Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (3 page)

There’s one element of
Doctor Who
that I haven’t mentioned yet: regeneration. In a way, it’s the most important, because without it, the show wouldn’t have lasted for five years, let alone fifty. If the lead actor becomes too ill, or too difficult, or too unpopular, he can simply be replaced.

It was
Doctor Who
’s then-producer, Innes Lloyd, who came up with this idea after the First Doctor, William
Hartnell
, had become increasingly erratic in his ability to play the part. Because the Doctor was an alien being, he thought, there was nothing stopping him from renewing himself into a younger, healthier person. The character of the Doctor could be defined by the person who played him. Suddenly, a programme that had a finite shelf life could now last for ever, continually reinventing both the lead character and the format of the show.

I learned that other Doctors existed on Saturday 8 June 1974, the day the Third Doctor became the Fourth. An hour before the episode was broadcast, my mother sat me down and told me, in no uncertain terms, that my
childhood
hero was going to die.

Mum didn’t use the word regeneration. No, this would be a resurrection. Just like Jesus, she said. Or the time our goldfish threw itself out of its bowl, or when next-door’s cat was run over by a milk float. And in much the same way that the next-door neighbours got themselves a new cat, and
we might get another goldfish one day (we never did), today everybody would get a new Doctor Who.

The regeneration itself lasts all of five seconds. It’s a simple visual effect – as simple as it gets. The camera is locked-off, the actors lie down in the same spot and then they mix the two images together. But it’s still one of the best tricks
Doctor
Who
ever managed to pull off.

To date, the Doctor has regenerated eleven times. I imagine you could name the twelve actors who have played the part on television, but just in case you can’t, they are: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, John Hurt, Christopher Eccleston, David
Tennant
, and Matt Smith.
*

However, it could be argued that many more actors have taken on the role of the Doctor, even if the part they are playing is incorrectly referred to as Doctor Who. These Doctors exist in a non-canonical alternative Whoniverse of comedy sketches, feature films and stage plays outside of the main Whoniverse (don’t bother looking in the dictionary, it’s not there).

Discussions of what is and what isn’t part of the
Doctor
Who
‘canon’ are to the programme’s fans what angels dancing on the head of a pin were to medieval theologians. Friendships can be wrecked over whether, say, Tom Baker’s appearance in his
Doctor Who
costume on
Disney Time
in 1975 means that it was actually the Doctor who materialised on Bank Holiday Monday to present
Disney Time
during the four-month break between ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ and ‘Terror of the Zygons’ (for the record – of course he bloody didn’t).

However, should you ever find yourself ensnared in a tricky pub-quiz situation, and you are asked to name more than twelve actors who have played the Doctor, here are some of the less well-known regenerates:

But the most famous non-canonical Doctor of them all is surely
Peter Cushing
. After the success of the Daleks on TV, producer Milton Subotsky was responsible for bringing them to the big screen in the movies
Dr Who and the Daleks
and
Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD
. The veteran Hammer
Horror
star Cushing was cast in the mistitled lead role. Now, these movies have their admirers – current producer Steven
Moffat
, for example – but as a child, I knew these films weren’t kosher and this guy playing ‘Doctor Who’ was emphatically not the Doctor; as well as having the wrong name, he was just too human. Besides, rather than laser beams, the movie Daleks fired lethal blasts of compressed air – in a big-budget film, for God’s sake! Like Milton Subotsky could give a shit.

The boys I went to school with were football crazy, football mad. All they wanted to do was talk about Saturday’s goals and swap Panini stickers. All I wanted to do was swap
Doctor Who
Weetabix cards and speculate about how the Doctor might escape last Saturday’s cliffhanger. Even the boys who did watch
Doctor Who
didn’t want to talk about it. But then again, what do boys talk about? Even as adults, most of our interactions tended to consist of: ‘Got … Got … Need … Swap … Got’ and ‘Tag! You’re it!’

So I defected to the girls, who were a much more chatty and imaginative bunch. When we played
Doctor Who
in the playground, I was
always
the Doctor and the girls were always Sarah Jane Smith or, better yet, one of the monsters. I am still warmed by the memory of Bethany McKenna and Beverly Sharpe crushing me to death between their chests as they pretended to be the robotic bear-hugging mummies from ‘Pyramids of Mars’. Bethany and Beverly, if you are reading this, please be aware that I am hoping to restage this event in 2015 as part of this classic story’s fortieth
anniversary
celebrations. Do get in touch.

