November 2013, Croydon
As many may
have noticed I have from time to time (or all of the time rather) made mention
of an affection towards that most incomprehensible of things, Doctor Who. With this weekend being its 50th-anniversary
I felt the need to write a little about what the show has meant to me. A few snippets of memories and why and how I
got horrifically addicted to a foreign television broadcast of a rather modest
budget. And why it is for me the
greatest thing ever.
After all, Doctor
Who shaped my life.
1963,
London
Somewhere
in London a committee within the BBC decides to fill a gap between the sports
results and “Juke Box Jury” with a sci-fi program designed to teach children
about science & history. The result,
Doctor Who, is met with general apathy and poor ratings when its start is
overshadowed by the previous day’s assassination of JFK.
The show
later goes on to become a world-wide hit lasting decades.
March 1978,
The Everett Chalmers Hospital, Fredericton
I was born.
I was
reading an article recently that the world-wide quality of life peaked in 1978
and has been going down-hill ever since.
I claim coincidence.
1982/83-ish,
Noonan
A rather
young Andrew goes into the den to find his father watching a show which has a
man with big curly hair and a confused looking woman in a leather swim-suit pass
through a rock wall. Notable is a strange
fringe around them as this occurs.
This moment
is remarkable for 2 reasons:
1. Dad was in the house which makes
this a very early memory since my parents divorced when I was 4 or 5 or so.
2. Years later I realised that this was
a scene from 1976’s “The Face of Evil” which had been airing on American PBS and
that it is my earliest memory of Doctor Who.
Said memory involving a rather unconvincing special effect is somehow
appropriate.
1983-88
Fredericton
I go
through your rather average childhood, playing Nintendo, memorising lists of
dinosaurs and planets, being far too sarcastic to adults, sucking at anything
sports-related (low point: striking out at Tee Ball. You know, where they put the ball on a stick
RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE?), occasionally watching Doctor Who on Saturday
night but it fading into the background (after all, Transformers & Go-Bots
were much more important) and generally being that weird kid at school that the
other children avoided (to be fair
I did have a tendency of wearing really ugly
sweaters).
4
September 1989, Fredericton (yes, I looked up the date)
A mildly older Andrew (I was up to 11 by this point) notices in the TV Guide (those
wacky days before the “Listings Channel” let alone PVRs) that YTV (AKA Canada’s
new “Youth Television”) would be airing Doctor Who from the beginning starting
at 6:30pm that evening. Having memories
of watching it “when little” (like 6-7 or so) I tuned in as there was a gap in
the carefully coordinated TV schedule between Count Duckula and when Mom would
take over the TV to watch Jeopardy at 7pm and yell out the responses.
So at this point I started watching the show and rather quickly got really rather interested in this strange relic of a by-gone age (don’t ask me why an 11 year old would like a nearly 30-year-old TV-show, but then even when I was younger than that I would happily watch movies from the 1930s).
Doctor Who, when mixed with my selectively OCD tendency of getting *really* into an interest meant that I was therefore doomed since it could (and did) take *years* to see all of the episodes and learn every little facet of minute trivia about the show.
Heck, I’m *still* learning about the show.
1989, London
Just as I start watching the BBC decide to stop making new episodes of Doctor Who. Again I show up just as humanity takes a down-turn.
2013 retrospective
of 1989 events, Croydon
But all of
this rambling really only touches on the “what happened”, not the cause, not
the reason. Why in particular would I
become obsessive-compulsive about a TV-show, and an incredibly dated/silly one
at that? Other guys liked things like
sports, cars, girls (eventually) or even bloody Star Trek. Why was it Who for me?
It’s difficult to really pin it down, especially when dealing with nearly 25-year-old memories. Perhaps it was the sense of escape; the adventure of it all which appealed. It was the dropping out of the world into a better universe next door, away childhood dramas and tedium. It appealed to the kid who read too much and was sarcastic and thought he was cleverer than most (yet to be disproved). It was the sheer otherness, as if a portal was there not just to another place but to another time. To someone in late 1980s Maritime Canada seeing a London of the 1960s seemed terribly exotic. Heck, even a London of the late-1980s seemed exotic in comparison to central New Brunswick.
Of course what *isn’t* more
exotic than Fredericton?
But yes,
the seed had been planted, germinated and over-run the host. I wanted to get my hands on anything and
everything Who-related, which was no easy feat in Fredericton. Thankfully I have decent parents who
grudgingly enabled my addiction. It
became known that “one does not pre-empt Doctor Who time” and for birthdays/Christmas
it was always “I want this book/video/dalek”.
And whenever we were on holiday I had it planned to get to various
stores in search of whatever merchandise I could find (including a trip to
Florida when I was 14, screw the beach I was off to the comic book store!)
1990-1993,
George Street Junior High School
Frankly I think Doctor Who is what got me through Junior High School without resorting to self-harm or Computer Club (which is worse?). It’s hard enough I imagine getting through your teenage years when your interests match those of kids around you, but I just never could manage to click with the general populace (some things never change). Although I did gravitate towards band and was happy to quickly progress into the senior band, although this was mainly since I could actually lift the baritone sax since I was taller than most other kids.
