Nobody wanted to talk about Doctor Who at Big School. It was the love that dared not speak its name, and I found it hard to moderate my enthusiasm and pedantry to acceptable levels.
Them: Knock, knock!
Me: Who’s there?
Them: Doctor!
Me: Doctor who?
Them: Exactly!
Me: That doesn’t work though, does it? The programme may be called Doctor Who but the character is called the Doctor. So the joke should really go ‘Knock, knock!’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘The Doctor!’ ‘The Doctor who?’ ‘The Doctor who is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, has two hearts, and travels with his companions in a battered-looking blue police box called the TARDIS, which stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space.’
Them: Fuck off.
Aside from the pyjamas, Adric had it easy. At least he had his maths.
*
The Fifth Doctor’s first year is pretty terrible. Peter Davison warms to the part – and I warmed to him as the series went on – but most of the adventures were rickety in both concept and execution. At least it wasn’t going out on Saturday nights. However, there is one great story in that season. It’s called ‘Earthshock’.
Doctor Who never usually bothered to hide the identity of its villains. In fact, the opposite was usually true; if you’re watching something called ‘Death to the Daleks’, you can’t be surprised when some Daleks turn up and then die. But ‘Earthshock’ wasn’t playing by the same rules.
The first shock in ‘Earthshock’ arrived at the climax to the opening episode, which, up to that point, was a standard runaround with some faceless androids as the bad guys. But then, without any warning whatsoever, something truly wonderful happened:
INTERIOR: Console room, spaceship. Some Cybermen are studying a holographic image of the Doctor.
Cyberleader: Destroy them! Destroy them at once!
Me: CYBERMEN!
I slipped out of my chair and onto my knees. I was twelve years old. The last time I’d seen Cybermen was half my lifetime ago, but I recognised them instantly. It didn’t matter that these Cybermen didn’t look or sound anything like the Cybermen of old, or that there wasn’t a single line of dialogue to confirm that they definitely were Cybermen; even though they were on screen for less than ten seconds, I knew.
The other surprise was less welcome. Do you remember when my mum told me the Doctor’s friends never died?
She lied.
The Cyberleader blasts the TARDIS console.
Sue: Noooo! They’ve killed the TARDIS!
The Doctor retaliates by shooting the Cyberleader at point-blank range.
Sue: Bloody hell, the Doctor just shot a Cyberman!
Bang!
Sue: He just shot him twice!
Bang!
Sue: Three times!
The Doctor tries to rescue Adric but it’s too late and his companion doesn’t make it out alive.
Sue: I’m shocked.
Me: You’re Earthshocked.
This was the second shock in ‘Earthshock’: the death of a companion. Suddenly, the Doctor was fallible. Yes, scores of innocent people had been killed over the course of his adventures, but those deaths might be considered collateral damage (and guest stars and extras didn’t really count). This time, the Doctor had failed to save someone who was close to him.
The really worrying thing about this, though, was I had begun to feel like I cared more about the death of Adric than the people who were making the programme did. And with this, my metamorphosis into a true fan was complete.
Words I Learned from Doctor Who
Colin Baker once said that it was part of Doctor Who’s job to send children scurrying off to their dictionaries when the Doctor uses a word they don’t understand. And even though he was being a bit sesquipedalian about it, and if a child had taken his advice they would have missed half the episode he was in (and he wasn’t in that many), he was also right. Because over six years, ITV’s answer to Doctor Who – The Tomorrow People – only managed to teach me three words, all beginning with the letter T: telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. Doctor Who, on the other hand, is still expanding my vocabulary in new and exciting ways today.
Bohemian – One of the many words I learned from Terrance Dicks, who would use it to describe the Fourth Doctor in every Target novelisation he ever wrote. According to Dicks, the Doctor wore ‘vaguely Bohemian looking garments’; I spent most of my formative years believing that the word meant ‘badly fitting’.
Dalekanium – The material from which the perfidious Daleks are made and which is impervious to absolutely nothing.
Entropy – Everybody is going to die. Slowly.
Hiatus – An enforced break and not a paid holiday where you sit around on your backside doing nothing for eighteen months.
Homunculus – A homicidal robot with the brain of a pig. This is not exactly correct but it sounds more like what something called a homunculus ought to be than the definition you’ll find in the dictionary.
Isomorphic – This has nothing to do with energy drinks. The word explains why the only person who can fly the Doctor’s TARDIS is the Doctor. (See James Bond’s gun in Skyfall for a blatant rip-off of this idea.)
Megabyte Modem – back in 1986, this was a genuine sci-fi term for a futuristically fast internet connection. These days we all have megabyte modems, apart from the perfidious customer complaints department of British Telecom, apparently.
Penultimate – I learned this word not from Doctor Who, but from the BBC continuity announcers who would regularly use it when they were introducing the third part of a four-part story. It was a word I came to dislike: the penultimate episode was usually the dullest one.
Perfidious – Deceitful and untrustworthy. I frequently utilised perfidious in school essays to impress the reader and I am still using it today. QED.
Radiophonic – Electronic music that sounds odd and/or disturbing and has been composed in a BBC basement with no windows. See also: Tangerine Dream (page 61).
