It is arguable that Levine’s influence spilled over from correcting continuity mistakes and making suggestions to actually influencing the approach Nathan-Turner took to producing the show. With Levine working on the inside of the production and vocal fans welcoming the evident ‘returning monsters’ policy developing through Nathan-Turner’s first few seasons, the producer apparently began to tailor the show to appeal to the vocal fan network, while also trying to make a show that would appeal to general BBC1 viewers. More than any previous producer, Nathan-Turner regarded his duties as including attending fan conventions (only Williams had previously attended fan events, being the producer when conventions began to take off). The fan acclaim he received could do no other than colour his production of the series.
However, the insular nature of the later material being created to appeal to fans did not cross over to the larger audience, beyond an initial nostalgia value. The show now often featured obscure continuity, and showcased returning characters and monsters, many forgotten by the more casual mass audience. By the time the show reached Attack of the Cybermen (supposedly co-written, or at the very least developed, by Levine) in 1985, the stories being told had become so continuity laden that even actively involved fans had trouble fitting together all the elements.
Fans were not always positive about the programme, even in the early days of organised fandom. One of the earliest reviews published by the DWAS was a scathing assessment of The Deadly Assassin (by DWAS organiser Jan Vincent Rudzki) ending with the plea: ‘What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?’ In later years, Robert Holmes’ reinvention of Time Lord society has come to be regarded as a classic, often featuring in the upper reaches of fan-favourite polls. The voices of 1980s fandom quickly turned on Nathan-Turner, even as they continued to enjoy privileged access to the show thanks to his largesse.
Nathan-Turner’s ‘open-door’ policy to fans contributed towards the development of a ‘fan hierarchy’. Those who had contacts in the Doctor Who production office were privy to advance knowledge that the greater body of fandom was not, and some would use this access to increase their stature within the small pond of fandom.
Small groups of active London fans even secured jobs within the BBC, including in the costume department at Television Centre or even working on the BBC listings magazine Radio Times. This afforded them access to information and even to the studio filming of episodes. Small groups of fans – those with BBC passes, their invited friends, and those allowed access by Nathan-Turner or other production-office contacts – were regular attendees at Television Centre studio recordings throughout the 1980s. They were able to watch episodes being recorded in the studio, pick up on behind-the-scenes relationships and politics and even fraternise with cast and crew in the BBC bar afterwards. Part of the reason for Doctor Who’s downfall at the end of the 1980s came from this free flow between fans and production personnel, unlike that on any other British TV show – cult, SF, soap or otherwise.
As well as the DWAS newsletter Celestial Toyroom, several other prominent fanzines had started up offering a platform for a plethora of critical voices (long before the existence of Internet forums). These magazines offered an outlet for experimentation and created a venue in which aspiring fiction writers and critics could learn their craft. Within this small universe, certain fan names would become well known and their work anticipated, by an actively engaged audience.
Two magazines in particular contributed to the development of Doctor Who’s fan culture in the 1980s: the professional Doctor Who magazine and the independent and critical Doctor Who Bulletin. Doctor Who magazine developed from the launch in 1979 by Marvel of Doctor Who Weekly comic. The title would prove to be important to the consolidation of fan identity and community in the UK. Modelled after Star Wars Weekly, the comic-strip-led publication was run by Doctor Who fans who used the publication’s resources and ‘official’ status to codify the Doctor Who canon. This wasn’t a deliberate project, but the result of unbridled enthusiasm meeting a welcoming audience. Soon the publication had developed beyond its beginnings as a children’s comic and was re-launched as Doctor Who Monthly (later just Doctor Who Magazine), appealing to an older, teen-and-upwards audience.
The establishment of key agreed facts about the show began in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly. Previously, fans had little published material beyond occasional features in the Radio Times (including the collectible Tenth Anniversary Special) and other newspapers and magazines, old TV21 comic-strip adventures and one book, The Making of Doctor Who (by scriptwriters Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke), which offered story synopses for the series up to the Tom Baker serial The Hand of Fear and some limited behind-the-scenes information. Now, the editors and writers of Doctor Who Monthly were able to establish a consensus as to which TV stories of the past were good (dubbed ‘classics’) and which were poor. Many readers gained an education on how television shows were constructed, with special attention paid to those elements that made Doctor Who unique, like special effects or model making. Stories told by cast and crew (often untrue or misremembered) became legends through repetition in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly. The publication matured with its audience, becoming Doctor Who Magazine and enduring through the years the show was off air (1989–2005), thriving on coverage of fan-produced novels and audio productions, as well as re-exploring Doctor Who’s past, often using video or DVD releases as a hook for reappraising a particular story or era of the show. That Doctor Who fandom has a shared language and set of cultural assumptions is largely due to the pervasive influence of Doctor Who Magazine.
