Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (5 page)

In a further shocking announcement, the BBC told us it was moving the Doctor out of his traditional Saturday
teatime
slot to a new home on Monday and Tuesday evenings. This was sacrilege. It was like moving
Songs of Praise
to a Thursday or
Top of the Pops
to a Monday. I was only twelve but it sounded like what it was – slightly desperate.

I didn’t like the Fifth Doctor at first. I thought he was pathetic.

It wasn’t just the new Doctor I had a problem with: Peter Davison had inherited not one but three companions from his predecessor. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very keen on
two-thirds
of them, either. There was Tegan, the Australian air hostess who never stopped whingeing, and Nyssa, a
telebio-geneticist
/princess from the planet Traken, though certainly pretty, was a bit too prissy and stuck-up for me. But I did like the Doctor’s third companion. His name was Adric.

Adric was both a teenage mathematical genius from the planet Alzarius and the quintessential nerd. He seemed
perpetually
ill at ease. No one took him seriously, not even the Doctor. If the Master wasn’t torturing him, the Australian air hostess was picking on him. Adric was played by an
inexperienced
young actor called Matthew Waterhouse, who stood awkwardly and never seemed to know where to put his hands. Coupled with being made to wear clothes he didn’t like – Adric’s costume was a never-changing set of green and yellow pyjamas – I found I could identify strongly
with this character, which was a new development in my relationship with
Doctor Who.
Except for the maths part. I was rubbish at maths.

Nobody wanted to talk about
Doctor Who
at Big School. It was the love that dared not speak its name, and I found it hard to moderate my enthusiasm and pedantry to
acceptable
levels.

Aside from the pyjamas, Adric had it easy. At least he had his maths.

The Fifth Doctor’s first year is pretty terrible. Peter Davison warms to the part – and I warmed to him as the series went on – but most of the adventures were rickety in both
concept
and execution. At least it wasn’t going out on Saturday nights. However, there is one great story in that season. It’s called ‘Earthshock’.

Doctor Who
never usually bothered to hide the
identity
of its villains. In fact, the opposite was usually true; if you’re watching something called ‘Death to the Daleks’, you can’t be surprised when some Daleks turn up and then die. But ‘Earthshock’ wasn’t playing by the same rules.

The first shock in ‘Earthshock’ arrived at the climax to the opening episode, which, up to that point, was a
standard
runaround with some faceless androids as the bad guys. But then, without any warning whatsoever, something truly wonderful happened:

INTERIOR: Console room, spaceship. Some Cybermen are studying a holographic image of the Doctor.

I slipped out of my chair and onto my knees. I was twelve years old. The last time I’d seen Cybermen was half my lifetime ago, but I recognised them instantly. It didn’t matter that these Cybermen didn’t look or sound anything like the Cybermen of old, or that there wasn’t a single line of dialogue to confirm that they definitely
were
Cybermen; even though they were on screen for less than ten seconds,
I knew.

The other surprise was less welcome. Do you remember when my mum told me the Doctor’s friends never died?

She lied.

This was the second shock in ‘Earthshock’: the death of a companion. Suddenly, the Doctor was fallible. Yes, scores of innocent people had been killed over the course of his
adventures
, but those deaths might be considered collateral damage (and guest stars and extras didn’t really count). This time, the Doctor had failed to save someone who was close to him.

The really worrying thing about this, though, was I had begun to feel like I cared more about the death of Adric than the people who were making the programme did. And with this, my metamorphosis into a true fan was complete.

Colin Baker once said that it was part of
Doctor Who
’s job to send children scurrying off to their dictionaries when the Doctor uses a word they don’t understand. And even though he was being a bit sesquipedalian about it, and if a child had taken his advice they would have missed half the episode he was in (and he wasn’t in that many), he was also right. Because over six years, ITV’s answer to
Doctor Who
–
The Tomorrow People
– only managed to teach me three words, all beginning with the letter T: telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation.
Doctor Who
, on the other hand, is still expanding my vocabulary in new and exciting ways today.

