“We could all do with a bit of youth.”

Was at my girlfriend Rhiannon’s flat today (she’s been asking for a mention lately, so I may as well take this opportunity to say she’s brilliant). She and her flatmate Katie were making lunch in a kitchen which fits around two people and, having established that I was not going to prove useful any time soon, we decided I should go and watch some telly. (I promise this story is going somewhere, and not just the lounge in my girlfriend’s flat.)

I went into the lounge and put the TV on. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything I really wanted to watch. (Not that I’ve any real aversion to programmes about buying houses, I just wasn’t in the right mood). But I eventually found a rather interesting show about sharks, on the CBBC channel. The significance of this was that I’d been planning to write a post here about children’s TV, and I thought this story would provide quite a good opening.

It’s quite easy to forget about modern children’s TV shows when you’re no longer the age at which you most frequently watch them, but Deadly 60 was great for a ten-minute programme. There are still shows here and there on CBBC that I can identify as things I’d have ended up remembering well if I’d been seven years old at the right time, or that I hear are wonderful (ie. Horrible Histories). Sorry, I’ve Got No Head rivals numerous adult comedy series, and I think the fact that it’s less well-known than Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show provides us with conclusive proof that there is no God. Blue Peter’s thankfully still in existence, and if it weren’t for the untimely death of Elisabeth Sladen, The Sarah Jane Adventures would probably have gone on entertaining children for years more.

The reason I’m interested in all this is that I remember the programmes I watched when I was younger so well, and I hope that children today will get the same pleasure when they start being 20, like people do. Generally, I talk the most about Doctor Who and shows on Cartoon Network when I think of what I watched then, but that does such a disservice to The Demon Headmaster, Aquila, Grange Hill, Pig Heart Boy, Home Farm Twins, Animal Magic, Newsround, The Ghost Hunter, The Really Wild Show, G-Force (doubtless impossible to find forever now because of this), Mr WyMi, ChuckleVision, Fireman Sam (non-CGI, with swung-rhythm theme tune), Bertha, Joshuha Jones, Charlie Chalk, Postman Pat, Story Time and Blue Peter.

That’s before we even get to older, classic shows that I found through other means (Thunderbirds, Trumpton, Noggin the Nog), programmes that I seem to have missed out on, if friends’ enthusiasm is anything to go by (Art Attack, SMart, Bernard’s Watch), BBC Look and Read programmes that I watched in school and at home (Through The Dragon’s Eye, Dark Towers, Skyhunter), and American imports like Arthur.

Lots of the shows I watched will probably be forgotten by most people eventually; as tends to happen, some shows stay in people’s consciousness longer than others and become classics. Perhaps G-Force and Joshua Jones won’t be so well remembered in the future (maybe rightly so in G-Force’s case, speaking objectively for a moment), but it doesn’t take away my memories of them, and the value I’d place in those. Something I’d definitely single out for deserving of rememberance, though, would be Aquila. Hopefully, some of you will have seen it. Perhaps this will jog your memory:

Normal enough story, boys fall through hole in the ground, hole in the ground conceals small ancient spaceship, boys secretly get it home and have two series’ worth of adventures. It’s the sort of thing Doctor Who and Harry Potter do well, putting something strange and brilliant into an ordinary world. When I first watched it, I thought it was incredibly cool. (I was a boy, it was a spaceship with loads of buttons, what can I say?)

But it’s funny how, as I’ve got older, what most sticks in my memory isn’t necessarily the colourful buttons and lasers, but all the human stories that surrounded them. Particularly in series two, the show looked at the boys’ families and personal lives a lot more, for example this episode, in which the character of Tom (Tom’s great, we like Tom) wonders whether his father (who he’s never really met properly) ever thinks about him, or cares. That sort of thing. The rather sweet ending’s what I remember best, and that scene doesn’t even have any lasers in. Though the earlier bit with the dog and the force field’s really good. While I didn’t seem to realise at the time, Aquila must have feeding into my emotional intelligence after all, not just keeping me dribbling over gadgets.

