Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (4 page)

I have so many wonderful memories of that time I spent in New Zealand: the tiny Honda motorcycle that I used to ride up and down the country lanes, pretending I was Poncherello from
CHiPs
; catching and killing my first fish (I cried when Uncle Mike told me to bash its head in); skiing on Coronet Peak; white-water rafting; flying in a helicopter for my tenth birthday. I was even a poster boy for a deer park while I was out there.

I kept a scrapbook of my holiday in New Zealand (and of the stopovers we made in Los Angeles and Singapore) and while the first half of this memento is filled with the sort of things you’d expect – sachets of thirty-three-year-old sugar from the plane that flew us there; a blurry photo of Jaws from the Universal Studios tour; a certificate that proves I successfully milked a cow – the second half is filled with black-and-white pictures of
Doctor Who.

These images were carefully scissored from issues of
Doctor Who Weekly
. This was a brand-new magazine that was entirely devoted to the programme, and while I missed the first issue,
I must have started buying it the very moment we returned to the UK. Here are, variously, a portrait of the Second
Doctor
and an Ogron monster; Zygons attacking the Doctor; a pair of Sensorites; Davros’s head and a colour poster for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(how the hell did that get in there?); a Krynoid in various stages of development (three of these) and a 1960s Dalek lurking under a bridge.

The pictures in this scrapbook do prove one thing, though. Despite what my mum would have you believe about my short-lived infatuation with
Star Wars
…

Despite
brief flirtations with inferior franchises
, I remained faithful to Tom Baker and
Doctor Who.

Tom Baker’s final season introduced some radical changes to the programme’s format, chief amongst them the demise of Tom Baker’s Doctor. A new producer named John Nathan-Turner was now running the show. Out went the 1970s diamond-shaped logo and time vortex title sequence, and in came bent chrome and a glittering star field – this was a new decade. Out went the wide-eyed innocent face of Tom Baker and in came the knackered, jaded face of Tom Baker, who had now been in the role for seven years. Out went the classic theme music and in came a much brasher version, with less mystery and more sparkle.

Not that I knew anything about it. I was too busy
watching
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
on the other side.

There’s a funereal feel to Tom Baker’s final season and a sombre tone permeates every frame. It didn’t matter if the Doctor was fighting vampires, marsh men or time-sensitive lions, he didn’t seem to be his old self. Resigned, almost. Spent. Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with him.

Buck Rogers
, on the other hand, was fun. It had a
disco-dancing
hero in tight-fitting Lycra, there were exciting dogfights in space, just like in
Star Wars
, and the actress
who played his sidekick, Wilma Deering, made me feel funny inside.

But on
Doctor Who
, we had long scenes of a grumpy Tom Baker staring at a BBC Micro computer while the universe was crushed to death by the grinding wheels of entropy – this really was the plot for every single episode of that series. The jokes that had replaced the violence had in turn been replaced by actual po-faced science.

Doctor Who
was either growing old or growing up.

But that was OK. I was growing up, too.

Tom Baker’s final story was called ‘Logopolis’. At the end, the Doctor is forced to regenerate when he falls to his death from a radio telescope, or if you want to be really cynical about it, when somebody drops a Gareth Hunt doll off an Airfix model.

I cried.

Of course I cried.

I knew Tom was leaving long before he fell. But it wasn’t my mum who spoiled it for me this time. Tom Baker had been on
Nationwide
, where he had looked very sad indeed, and he told me his time was up, but I mustn’t worry, because
Doctor Who
would go on without him.
Doctor Who
would go on for ever. He promised.

And because he was Tom Baker, I believed him.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I never thought I’d ever see an episode of
Doctor Who
with William Hartnell in it. They were in the past (even the ones set in the future). So when, in 1981, the BBC screened a trailer for something called
The Five Faces of Doctor Who
at the end of an episode of
Blake’s 7
, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, or at the very least back to New Zealand.

As noted above, in the days before the internet and VHS tapes or DVDs, it was almost impossible to see old episodes of
Doctor Who
, barring a few black-and-white clips which might accompany a feature on, say,
Blue Peter
. What few people knew at the time was that the BBC had wiped
numerous
episodes of the programme in order to reuse expensive videotape and save shelf space. So this season of repeats was, by some distance, An Event.

Only one thing stood between me and It: rugby practice.

I didn’t like rugby. I couldn’t even tell you what kind of rugby we were playing. I definitely didn’t want to play it for
the school team. But this was my first year at Big School, and I desperately wanted to fit in. So when I was plucked from a PE lesson to try out as a winger, I neglected to say, ‘No thanks, I’d rather try out for basket weaving.’ (Not an exaggeration, I really did weave baskets, and in fact I was the only boy at school who studied Home Economics.)

Actually, I was pretty good at rugby. But my ability to run like a Thal from a Dalek was fuelled entirely by a
disinclination
to being clattered into the mud by Ogron-like adolescents surely too burly and bloodthirsty to be called ‘children’, though they were all the same age as me. Plus none of them knew what Ogrons were.

On Monday 2 November 1981, the day of the first
episode
of
The Five Faces of Doctor Who
, I made sure I was the first player back in the changing room, out of my kit and into my clothes as speedily as if I were being pursued by a grunting prop forward. The programme began at 5.40 p.m. If I ran all the way, I could make it home in time.

But as I sprinted towards the exit, my right knee
collided
with the edge of a shower cubicle. My leg exploded with pain as a fragment of ceramic tile embedded itself in my flesh, right below the kneecap. I screamed, extremely loudly. A pool of blood formed around me and spread towards the door.