1983 was a brilliant year to be a
Doctor Who
fan. It was the twentieth anniversary of the show, which meant there were lots of things to collect – lavish coffee-table books,
Doctor Who
wallpaper, Dalek Easter Eggs, LPs of the background music,
Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets
, TARDIS tents, T-shirts, mugs. There was even an academic book written on the subject, entitled
The Unfolding Text
(sample chapter: ‘Regeneration: Narrative Similarity and Difference’). Best of all, there was a videocassette of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ starring Tom Baker, but it cost an eye-watering £40 and we didn’t have a VCR to play it on.

There were also two very special anniversary events planned for 1983. One was a television special. The other …

Ah, Longleat. I wasn’t allowed to go. I wasn’t even allowed to send a stamped addressed envelope to the BBC for
further
information. I was informed in no uncertain terms that
we would not be visiting Longleat to help celebrate twenty years of
Doctor Who
, and that was final. I blame my sister. Joanne didn’t like
Doctor Who
.
*
If Mum and Dad had to take one of us to Longleat, we all had to go to Longleat, guaranteeing that at least three-quarters of our party would have a thoroughly miserable time.

Anyway, thanks to my selfish sister, readers of this book are deprived of my memories of Longleat, perhaps
the
pivotal
event in the history of
Doctor Who
fandom. Famously, Mark Strickson, the actor who played Adric’s replacement on the programme, had appeared on
Saturday Superstore
a few weeks earlier, where he told viewers not to bother
buying
tickets in advance. ‘Just turn up on the day,’ he said.

Thanks to Mark, Longleat was a glorious shambles. BBC Enterprises had expected 10,000 fans to show up, so when 40,000 descended on the site, they had to lock the doors and turn people away. The roads around the estate became gridlocked, the makeshift parking area turned into a mud bath, and people were obliged to stand in line for five hours just to get a glimpse of Tom Baker in a tent. The toilets overflowed, the food ran out and the Red Cross had to be called in to airlift small children out of a talk
given
by Jeremy Bentham on the history of TARDIS design variations.

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Yet I would have sold my own sister to attend. I cannot recall precisely what I did on the
afternoon of Sunday 3 April, while the Longleat celebration was happening without me, but whatever it was, I cannot imagine I did it with good grace.

Fortunately, Longleat was not the highlight of
Doctor Who
’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. That honour fell to ‘The Five Doctors’, a movie-length multi-Doctor
anniversary
special that would feature every incarnation of the Time Lord, lots of companions, and loads of monsters. Or if you were me in 1983, the best thing in the world ever.

The build-up to the programme is almost as memorable to me as the episode itself. The hype was unprecedented. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about
Doctor Who
on ‘normal telly’, even the news. There was a special
Radio Times
cover, a painting of all five Doctors and the Master, which made my heart miss a beat when I saw it in the
newsagent
’s on Southbank Road. Furthermore, I was allowed to buy it – an unheard-of indulgence in a house where the
Radio Times
was normally seen only at Christmas.

‘The Five Doctors’ was scheduled for transmission as part of BBC One’s
Children in Need
coverage. I can remember thinking at the time how nice it was that the Corporation was giving those poor urchins a special episode of
Doctor Who
. That’ll cheer them up, I thought, though I confess I was worried that they’d keep cutting away from the Daleks, Wirrn etc. every fifteen minutes so they could show videos of homeless kids sleeping rough on the streets, which would spoil it for me.

In the event, ‘The Five Doctors’ was everything I wanted it to be and more. OK, the ticker at the bottom of the screen constantly asking for donations got on my nerves after a
while, and Tom Baker wasn’t in it very much, but that didn’t seem to matter because he hadn’t been gone that long, and besides, I was much more excited about seeing Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell together again. Except it wasn’t William Hartnell, it was just somebody who looked like him. Did I know this at the time? Probably. Did I care? Not a bit, not when I had Daleks, Cybermen, and a Yeti to distract me. There was also an amazing new monster, a sleek, silver killing machine that went by the name of the Raston Warrior Robot.

As I’ve said earlier, 1983 was a brilliant year. I was proud to be a
Doctor Who
fan in 1983. I didn’t care if my friends and family weren’t interested in the show; if they wanted to miss out on the best television programme ever made, that was their lookout.

At school the Monday after ‘The Five Doctors’, I was approached by a couple of bigger lads in the playground.

I didn’t say I told you so. But I told you so.