A good example of why I consider good children’s TV drama incredibly important. At least, in the context of TV as a whole. I’m not saying it’s more important than international aid (though, in terms of what helps British children’s intellectual and emotional growth… No, no, of course not. Although…)

It’s a little worrying, in that case, that it seems to be shrinking these days, in terms of what we see. Children’s television tends to get a rather small proportion of the budgets allocated by TV stations. Most original CITV output faded away, and it’s now become a channel broadcasting largely American-imported animations and live-action Disney comedies. I mean, some of this seems like a laugh, but I think it’d be good to have some drama too and, dare I say it, more British programmes. But of course, they cost a lot to make.

With the cuts made recently, the BBC are planning to remove the terrestrial afternoon CBBC block and keep that programming confined to their two children’s channels, after digital switch-over. Not such a terrible, radical change, perhaps, but losing all of that children’s programming from the flagship channels strikes me as significant. And CBBC itself has clearly been having to cope with reductions prior to this anyway. Regular presenters in the studio linking all the programmes together aren’t about so much anymore, and I think it’s sad to lose that friendly presence, just ending up with quick bursts of graphics and music instead.

With The Sarah Jane Adventures over, there’s going to be a gap in the schedule, and here’s hoping it’ll be filled by something as engaging, well-written and imaginative as that show was, as children deserve. It might prove cheaper to make a factual programme, or get a ready-made show from elsewhere, but I think people should be able to have an Aquila or two in their life.

And now I’m done, sorry for going on about things. Here’s a Sorry, I’ve Got No Head sketch to make up for it:

“You were right, Jo, there is magic in the world after all!”

Well, it’s the end of the month again. Time for me to carry on talking about Doctor Who!

I think it’s fair to say I had a more sheltered childhood than some (not that that’s in itself a bad thing). I was terrible at sport, not very hands-on, and not very outdoors-y. I do have some friends who think it rather bad that I’m not a strong swimmer and never learned to cycle (well, I had success with a tricycle, but perhaps that’s not what they’re after). On one occasion I even had someone say, “You never climbed a tree?!” Incidentally, the act of climbing trees is now referred to as part of the OED’s definition of the word ‘child’.

Perhaps those people won’t be very impressed either that, while I stayed indoors a bit more in my childhood, I was having fun gradually discovering more and more about Doctor Who. But not only finding some unknown gem of a story on a trip to the Video Crypt, or finding out that some 1960s episodes were missing from the BBC archives, or that the Cybermen’s first story was the First Doctor’s last. As I kept watching stories from the same eras, I started to engage more and more with the characters.

The tragic deaths of Nicholas Courtney, and then Elisabeth Sladen, earlier this year helped me to realise that, in all the time I had been watching them, they had come to feel like friends. People like the Brigadier and Sarah were a warm, comforting presence in my mind, who I thought would always be around (I suppose they will, really). But it goes to show that, rather than it being just a silly obsession, I was forming a genuine emotional attachment, which also helps explain a memory I hadn’t been quite able to understand at the time. I was eleven or twelve, watching the end of a story, as the Second Doctor (played by Patrick Troughton, think he’s my favourite), Jamie and Zoe got back to the TARDIS, having been soaked in the rain, then left, to go off on other adventures. Just a bit of fun, but as the episode finished, I started to cry.

It seemed rather stupid then, and when my mum came into the room, I just about managed to pass it off as finding my Harry Potter-based English homework deeply stressful. In fact, I felt sad because I knew Patrick Troughton was dead now and, though I didn’t quite understand then, I think it had occurred to me that these three friends might not be off having adventures any more, even though they had just flown away, happy as ever. And they felt like my friends too.

