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.
Star Shaped 