It must have been bad. Our rugby teacher, Mr Brown, not a man known for Florence Nightingale-like reverses of compassion, wanted to take me to A&E, although I could tell he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect – he probably had other plans that night, though I doubt they included the first episode of
Doctor Who.

I limped home as fast as I could, which wasn’t very, teeth clenched in agony. Hobbling into the front room, blood soaking through my new Farah trousers, I made straight for the television, which I switched to BBC Two.

The
Doctor Who
theme music had already begun.

I could feel a river of blood trickling down my leg.

Relieved, I collapsed onto the sofa and we watched ‘An Unearthly Child’ together.

I didn’t have the strength to argue. The pain in my knee was now more than I could bear, so I shuffled off to the kitchen to find my mum. She wrote a very stern letter to the school about the damage sustained to both her son and his expensive – and now ruined – trousers, as soon as she’d finished stitching the holes in my leg and slacks with the same piece of thread.

I missed the second episode. But thanks to a stroke of good fortune – for me – Dad went back to working nights at his factory, and this meant he had to be out of the house by 5.30 p.m.

Actually, Dad had not been wrong. That first episode was
too slow, too dark (as in we couldn’t see anything) and too talky. Worse than that, the First Doctor was a
horrible man.
He was nothing like the Doctor I’d grown up with. Yes, that Doctor could be a bit scary at times, but he was never this strict and unapproachable and unpleasant.

Sadly, the third episode was even worse than the first.

You never forget your first Kroton.

No, not crouton, though I do actually remember my first crouton too; it was floating in a chicken and mushroom Cup-a-Soup. No, I’m talking about the Krotons, the race of quasi-organic tellurium-based crystals who appeared in the
Doctor Who
serial that the BBC chose to represent the Second Doctor’s time in the TARDIS.

If ‘An Unearthly Child’ was a letdown then the ‘The
Krotons
’ was a kick in the teeth. It was boring and difficult to follow. I remember thinking to myself: if this is the best
story the BBC could find to show off the Second Doctor, how bad must the rest of his adventures be?

What I didn’t realise then was that the BBC had thrown most of Patrick Troughton’s stories into a skip, and the only four-part Second Doctor story left on their shelves was this one.

Two stories into
The Five Faces of Doctor Who
, I had to face facts: old
Doctor Who – Doctor Who
made before I was born – seemed to be absolutely rubbish. In fact, ‘The
Krotons
’ was so boring I didn’t even make it to the final episode.

The truth is that many old episodes of
Doctor Who
were better served by novelisations, and my young imagination, than the shabby, black-and-white reality.

Hitherto, my image of the Second Doctor was based on one of the many novelisations published by Target Books:
Doctor Who and the Web of Fear
by Terrance Dicks, which I remember reading in a caravan in Rhyl when I was eight years old.

That book had one hell of a cover: a beautiful illustration by Chris Achilleos of Patrick Troughton set against a
spider-web
background. He’s looking down at a fat, furry teddy bear lassoing a soldier with a halo of bright yellow light, which was cool, but not as cool as the realisation that the Second Doctor’s hair had been cut into the shape of a pudding bowl. This made me feel a whole lot better about my own hairstyle, the only difference being that my bowl was blond.

I tried to imagine what the Second Doctor was like – ‘a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle, humorous face’, according to Dicks – and as I read about his escapades in the London Underground and his battle against the
villainous
Yeti (who turned out to be alien robots and not homicidal teddy bears after all) I found it increasingly easy to
replace Tom Baker’s face with my ideal of Patrick Troughton.

So when the time came for me to watch Patrick
Troughton
for real, I was expecting him to measure up to the Second Doctor of my imagination. And that’s why it is with a very heavy heart that I have to confess the only thing I can remember about the November 1981 screening of ‘The Krotons’ is that I thought it was terrible.

And yet love of
Doctor Who
, like the Doctor himself, can regenerate after the deadliest of blows. Of all the repeats chosen to celebrate the Doctor’s past in
The Five Faces of Doctor Who,
the one I was most looking forward to seeing was ‘The Three Doctors’.

Of all the images I’d seen of earlier Doctors in books and magazines, there was one that stood out: a publicity photo of Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell posing together to
celebrate
the programme’s tenth birthday. I’d stare at this image for hours, trying to imagine what a story that featured three versions of the Doctor working together would possibly be like. Now I would get the chance to find out.

‘The Three Doctors’ was tremendous and Patrick Troughton was a revelation: the banter between him and his successor, Jon Pertwee, was priceless. Here was the Second Doctor of my imagination – playful and mischievous. And it was great to see the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and Jo Grant – the girl from the swamp – again too.

The BBC wrapped up
The Five Faces of Doctor Who
with a repeat of the Fourth Doctor’s swansong, ‘Logopolis’. I cried again, although I would have preferred something older – something
classic
– like ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘The Brain of Morbius’ or ‘The Ark in Space’.

This season of repeats, though, is when I went from being a kid who liked
Doctor Who
to being a
Doctor Who
fan, for better or worse. For a fan, not liking
Doctor Who
can be just as much fun as liking it – like supporters of a conference league football team, you’re in it for the long haul; if anyone is entitled to hurl abuse at lazy performances and shambolic set-pieces and poor managerial decisions, you are.

Besides, the season was called
Five Faces
because there was a fifth face – a new Doctor. His name was Peter
Davison
from
All Creatures Great and Small.
He’s too young, I thought, when I heard he would be taking on the role, never imagining that one day I’d have to accept a Doctor almost
twenty years
younger
than me. Also, how could anyone replace Tom Baker as the Doctor? I could barely remember a time when he wasn’t a part of my childhood.