So, how did I become a Doctor Who fan and how did I end up writing - roughly - 400,000 words about Doctor Who? As you can see from the photo above I'm old enough to have been born in black and white, although Doctor Who itself was in colour. Jon Pertwee was battling The Autons for the second time when I was born. I missed all that. Obviously.
However, my first memories of Doctor Who start in 1975, when I was 4. I have scattered memories of Season 13: the nurse turning into a Zygon; bits of Planet of Evil and a couple of memories of The Seeds of Doom.* I was scared a lot. I do sometimes question my Mum and Dad's decision to let me watch some of these things.
Season 14 I remember more of, particularly The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Leela is the first companion I have clear memories of. By this point I had developed a technique for dealing with fear. When Doctor Who reached a moment that I was too scared to watch I didn't hide behind the sofa. I pretended I needed to go to the toilet. Then I would stand outside and watch through the crack in the door. Everyone knew this was what I was doing and it became a standing joke.
Seasons 15 and 16 I remember a lot. I was 7/8 by this point. I loved Doctor Who at this point. Season 17 is the moment I remember everything. Season 17 is much maligned, but it is - and probably always will be - my favourite season of Doctor Who. I loved the fourth Doctor and Romana. They seemed to be having fun. Fun at the expense of the bad people. At that point I couldn't see the budget problems. Doctor Who was still scary. My Mum used to tell me, at moments of peak far, "it's only a television programme." But in the heat of the moment it never felt like that. I suspect 1979/1980 might be the most fun years of my childhood. We were living in Newquay, Cornwall. The sun always seemed to be shining, even when it obviously couldn't have been. Memory is a funny thing. We were outside a lot. School was fun. Yes, I said it.
Then in 1981 Tom Baker stopped being Doctor Who. Now, I vaguely knew there were other Doctors but Tom Baker had been Doctor Who for all of my life. (Or at least as far as I could remember.) Logopolis was a shock. I remember being sad that the Fourth Doctor had gone. I don't remember if I really liked the Fifth. I kept watching Doctor Who, but not quite with the same zeal as I had before. Or at least that's how I remember it. But, as John Nathan-Turner once said, "the memory cheats."
If there was ever a time I came close to not watching Doctor Who it was 1983/1984. I was 12/13. There were other things to occupy my attention. I still watched most of the time, but not all of the time and I was certainly not in fandom. We moved to Buckinghamshire and I went from a mixed Cornish comprehensive to an all boys Buckinghamshire Grammar School. I didn't like it. But because we'd moved to Buckinghamshire a year after I would have taken the 11+ when I got into Grammar School they had a class specifically for the kids that arrived a year late. There I met Rick. Rick was my conduit back into Doctor Who. He told me there was a new Doctor Who coming. Now, I must have still been talking about Doctor Who enough at this point for Rick and I to end up discussing it.
Enter the Sixth Doctor. Colin Baker's era is when I became a Doctor Who fan. If there is another era of Doctor Who coloured by nostalgia for me, it is Colin Baker's era. I loved it. Now, I can see lots of flaws in it. Then I didn't. I loved Colin's brash version of the Doctor. And gradually I fell back in love with Doctor Who.
So, I started reading DWM and then DWB. It was DWB that made me realise that, weirdly, there were Doctor Who fans that didn't like Doctor Who very much. It was at this point I also started buying - or getting for Christmas - Doctor Who VHS and books. I remember a trip to a bookshop around Christmas when my Nan told me to pick out some Target Books I'd not got and she'd take them away and wrap them up to give me on Christmas Day. I think Galaxy 4 was one of them.
This was all part of my exploration of Doctor Who's past. It is at this point that it is easy to turn into one of those grumpy old men that goes on about how young people today with access to downloads don't know they're born. The past is a different world. Official Doctor Who VHS releases were dripping out of the BBC but to watch older stories you usually had to dip into a world of unofficial VHS or C-90 cassette tapes. Sometimes these were fine. Sometimes they were sixth or seventh generation copies that you could barely watch. I have particularly fond memories of Rick and I watching a copy of The Mind of Evil where the audio was pretty good but the picture was awful. My Uncle walked in, watched for a couple of minutes and asked 'what the hell is this?' Or listening to cassette copies of William Hartnell stories where the sound was washed away through hiss and distortion. But it was exciting. All these new discoveries.
When Sylvester McCoy came along I was ready. I recorded them all on VHS so I could watch them over and over again. By the time I was off to University at Lancaster in 1989 Doctor Who fan was the most obvious part of my identity. I was writing off for autographs by this point so when I went off to University I took some of those and stuck them on my wall. I took my Target books and VHS. Not that I had anything to watch them on in my first year. Unless you rented a TV and video recorder from the Visual Tech department.
I remember doing that once to watch Terror of the Zygons and ending up with six or seven people in my room gathering to watch it. Most of whom I didn't know that well. The Skarasen got some good natured ribbing but everyone seemed to enjoy it.
By this point though Doctor Who was on its last legs. I loved the McCoy era but the BBC seemed to have given up on it and putting it on against Coronation Street was the kiss of death. I had good natured battles in the TV Room trying to watch it, but I always lost.
I put an ad in DWM at this point trying to gather a Lancaster and Morecambe Doctor Who society together. It worked. We had a few meetings. One of which, at the John O'Gaunt, the then editor of DWM John Freeman came along to and bought us some pages of the comic strip from the forthcoming Doctor Who Annual to look at. I suppose this is the point that I entered fandom proper. I have grown to love the social part of Doctor Who fandom, even when I'm failing once more to persuade a fellow fan that The Web Planet is absolutely brilliant.
By this point I also owned far too much Doctor Who stuff. I still do.
So time moves on. VHS is replaced by DVD and Blu-Ray. Then streaming and downloads. Paul McGann comes and goes. Then in 2005 they bring Doctor Who back. And it is brilliant. I felt that all my attempts to get my friends to love Doctor Who during its long absence were vindicated. Mainly because by that point a lot of them had kids who loved Doctor Who. I even had an ex-workmate on Facebook tell me I'd been right about Doctor Who all along.
I had reached a point by 2010 where I'd watched pretty much every episode of Doctor Who that then existed and for some reason I thought the time had come to do a full watch from An Unearthly Child to, well, wherever we were in 2010.
I watched Hartnell and Troughton. I was surprised by how much I loved the William Hartnell era. Watching it in order helped you get used to the rhythms and styles of 60s TV. Plus William Hartnell has some of Doctor Who most fabulous companions. Then I watched the first season of Jon Pertwee. And thought I'd blog about the whole season.
Then I decided I'd blog each story, which I did. Then I had to watch William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton all over again to add them to the blog, which is one of the reasons if you look at this blog it is so strangely ordered.
And so we arrive at the present day and Across Time and Space, which is my 800 page companion to Doctor Who - which you can support here - Unbound
I hope you enjoyed my wonder through memory lane. There's lots I've missed out. Obviously. But I'd love to know your stories.
*All this time as a Doctor Who fan but I still have to spend time remembering whether the title of the Tom Baker story is The Seeds of Doom or The Seeds of Death. And the other way round. Why is that?
Death become before Doom both alphabetically and in story order.
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