Within the pages of the magazine, John Nathan-Turner established himself as a larger-than-life personality, one to rival Fourth Doctor Tom Baker. He even had a ‘costume’ of sorts, often wearing loud Hawaiian shirts in photographs and personal appearances. His was the voice of wisdom; he was the man who held the secrets of Doctor Who adventures yet to come and who could explain how fans were mistaken in their view that the 1980s version of the show was not as good as it used to be, due to the fact that ‘the memory cheats’. Nathan-Turner developed a series of catchphrases, readily repeated (and eventually mocked), such as ‘stay tuned’, when promising new developments, and ‘I have been persuaded to stay’, when fans were desperate for a new producer to take over from 1985 onwards. Nathan-Turner was regularly photographed in the pages of the magazine alongside the series’ stars, often wearing those ‘trademark’ Hawaiian shirts, or a sheepskin coat. His ‘cult of the personality’ was one that fandom initially fed, before they turned on the monster they’d been instrumental in creating.
A key tool in fan dissent was the maverick Doctor Who Bulletin (DWB). DWB took issue with the official picture of the series being painted in the 1980s through the pages of Celestial Toyroom and Doctor Who Magazine. Begun in 1983 as a back-bedroom-produced fanzine, DWB would become increasingly professional in its approach and production values as well as function as an outlet for the kind of fan debate not tolerated in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. Pre-Internet, letters-pages debates would rage among fans for months at a time, while editor Gary Levy (later Leigh) built solid contacts within the Doctor Who production office. The publication was tolerated by producer John Nathan-Turner until the magazine turned on the show and began to heavily criticise the production and those making it, with much of the criticism seemingly driven by growing personal animosity. With the help of continuity advisor Ian Levine (also an outcast as far as the production office was concerned by 1986), DWB chronicled the 1985 cancellation crisis and the reception of the flawed The Trial of a Time Lord season in 1986. It gave a voice to increasingly negative fan reaction.
Throughout the 1980s, many of the fans who began as writers for fanzines, or worked on Celestial Toyroom, Doctor Who Magazine or DWB, would become professionals in their fields, shaped by their experiences in Doctor Who fandom. Many became writers, whether for magazines or television, while others pursued more technical interests in video production and r
estoration. Some fans, born in the 1960s, were the right age to find work on the programme itself in its dying days, such as model maker Mike Tucker (who would go on to write official spin-off novels) and mask makers Stephen Mansfield and Susan Moore.
Other events had linked and brought Doctor Who fans together, showing isolated, individual fans that they in fact belonged to a large and active subculture. In 1983, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who in advance of that autumn’s broadcast of The Five Doctors, BBC Enterprises (the publicly funded BBC’s commercial arm) arranged an official convention to take place in the grounds of Longleat House in Wiltshire. There had been occasional Doctor Who exhibitions and public appearances by the stars before, most notably the ongoing (and constantly changing) exhibition on the sea front at Blackpool and that at Longleat itself. The Longleat event would be different, however. The organisers expected around 50,000 people to attend over the Easter-weekend holiday, drawn by appearances by many of the actors from the show’s 20-year history. However, the BBC had underestimated the appeal of Doctor Who and the effect of nostalgia. Traffic jams and endless lines became a hallmark of the event, as crowds swarmed to see prop displays, watch old episodes screened in tents and queue for hours to secure autographs from their favourite actors. The enforced waiting in line had a curious side effect: many friendships, some lasting to this day, began in the lines at Longleat. Fan writer Paul Cornell even went on to describe the event as the Doctor Who fan equivalent of Woodstock (the 1969 music festival in New York State that many see as marking the end of the ‘innocence’ of that tumultuous decade).
The unforeseen success of the Longleat event proved at least one thing to the BBC: Doctor Who was still as merchandisable a property as it had been during the 1960s at the height of ‘Dalekmania’. As a result, the quantity and availability of Doctor Who merchandise would rocket, as would products aimed exclusively at fan purchasers. Far from being seen as the creative group they would later be recognised as, the vast majority of fans (those without any privileged access) in the 1980s were largely perceived as an economic construct waiting to be exploited, little more than consumers of merchandise and memorabilia. A plethora of books appeared chronicling the history of the series (not always accurately, as several tomes by Peter Haining showed: it took later writers, who combined their fandom with solid research, to really get the facts on how the show had been created and made from the 1960s to the 1980s). Others had more tenuous links to the programme, such as The Doctor Who Cook Book and The Doctor Who Knitting Pattern Book.
Fans had been canvassed at the Longleat event to see what story from the past they would like to see released on home video, which was just taking off as a new entertainment format in the early 1980s. The eventual choice would be Revenge of the Cybermen (the first choice, the then-lost Troughton serial Tomb of the Cybermen, not being available), released in a one-hour, cut-down version for £40. However, throughout the early-to-mid-1980s there was a large fan underground trade in VHS videotapes of many Doctor Who stories. Some were sourced from ongoing transmissions of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee stories in the United States and Australia. Fans with international pen friends would receive copies of off-air VHS video recordings of episodes. These would then be copied further on connected home-videotape machines and redistributed around the UK’s fan networks. It was the only way fans gained access to the actual episodes that made up Doctor Who’s long history. That lack of access to older episodes of the show was also why the tents at Longleat screening The Dalek Invasion of Earth or The Dominators proved almost more popular than those boasting appearances by real-life Doctor Who actors. Often, small groups of fans would meet in each other’s houses (or in rented halls or community-centre rooms if the groups were larger) to watch these fourth- or fifth-generation videotape copies of long-unseen Doctor Who stories. It was hardly the ideal way to discover the history of their favourite TV show, but as very little was officially available and repeat screenings on television (limited to just four channels) were almost non-existent, unofficially sourced videotapes were the only way to see vintage Doctor Who. Occasionally, fans would gain access to older, black-and-white episodes of the show, clearly not transferred to tape from off-air broadcasts (these were clean copies lacking continuity announcers, onscreen logos or ad breaks). These mysteriously sourced tapes appeared to have come directly from within the BBC archives themselves, and were often copied from film or video versions of the episodes officially on loan from the BBC for screenings at Doctor Who conventions. Other material (such as annual gag reels compiled by the BBC’s own videotape engineers featuring programme outtakes and often ‘adult’ humour) found its way into fandom through more nefarious means.