Tom Baker was my Doctor. I forgot about Jon Pertwee within the first ten minutes of Tom’s debut. With his wild staring eyes and insane toothy grin, he was some way
from the suave dandy played by Jon Pertwee, but by the time the Fourth Doctor had donned his floppy hat and wrapped his inordinately long multicoloured scarf around his neck, I was hooked. Mum thought he was ‘much too silly’ but she was wrong.

As much as I had loved the Third Doctor, he had silver hair, which meant I thought about him the same way I’d think about a grandfather or a kindly uncle. The Fourth Doctor was different; we didn’t know anyone like him. He
looked like a nutcase, behaved like a nutcase, and, I would later learn, was being played by a nutcase. But what a nutcase.

In his second story, ‘The Ark in Space’, the Doctor has a famous speech about the indomitable spirit of mankind as a species. Tom Baker plays it like he’s onstage at the Globe Theatre, and when I watch it now, it makes me profoundly grateful that the BBC happened to cast an actor who saw no reason not to take the part of a time-travelling
extraterrestrial
extremely seriously. He had all the mischief and all the heroism and wisdom of previous Doctors, but he was,
perhaps
, the first actor who really believed he was the Doctor.

I remember two things about watching ‘The Ark in Space’ as a child. One, it scared the willies out of me, and two, I couldn’t wait to reproduce the terror I felt in the school
playground
the following Monday.

The monsters in ‘The Ark in Space’ – the Wirrn – were giant insects, and as you will have realised by now, giant insects always gave me trouble. This lot were a swarm of intelligent wasp-like monstrosities who wanted to
impregnate
you with their babies, and you knew you were in trouble if your flesh started to break out in green weeping pustules, an effect the cash-strapped BBC special effects department achieved by wrapping the actor’s hand and lower arm in painted bubble wrap.

Body horror translated well to the playground.
Everyone
knew how the dreaded lurgy worked. I remember Beverly Sharpe walking around with her hand stuffed in her pocket – a sure sign that she’d been infected by the Wirrn – and when she tried to strangle me with it later, I was impressed to find that she’d gone to the trouble of wrapping several
layers of Sellotape around it. Beverly was the first girl I ever kissed, by the way. On the lips and everything.

I never hid behind the sofa when I watched
Doctor Who
. For a start, we called it a settee, not a sofa, and it was pushed right up against our living-room wall. So I’d sit on the floor with a cushion in my lap, and if things got too frightening for me, I’d bury my face in its folds. And if the sound effects were too disturbing, I’d press the corners into my ears.

I did this a lot when Tom Baker was playing the Doctor,
especially during the end-of-episode cliffhangers. Like the time Sarah Jane Smith fell from some scaffolding at the end of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, part 2. I was so convinced that she couldn’t possibly survive this fall, I ran into the kitchen to find Mum.

(I didn’t feel cheated when part 3 began with Sarah Jane falling safely onto a gantry
that wasn’t there the week before.
She was still alive. That’s all that mattered.)

The playground games fizzled out by the end of 1976 and our last hurrah was a homage to ‘The Hand of Fear’, which was ideal for the girls because all they had to do was walk around in a trance, a palm face up in the air, repeating the phrase ‘Eldrad must live! Eldrad must live!’ over and over again. Even I could have done that.

‘The Hand of Fear’ was also Sarah Jane’s last story.

I didn’t see it coming. One minute the Doctor and his best friend are running rings around Eldrad on a planet made from ice, the next minute he’s dropping her off in Croydon because he isn’t allowed to take her to Gallifrey. It didn’t seem fair, not after everything Sarah had been through.

Sarah Jane’s departure hit me for six. I wasn’t used to companions leaving, and while I could vaguely recall her predecessor, Jo Grant, I had been too young to form any meaningful attachment to her. Sarah Jane was my first
proper companion. She was the big sister I never had, the one I wanted to baby-sit me.

I wanted the Doctor to change his mind and return for her the following week, but he didn’t. It was at these moments that Tom Baker really made you believe he wasn’t quite human because a human being would have gone back for her.

There was one thing more frightening than watching
Doctor Who
, and that was missing
Doctor Who.

Take Saturday 6 December 1975, for example. It’s 5.55 p.m. and I should have been settling down to watch ‘The Android Invasion’, part 3 at home, but instead I was playing pass-the-parcel at some kid’s birthday party. Seriously, what kind of idiot throws a birthday party when
Doctor Who
is on?

And then there was ‘The Ribos Operation’, part 1. Dad had taken me to see a non-league football match. I
remember
that it rained the whole time, there were no decent seats, the roof was leaking, neither team scored a goal and I was bored to tears. The only thing that made this treat bearable was the knowledge that a brand-new series of
Doctor Who
was due to start when I got home.