Robophobia – An inexplicable fear of killer robots.
Serendipity – Doctor Who’s excuse for a plot riddled with coincidences.
Timey-wimey – Doctor Who’s excuse for a plot that has long since stopped making sense.
Whovian – Please refer to this book’s glossary (page 259).
1983
1983 was a brilliant year to be a Doctor Who fan. It was the twentieth anniversary of the show, which meant there were lots of things to collect – lavish coffee-table books, Doctor Who wallpaper, Dalek Easter Eggs, LPs of the background music, Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets, TARDIS tents, T-shirts, mugs. There was even an academic book written on the subject, entitled The Unfolding Text (sample chapter: ‘Regeneration: Narrative Similarity and Difference’). Best of all, there was a videocassette of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ starring Tom Baker, but it cost an eye-watering £40 and we didn’t have a VCR to play it on.
There were also two very special anniversary events planned for 1983. One was a television special. The other …
BBC Continuity Announcer: To celebrate twenty years of Doctor Who, BBC Enterprises are holding a Doctor Who celebration at Longleat in Wiltshire on Easter Bank Holiday, Sunday 3 and Monday 4 April. It will include stars and characters from the series, and displays of BBC make-up, costumes and visual effects. For further information please send a stamped addressed envelope to BBC Enterprises …
Ah, Longleat. I wasn’t allowed to go. I wasn’t even allowed to send a stamped addressed envelope to the BBC for further information. I was informed in no uncertain terms that we would not be visiting Longleat to help celebrate twenty years of Doctor Who, and that was final. I blame my sister. Joanne didn’t like Doctor Who.* If Mum and Dad had to take one of us to Longleat, we all had to go to Longleat, guaranteeing that at least three-quarters of our party would have a thoroughly miserable time.
Anyway, thanks to my selfish sister, readers of this book are deprive
d of my memories of Longleat, perhaps the pivotal event in the history of Doctor Who fandom. Famously, Mark Strickson, the actor who played Adric’s replacement on the programme, had appeared on Saturday Superstore a few weeks earlier, where he told viewers not to bother buying tickets in advance. ‘Just turn up on the day,’ he said.
Thanks to Mark, Longleat was a glorious shambles. BBC Enterprises had expected 10,000 fans to show up, so when 40,000 descended on the site, they had to lock the doors and turn people away. The roads around the estate became gridlocked, the makeshift parking area turned into a mud bath, and people were obliged to stand in line for five hours just to get a glimpse of Tom Baker in a tent. The toilets overflowed, the food ran out and the Red Cross had to be called in to airlift small children out of a talk given by Jeremy Bentham on the history of TARDIS design variations.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Yet I would have sold my own sister to attend. I cannot recall precisely what I did on the afternoon of Sunday 3 April, while the Longleat celebration was happening without me, but whatever it was, I cannot imagine I did it with good grace.
Fortunately, Longleat was not the highlight of Doctor Who’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. That honour fell to ‘The Five Doctors’, a movie-length multi-Doctor anniversary special that would feature every incarnation of the Time Lord, lots of companions, and loads of monsters. Or if you were me in 1983, the best thing in the world ever.
The build-up to the programme is almost as memorable to me as the episode itself. The hype was unprecedented. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about Doctor Who on ‘normal telly’, even the news. There was a special Radio Times cover, a painting of all five Doctors and the Master, which made my heart miss a beat when I saw it in the newsagent’s on Southbank Road. Furthermore, I was allowed to buy it – an unheard-of indulgence in a house where the Radio Times was normally seen only at Christmas.
‘The Five Doctors’ was scheduled for transmission as part of BBC One’s Children in Need coverage. I can remember thinking at the time how nice it was that the Corporation was giving those poor urchins a special episode of Doctor Who. That’ll cheer them up, I thought, though I confess I was worried that they’d keep cutting away from the Daleks, Wirrn etc. every fifteen minutes so they could show videos of homeless kids sleeping rough on the streets, which would spoil it for me.
In the event, ‘The Five Doctors’ was everything I wanted it to be and more. OK, the ticker at the bottom of the screen constantly asking for donations got on my nerves after a while, and Tom Baker wasn’t in it very much, but that didn’t seem to matter because he hadn’t been gone that long, and besides, I was much more excited about seeing Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell together again. Except it wasn’t William Hartnell, it was just somebody who looked like him. Did I know this at the time? Probably. Did I care? Not a bit, not when I had Daleks, Cybermen, and a Yeti to distract me. There was also an amazing new monster, a sleek, silver killing machine that went by the name of the Raston Warrior Robot.
Sue: That’s scary. I like that. Is this new? It’s not an Auton, is it?
Me: No, it’s a new monster.
Sue: I thought so. I wouldn’t have forgotten that in a hurry. Nice arse.
The Cybermen advance on the Third Doctor and Sarah …
Sue: Look at that! This is brilliant.
The Raston Warrior Robot makes short work of the Cybermen.
Sue: I love it. I just wish his poles were a bit shorter. I don’t see how he could keep them up his arms like that. There’s no room for them.