This privileged access to the show’s own past was one of the main benefits of being part of Doctor Who fandom: beyond the interminably slow official release of the series to home video by the BBC there was just no way to legitimately see episodes. These same fans would later form the core audience for the home-video and (much later) DVD releases of the series, as well as (in many cases) contributing towards the creation of the value-added ‘extras’ material featured on the DVDs. Fan audio recordings from the 1960s are often the only remaining material from key stories whose videotape recordings had been wiped. These same unauthorised audio recordings of stories like The Myth Makers or Marco Polo have been audio restored and polished and officially released on CD by the BBC. Efforts by fans of the show, in cases like this, have resulted in the preservation of material that the BBC would otherwise have wilfully destroyed long ago. As of 2008, however, there were still 106 missing episodes of Doctor Who (all from the show’s earlier black-and-white era), while many of those that have been recovered from foreign broadcasters (to whom they’d been sold for transmission in the 1960s and 1970s) have been found in international searches carried out by dedicated fans.
The problem with this increasing influence of a vocal minority of fans over Doctor Who during the 1980s was that it lost its grip on the mass audience. In appealing to vocal fans the programme became more insular (offering more returning monsters and more explorations of the series’ fundamental concepts). The irony was that, by the time of the 1985 hiatus, Doctor Who was a television show that most fans no longer seemed to like either, at least as far as the current version went. While Nathan-Turner claimed that ‘the memory cheats’, committed fans actually had contemporary access (through their unofficially circulated VHS videos) to the show’s own past episodes and were thus able to make direct comparisons.
Ian Levine was pictured in the press smashing his TV with a hammer in a publicity stunt to protest against the 1985 hiatus. During The Trial of a Time Lord season in 1986, he appeared on TV review show Did You See…? in a segment entitled ‘Doctor Who in Decline’. Levine voiced the complaints of many fans when he noted that recent years had seen ‘a very steep decline in the quality of the show’ and that it was now a ‘mockery pantomime version of its former self’. Other professional fans (like Doctor Who Magazine writer J Jeremy Bentham and later Doctor Who novelist Peter Anghelides) appeared to join in the criticism of the in-danger-of-cancellation programme. Doctor Who didn’t need executive enemies within the BBC – it had ‘fans’.
This tension between loving Doctor Who but not liking the currently on-air version was unique to the series at the time, but with a rash of ‘reinventions’ of old formats in recent years, fans of 1970s television series like Bionic Woman or Battlestar Galactica have found themselves locked into love-hate relationships with the new versions of their old favourites. Production decisions are debated, casting choices bemoaned and alternatives endlessly suggested in Internet forums and chat rooms. This all happened in Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s, too, but the media available were the letter columns of fanzines and, eventually, television itself through comment shows like Did You See…? or Open Air (which saw a group of fans tackle writers Pip and Jane Baker over the faults in the conclusion of the Trial of a Time Lord season, including teenager Ch
ris Chibnall, later to become key writer on Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood).
Through their knowledge of the series, gathered from fanzines and publications like Doctor Who Magazine and their viewing of older, generally unavailable episodes, as well as (for the select few who were well connected) their actual involvement with the Doctor Who production-office personnel, Doctor Who fandom collectively developed a sense of ownership of the show. This perceived ownership reached its height during the aftermath of the 1985 hiatus crisis, and would lead to fan fiction writers ‘taking over’ the production of Doctor Who when the show was off air.
There were benefits to be had from this obsessive attention to a single TV show. As a result of the attention paid to it, Doctor Who is the most studied and chronicled television show of all time, and fandom has produced some meticulous and detail-oriented media researchers, key among them being Andrew Pixley. A whole set of professionals all found their initial inspirations and first experiences within the diverse worlds of Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s. In this shared vocabulary and set of references, Doctor Who fans found a form of discourse that connected them, educated them and equipped them to take over the production of the continuing unfolding text of Doctor Who after the BBC had abandoned it, through novels, audio dramas and in-depth research into the making of the programme. Fans became the custodians of the Doctor Who legacy, safeguarding it and expanding it until the time was right for the TV show to reemerge and take its rightful place at the top of the TV ratings.
Timeless Adventures Page 20