Maybe I can be forgiven, then, for growing up so passionate about the show, and odd things would occasionally turn up to spur me on. There was a Doctor Who Night on BBC2, back in September 1999, leading into a short-lived (ie. ratings weren’t good enough) repeat season of stories from the 1970s. I think it even briefly interested a couple of members of my Year 4 class. And, of course, one of the staff at the Video Crypt told me (and my mum too, wonder if she could ever forgive him?) that Longleat held a Doctor Who Day on the first Sunday of August each year. So obviously, I went to some, and got to meet several Doctors and companions (including Nicholas Courtney).

My parents took me to them, hopefully they didn’t mind. Actually, perhaps they liked having a few childhood memories shoved in their faces, at home as well as at Longleat. Fingers crossed. My older brothers weren’t quite so enthusiastic; if anything, my fixation probably made them care for the programme even less than with the indifference they already had. As for the days at Longleat, they were crawling with fans. Lots of people who loved the show, like me. Some of them even spoke to me but, although they were very friendly, I wasn’t quite sure what to say back; I was still rather new to this world and, in spite of there being one or two, there didn’t seem to be very many fans there who were my age.

I made a friend in Year 6. I will elaborate on that in a moment. I’ll just let this sentence finish. She was called Susanna and, as well as being very nice, she also liked Doctor Who! I was astonished. Still very good friends with her now, actually. I wasn’t entirely sure what girls were yet, let alone how to talk to them, but it was lovely having someone to blurt references out to occasionally. Or name every single story in transmission order. Several times. (Can still do that, I’m afraid.)

Sadly, aside from her, and then other friends of mine who thought the show was fine, but didn’t know heaps about it either, I did get the impression that quite a few people considered it a pitiful waste of time. Especially one of my Year 7 English teachers, who once pointed at the Doctor Who book I was reading in a lesson and said, “Sad!” Probably meant it as a bit of a joke, but I didn’t like it at all. Wasn’t my fault I liked something that she didn’t. I shan’t name the teacher in question anyway, I doubt Ms. Bazely would like her undermining of a pupil to be made public. Whoops.

On the whole, liking Doctor Who felt a rather solitary experience. I had a sense that it seemed to everyone like a harmless little quirk, that this silly, old, forgotten thing was important to me for some reason.

And then, in 2005, it came back, every bit as inventive and charming and fun as it always had been. I was in Year 9 then, and people who previously hadn’t given it a second thought started talking to me each Monday about Saturday’s episode. One of my fonder memories of that year was someone coming up to me in the English lesson we had in the library and saying how scary that gas mask child had been. Something I’d felt I was in a minority for liking was suddenly being accepted, then embraced.

When I did a week’s work experience at my old middle school the following year, a pair of Year 6 boys were discussing the series finale, and whether Daleks or Cybermen were better. I found it rather heart-warming really, wondering if those boys realised they were doing something that previous generations of children had done decades before. Doctor Who was more than just cool again; it had a place back where it belonged.

I must confess, when new fans of the show mention it in front of me, I sometimes feel a slight trepidation. I’ve even met one or two people since arriving at university who, far more than having enjoyed old stories, actually have opinions on them. Their own opinions. It makes me feel a tad uneasy, but I expect most long-term fans have experienced such proprietorial feelings over something which is so firmly ingrained in their childhood memories, that feels like something which ‘belonged’ to them. Really though, I take great joy from the fact that the show is so popular again, and from all the people who’ve now had the pleasure of discovering it for the first time. Perhaps it’s become easier to see why I love it so much.

But as well as looking at how successfully the show has returned, reflecting on all my fond memories of watching when I was younger, in the process of writing all this down, has all been rather comforting. I’m sure now that my childhood wasn’t quite so wasted, as I’d occasionally wondered. And talking of childhood ties in rather neatly with why it’s still so special to me, as it has been to others before, and now to whole new generations of spellbound children. As Verity Lambert, the show’s wonderful first producer, said in an interview on that BBC2 Doctor Who Night all those years ago, it was part of growing up.