Me: Maybe he runs over to his cave to get another spear and then he runs back to throw it. Because he’s quantum locked, you can’t see him when he’s running backwards and forwards.
Sue: Bullshit.
As I’ve said earlier, 1983 was a brilliant year. I was proud to be a Doctor Who fan in 1983. I didn’t care if my friends and family weren’t interested in the show; if they wanted to miss out on the best television programme ever made, that was their lookout.
At school the Monday after ‘The Five Doctors’, I was approached by a couple of bigger lads in the playground.
Them: Oi, Perryman! You like Doctor Who, don’t you?
Me: (uncertainly) Yes …
Them: That robot with the missiles coming out of his hands …
Me: The Raston Warrior Robot?
Them: Yeah, that was pretty cool, actually.
I didn’t say I told you so. But I told you so.
* When I began writing this book, I asked my sister to share her memories of Doctor Who with me, and this is what she came up with: ‘It was too scary. I didn’t like it very much. I remember Daleks and Cybermen being in it, if that’s any help.’ This is why she doesn’t feature in this book very much, which is a lucky escape for Joanne, I expect.
I Wasn’t a Teenage Whovian
In early 1984 I began to get interested in girls. Perhaps not coincidentally, at around the same time, I stopped watching Doctor Who for three years. Final childhood memory of the show: Ingrid Pitt karate-kicking a sea monster called the Myrka in the face. After that … nothing. It was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile the demands of early adolescence with the exact and opposite demands of being a teenage Whovian. At this point in history, being a teenage Whovian was just about the worst thing it was possible to be.
It was Myrka’s fault. Doctor Who’s past is littered with ropey special effects and unrealistic monsters, though that had never bothered me before. But there was something arrestingly, preternaturally dire about the Myrka. It was operated by the same men who brought Dobbin the pantomime horse to life in Rentaghost, but Dobbin was a far scarier prospect than the floppy green waddlefuck that staggered along a corridor, bumping into the walls, in episode 2 of the story ‘Warriors of the Deep’.
The faces of the Doctor and Tegan register fear and horror at the approach of the Myrka. And then after all that build up …
Sue: Oh dear.
At least she has something to take her mind off it:
Sue: The door is even worse than the monster. Is it made from marshmallow?
Me: This story’s nickname is ‘Warriors on the Cheap’.
Sue: I’m not surprised. I don’t understand why they need this stupid Myrka thing anyway. They’ve already got the Silurians and the Sea Devils. How many monsters do they need?
The Doctor throws an ammunition magazine at the Myrka and the blast disorientates the beast.
Tegan: It’s blinded!
Sue: They should have blinded the audience. That would have been more merciful.
I was thirteen when I started noticing the female of our species. Up until then, the only girls I’d been interested in were the Doctor’s assistants, and that was purely platonic. But then one day – practically overnight – girls stopped being my classmates with the funny clothes, long silly hair and giggly voices, and they became the most alluring creatures on this or any other planet. I’d even been on a date with a girl, if you can call paying for Sharon Wilkins to watch E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial at the local ABC fleapit as long as she agrees to sit next to you, a date.
It wasn’t just a conspicuous love of Doctor Who that was cramping my style. My physical appearance definitely contributed to my failure to make any headway with the opposite sex: my pudding-bowl haircut (cheers, Mum), my squashed boxer’s nose (thanks for that, Dad), and my delightfully spotty face (nice one, Curly Wurlys). In addition to which, my Mum, in an effort to save some money, took it upon herself to kit me out in a pair of safety boots that she’d liberated from the factory where Dad worked. The first time I wore them to school, my classmates took it in turns to sing UB40’s ‘One In Ten’ at me. I didn’t get it at first, and they had to explain it was because I walked around with a size-one foot in a size-ten shoe. This went on for about a year.
So to recap: comedy shoes, Mr Logic hair, chronic acne and a big squashed nose. Where girls were concerned, I could ill afford the additional handicap of a deep e
nthusiasm for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, Doctor Who. So Doctor Who had to go.
One night in 1984 Amanda Williams, the girl of my dreams, asked me round to her house to watch Lace. Lace was a very steamy (at least by 1984 standards) television mini-series based on the equally steamy novel by Shirley Conran, the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day. It would have been a fantastic opportunity for a quick fumble if Amanda’s mum and dad hadn’t been sitting in the same room as us. I made it as far as the second ad-break before sheer blushing discomfiture got the better of me and I had to make my excuses and leave. When I got home, I was too embarrassed to tell my mum where I’d been, and she only got the truth out of me when she threatened to take my ZX Spectrum away.
Ah yes, my ZX Spectrum, another reason for abandoning Doctor Who. I loved my Spectrum like the girlfriend I didn’t have. While Peter Davison was fighting Daleks and the combined uselessness of the BBC prop department, I was copying reams of machine code into a cheap lump of plastic, just so I could play an electronic version of Hangman on it several hours later, instead of using, say, the pencil and paper right next to me. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was painstakingly transcribing pages from the Daily Mirror newspaper onto our television screen in BASIC, because no one had invented the World Wide Web yet. But most of the time, I just played games on it.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 5