Life lesson: You don’t need to
work hard to succeed, you just need to do crap nobody else wants and totally
half-ass it.
And slowly
I got to become better at this thing called “socializing”, to the point that by
the time I got to high school I actually had mustered a few friends. Of course my Who-love was kept strictly
hidden, so that for instance my new paperback of the novelisation for “Full
Circle” carefully put in the part of my back-pack where there was no danger of
it accidentally falling out for all to see.
Mid-1993, the Band Room
I remember one day, in grade 9 I think, when I was in the band room talking to Julie Pope and conversation moved to various TV-shows. I’d known Julie since the 3rd grade, and we’d always been friends-ish but didn’t see each other outside of school. We got talking about various shows, and I think discussing Monty Python and other UK shows when I mentioned getting a recent Doctor Who video with a main baddy who wandered around Cambridge in a tight white sparkly outfit, silver cape and giant floppy hat. Oh, and his brain sucking ball.
I seem to
remember:
Julie: I
never really saw Dr.Who, but she sounds like quite the villain.
Me: No,
it’s a guy.
Julie:
BWAHAHAHAHA. Are you serious?!!
Me: I can
lend you the tape and prove it.
And that was that. I lent her “Shada” (“That outfit was the greatest thing ever”) and I she lent me a tape from the US of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” which I took home and found to be the most hilarious thing in the history of forever (and it’s still pretty damn funny). And we became very good friends, and she was basically my rock for the next few years.
And more importantly I was out (so to speak); I was a known “Doctor Who” fan. And amazingly I found some friends who would humour me and occasionally watch a Doctor Who video. Mainly from an ironic sardonic sort of way, but hey, I’d take it.
I guess this is the point where your average individual would then move away from the show since there was all of the hijinks of high school, right?
Well the main problem there is that the whole “dating” thing just wasn’t working (I figured out the problem eventually…) and I couldn’t find those kids they show in educational videos that dispense drugs and lead you down a path to ruin. Of course those kids probably lurked in the engineering wing of high school, which is a place never to tread.
So with no other recourse in how to waste my teenage years (to the normal means of sex and drugs) I was (happily) left with Who.
Plus they’d started publishing the New Adventures, so even though there’d been no new TV-show since 1989 I still had new stories.
1996, Fredericton High School & UNB
1996 was a big year. I graduated from high-school. Plus a couple of other things…
The first
of my big Doctor Who memories for 1996 involves The TV-Movie. That magical night when after 7 years the
show was coming back, and this time as a huge big-budget American-produced
extravaganza which would *of course* be made into a full series!!!
It was trounced in the US ratings
by an episode of Roseanne and nothing more happened.
But still,
at the time it was terrifically exciting and I’d been looking forward to it
airing for months. And *of course* that
ended up being the night that I had to go to a school function where I was one
of around 20 kids receiving an award for enriched studies out of an 800-strong
graduating class.
Yes, I was/am the sort who
took harder than needed classes in high-school, and then when deciding I wanted
this award for my troubles and seeing I had to have a certain amount of
volunteering I operated cameras for the local cable-station at hockey games for
a few months. Oh and a cooking show that
gave me food poisoning. Let it not be
said that I don’t work for what I want.
I have memories
of having to shake a lot of teachers’ hands and stand in front of people being
given a leather-bound certificate (and the Vice-Principal mispronounced my name
and gave total pissy-face when I yelled out the correction to the entire room). Oh, and I think Mom saying to someone “Andrew’s
annoyed since he’s missing *Doctor Who*” with that sigh which always
accompanied the name of the show.
But Doctor
Who was to have an even greater bearing on my life later in the year…
With
growing up in a small-town (as well as generally being not a fan of “the
outdoors”, I’ve gotten better since then) I found that I had a strong pull
toward new fangled inventions such as “The Internet” and got myself a dial-up
connection starting around 1995 I believe.
The first thing I remember doing was finding some Doctor Who pictures or
sounds and downloading them. Then soon
afterwards I came across some sort of gay youth information/groups online and
suddenly that whole “dating girls not working” thing made sense.
But I
digress. Through my meanderings online I’d
started chatting (IRC Chat, if that still means anything to anyone) with various
guys in distant parts of Canada and the US (like I could find anyone in New
Brunswick, well until it turned out that there were like 10 gay guys I went to
high school with).
But I had
been chatting with one guy who lived on Vancouver Island but had relocated to
Winnipeg. One day I get a message saying
“oh, a friend of a friend here likes that stupid old show you like”, or
something to that effect. Now who could
this “friend of a friend” be?
No prizes for the correct answer, it was Phil.
So, Phil and I ended up emailing, and then talking on the phone, and then we moved to Australia.
I think I
missed a couple of steps there, but I’m sure you can fill in the rest.
But yes,
based on a mutual love of Doctor Who we started an on-going relationship with
only a mere 3000 kilometres between us.
After all, he had some videos I was missing and I had the last
novelisations he needed. I do still
sometimes say that we didn’t so much start dating as much as “complete each
other’s collections”.
