.
Hitherto, my image of the Second Doctor was based on one of the many novelisations published by Target Books: Doctor Who and the Web of Fear by Terrance Dicks, which I remember reading in a caravan in Rhyl when I was eight years old.
That book had one hell of a cover: a beautiful illustration by Chris Achilleos of Patrick Troughton set against a spider-web background. He’s looking down at a fat, furry teddy bear lassoing a soldier with a halo of bright yellow light, which was cool, but not as cool as the realisation that the Second Doctor’s hair had been cut into the shape of a pudding bowl. This made me feel a whole lot better about my own hairstyle, the only difference being that my bowl was blond.
I tried to imagine what the Second Doctor was like – ‘a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle, humorous face’, according to Dicks – and as I read about his escapades in the London Underground and his battle against the villainous Yeti (who turned out to be alien robots and not homicidal teddy bears after all) I found it increasingly easy to replace Tom Baker’s face with my ideal of Patrick Troughton.
So when the time came for me to watch Patrick Troughton for real, I was expecting him to measure up to the Second Doctor of my imagination. And that’s why it is with a very heavy heart that I have to confess the only thing I can remember about the November 1981 screening of ‘The Krotons’ is that I thought it was terrible.
*
And yet love of Doctor Who, like the Doctor himself, can regenerate after the deadliest of blows. Of all the repeats chosen to celebrate the Doctor’s past in The Five Faces of Doctor Who, the one I was most looking forward to seeing was ‘The Three Doctors’.
BBC Announcer: On BBC One in five minutes there’s the evening news and weather. In twenty-five minutes here on BBC Two, school uniforms become a controversial issue at Grange Hill. But now it’s time for ‘The Three Doctors’, all called Who.
Of all the images I’d seen of earlier Doctors in books and magazines, there was one that stood out: a publicity photo of Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell posing together to celebrate the programme’s tenth birthday. I’d stare at this image for hours, trying to imagine what a story that featured three versions of the Doctor working together would possibly be like. Now I would get the chance to find out.
Sue: Did you hate it? I bet you hated everything back then. You should probably blame your hormones. It sounds to me like you were going through a very negative phase.
Me: No. I loved it.
Sue: Phew. I was starting to worry.
‘The Three Doctors’ was tremendous and Patrick Troughton was a revelation: the banter between him and his successor, Jon Pertwee, was priceless. Here was the Second Doctor of my imagination – playful and mischievous. And it was great to see the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and Jo Grant – the girl from the swamp – again too.
*
The BBC wrapped up The Five Faces of Doctor Who with a repeat of the Fourth Doctor’s swansong, ‘Logopolis’. I cried again, although I would have preferred something older – something classic – like ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘The Brain of Morbius’ or ‘The Ark in Space’.
This season of repeats, though, is when I went from being a kid who liked Doctor Who to being a Doctor Who fan, for better or worse. For a fan, not liking Doctor Who can be just as much fun as liking it – like supporters of a conference league football team, you’re in it for the long haul; if anyone is entitled to hurl abuse at lazy pe
rformances and shambolic set-pieces and poor managerial decisions, you are.
Besides, the season was called Five Faces because there was a fifth face – a new Doctor. His name was Peter Davison from All Creatures Great and Small. He’s too young, I thought, when I heard he would be taking on the role, never imagining that one day I’d have to accept a Doctor almost twenty years younger than me. Also, how could anyone replace Tom Baker as the Doctor? I could barely remember a time when he wasn’t a part of my childhood.
In a further shocking announcement, the BBC told us it was moving the Doctor out of his traditional Saturday teatime slot to a new home on Monday and Tuesday evenings. This was sacrilege. It was like moving Songs of Praise to a Thursday or Top of the Pops to a Monday. I was only twelve but it sounded like what it was – slightly desperate.
I didn’t like the Fifth Doctor at first. I thought he was pathetic.
Sue: Hormones.
It wasn’t just the new Doctor I had a problem with: Peter Davison had inherited not one but three companions from his predecessor. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very keen on two-thirds of them, either. There was Tegan, the Australian air hostess who never stopped whingeing, and Nyssa, a telebio-geneticist/princess from the planet Traken, though certainly pretty, was a bit too prissy and stuck-up for me. But I did like the Doctor’s third companion. His name was Adric.
Adric was both a teenage mathematical genius from the planet Alzarius and the quintessential nerd. He seemed perpetually ill at ease. No one took him seriously, not even the Doctor. If the Master wasn’t torturing him, the Australian air hostess was picking on him. Adric was played by an inexperienced young actor called Matthew Waterhouse, who stood awkwardly and never seemed to know where to put his hands. Coupled with being made to wear clothes he didn’t like – Adric’s costume was a never-changing set of green and yellow pyjamas – I found I could identify strongly with this character, which was a new development in my relationship with Doctor Who. Except for the maths part. I was rubbish at maths.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 4