The match finished at 4.45 p.m., which gave us a good hour to make it home in time. However, because Dad didn’t drive, we had to wait for a lift from his friend, Bob. Bob couldn’t have been a
Doctor Who
fan; he wanted to have a quick pint instead. I stood in the cold, draughty corridor with a packet of pork scratchings because I wasn’t allowed into the bar. The quick pint wasn’t quick enough.

I knew we wouldn’t make it back in time when, after several more quick pints, Bob finally decided to leave. I sulked all the way home about missing
Doctor Who
, which at least took my mind off being driven home by someone who must have been over the legal limit. Maybe, his
judgement
clouded, Bob actually put his foot down because in the event I only missed the first quarter of an hour.
However
, in the age before repeats, videos or the internet, I would not actually get to watch those missing minutes of ‘The Ribos Operation’ for another seventeen years. Thanks, Dad.

And then I saw
Star Wars.

My mum is half-right here.

When
Star Wars
was released in 1978, I, like every other small boy in the entire country, thought it was the most mind-blowing film I had ever seen or was ever likely to see. By the end of the 1970s, my bedroom had become a shrine to Kenner’s range of
Star Wars
action figures. It was a drop in the ocean compared with what was out there, but enough for me to stage some very impressive battles at the bottom of our stairs. My favourite action figure was Bossk the bounty hunter (a crocodile in a yellow jumpsuit), but I had a soft spot for Luke’s Landspeeder too, until Joanne stepped on it and snapped its wheels off.

However, I still liked
Doctor Who
and Tom Baker – a lot. Although the programme couldn’t compete with the lavish special effects of
Star Wars
– no noticeable bubble wrap in sight – its lead actor, four years in, was still unassailable. The programme had grown noticeably sillier in recent months, in an attempt to appease an old lady named Mary
Whitehouse
, but Tom remained as exciting, weird and mercurial as ever. And
Doctor Who
could still satisfy some part of my imagination that nothing else could. The only reason I was playing
Star Wars
on the stairs is because the
Doctor Who
franchise didn’t have anything like the same amount of toys available, and by this stage of my life, I’d moved beyond the realm of pure imagination and I needed some props.

For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a red Palitoy Dalek; for my ninth, I got a Denys Fisher Fourth Doctor doll to go with it. I now know that a manufacturing cock-up meant that Tom Baker’s head had to be substituted at the last minute with Gareth Hunt’s from
The New Avengers
. This didn’t bother me at the time as the head in question looked about as much like Tom Baker as it did Gareth Hunt (quality control on the
New Avengers
toys must have been half-hearted at best). There was a Denys Fisher TARDIS, too, but at £5.95 it was probably too steep for my parents’ budget, and I never got the Denys Fisher Cyberman either – the only Cyberman with a nose.

Here are a few more
Doctor Who
toys and tie-ins that I did have:

• A board game entitled
  War of the Daleks.
  I remember that the little Dalek figures didn’t have the right
  proportions – irritating – and I’d only had it a couple of months when one of the pseudo-Daleks went AWOL and the game was completely ruined.
  
• The Typhoo Tea and Weetabix card collections, which you’d get free in packets of tea and cereal. Free, unless you counted all the tea and cereal you had to consume to get at them. At one stage I was eating twelve Weetabix a day just to get my hands on more cards, and I hated Weetabix. However, looking back, this may be the most balanced diet I’ve ever had.
  
• Palitoy’s talking K9. I hated K9. What was the point of him? The phrases the toy came out with included: ‘Affirmative, Master’, ‘I cannot appear in this story because the floors are uneven’ and ‘You don’t need me, you have a sonic screwdriver’, although I may be recalling this wrong.
  
• The notorious
  Doctor Who
  underpants, which when worn showcased the classic 1970s Tom Baker face looming out of your crotch area. It is rumoured that Tom Baker himself sported these pants on his honeymoon night.
  
• Target novelisations of past adventures. We will come to them in the next chapter.
  

In 1979, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who was arguably at his most popular. Just over 16 million people tuned in to watch the final episode of ‘City of Death’. It helped that, although ‘City of Death’ is a wonderful story and Tom is
magnificent
throughout, there was nothing on the other side owing
to industrial action at ITV. It was during this period of Baker’s apotheosis that I went to live in New Zealand for five months.

We stayed with Auntie Angie and her husband, Uncle Mike, on their farm on the outskirts of Queenstown on the rural South Island. It was in the middle of nowhere – the nearest shop was miles away – but it was surrounded by beautiful countryside, there were gorgeous views of the mountains, and there were sheep. There were lots and lots of sheep. Plus, repeats of
Doctor Who
were on every day of the week.