1997-2004, Winnipeg & Dartmouth
During this period my interest in Who had started to wane. After over a decade with no new show and the various spin-offs becoming increasingly awful it was starting to finally become a fondly remembered part of my past. I’d still get the DVDs but otherwise it was a slowly declining interest in my life (since I had exciting things like full-time employment, retirement savings and home-loans to occupy my time…ugh…).
But then in 2003 the BBC announce they’re bringing back Doctor Who, to air sometime in 2005…
2005, New Zealand
It had been 6 months since we left Canada for Noo Zilnd, in an unlikely plot-twist. It’s been almost 2 years since the announcement that the BBC would be bringing Doctor Who back to TV and I have no idea what to expect. There have been some pictures on the Internet, but still a sense of “we’ve been here before and it didn’t work”. But still as a worst case we’d at least have 13 completely new episodes, even if they’re awful.
“The show” coming back just did not compute, it didn’t make sense.
But it was actually being made, I’d see pictures online and everything. Some random named Christopher Eccleston would be The Doctor and a “Billie Piper” would be Rose. But slowly Easter 2005 (the start date) approached. Then news emerged that the first episode had mysteriously been leaked 3 weeks early and I could watch it now!
Except, Phil was away for a couple of days and I had to wait…
I wanted to surprise him so didn’t say that there was a copy out, and I somehow managed to keep myself from watching it (ok, so I looked at the first couple of minutes. It was so fast and new, with Billie Piper being all normal in London! Where were the space aliens? Where was the technobabble? Where did they find these production values?!!).
Eventually Phil returned, I believe from the bogan-filled wastes of Wellington, and I sat him down to watch what I claimed was “that new Farscape mini-series” (we eventually watched that in 2012). Except that upon starting the file SURPRISE it was a leaked copy of “Rose”!
So we sat there watching the first new Doctor Who in almost a decade. Seeing Billie Piper (who we’d never heard of) face an army of killer shop-window dummies, watching a strange new Doctor who wore a leather jacket and could be anybody off the street but at the same time is completely The Doctor, see Doctor Who as a properly made show mainstream show for the first time ever. It was sincere, it was completely modern and it was not “ironic” what-so-ever, thank God.
My only comment afterwards was “That was Doctor Who”, not words ever thought to be uttered again. It wasn’t trying to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek or Desperate Housewives, it had managed to take what the heart of the show and drag it into the 21st-century.
However I didn’t *really* fall in love with the new show until our second “date” when I got to see “The End of the World”. If “Rose” was Doctor Who launching the platform then this was reaching the stratosphere. Colourful, insane and very funny (oh how I still adore the perfection of “Toxic” joke) I was completely enthralled. Here was Doctor Who that everyone else could see was just as good as I thought it was. No rose-tinted glasses (pun not intended) needed.
But, “my show” was back and better than ever. And far from being a disaster it ended up with massive ratings in the UK and was guaranteed a long run. Even colleagues at work were talking about it (“I wonder if they’ll bring Daleks back?” “I remember the yeti scared me when I was a kid.” “I’d totally root Billie Piper”).
Later in 2005
David Tennant starts his stint as The Doctor and I suffer the bizarre confusion of the mixing of my childhood hero with “I’d like a bit of that”.
An affinity for hyperactive skinny guys you say? If only I could get Phil to wear a suit more often/ever…
2006-2012, New Zealand/Australia
I increasingly see advertisements and total penetration of Doctor Who into society. Cybermen and Daleks on buses. Big posters featuring the Tardis and Catherine Tate all around the place. Ood in The Warehouse. Facebook updates of “OMFG Doctor Who this week!”
I start to find that people I know have become increasingly obsessive about the show. I could start having an “Are they a Doctor Who fan?” criteria for friendship, not a deal-breaker by any means but will induce swift and sharp judgment.
However I have also discovered that all Doctor Who fans are insane, it’s just a matter of finding the ones who can be productive rather than destructive with their psychosis.
Now
So, Doctor Who is 50. It isn’t the forgotten relic of 2003 (the 40th anniversary) or the sad and cheap joke of 1993 (the 30th). I’m living in a world where those kids who watched and loved the show now make it. Where the criticism of “The Cool” wasn’t enough to stop people embracing what they love and creating something great. Where I can say to myself that I was right and completely justified in my interests, despite being the teasing and being the odd one out. I was right and the rest of the planet was wrong.
So there.
Why do I continue to love the show? Because it’s shaped and validated my life. It’s made friends for me, it’s given me 17 years (so far) with my partner, it’s allowed me the opportunity to live across the globe and the confidence to remember that I love what I love, regardless of those who don’t agree.
It’s Shakespeare and Dolly Parton, Fantasy Sports Leagues and model trains, Death Metal and My Little Pony and anything else you love that make other people go “why would you like *that*?!!” It’s my reminder to say “F*ck’ em, I know what I’m doing”.
Plus it’s still the best thing on TV. Forever.
But mainly it’s that silly little tv-show that’s given me my big wide world. Doctor Who is after all bigger on the inside.
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