Who Goes There
I'm guessing Who Goes There by Nick Griffiths was supplied by a relative. I don't think it is the kind of book I would purchase myself any more. I spent a lot of the book trying to puzzle out what exactly it was trying to do. Ostensibly its the tale of Griffiths' visits to various Doctor Who locations.
1. It's not a guide book. A guide book to Doctor Who locations was published in the 1980s, called Travel without the TARDIS by Jean Airey and Lauried Haldeman, two female American Who fans who I don't recall ever hearing of again. I was mildly charmed by it, though mostly by the fact the authors appeared to have no conception that anyone non-American might be reading and so supply lavish advice on getting to the UK and operating while here, including about two pages of entertaining invective against the then British phone system. Anyway it's full of facts, addresses and directions. Who Goes There is devoid of much helpful information for locating these places and all too frequently contains the injunction that, actually, you shouldn't visit such-and-such a place because Griffiths was trespassing when he did so. Not a guide book then.
2. It's not a travel memoir. OK, so I'm not really a connoisseur of travel memoirs but Griffiths a) doesn't like people much (nothing wrong with that, I don't like people much, but the interesting people met along the way often form a large part of the few travel memoirs I recall) and b) doesn't like sight-seeing much. He works up a fair old enthusiasm about some of the Who-based locations but, during the course of the book, his wife insists they visit various non-Who related tourist attractions which he, without fail, finds too dull for words.
3. I think maybe it's meant to be a personal memoir, a kind of rite-of-passage book. The anecdotal style, recounting Griffiths' trips to various Who locations, is interspersed with very personal passages in which he discusses the death of his mother and his reactions to this. He's already published one memoir, Dalek I loved you which, I gather, described growing up as a Who fan and I'm guessing this book was intended to be more of the same. With less material to cover, the wander around Who locations provides a substitute for the passage of time.
The problem with treating it as a memoir, really, is that its selling point has to be the way it connects to the experiences of existing Who fans and Who Goes There sits alongside Jackie Jenkins in presenting a face of Who fandom in which I identify with virtually nothing. Jackie Jenkins was a column in Doctor Who Magazine which (I recently discovered) was based on Bridget Jones and purported to chronicle the life of a female Who fan. I had no points of identification with the bright young thing, booze and party lifestyle it presented. Similarly I found little to identify with in the pub-and-club fandom described by Griffiths, in which women are long-suffering and often sceptical bystanders, and you freely refer to some of them as "stupid bints". Moreover the Who fans I know are typified by an attention to detail and a tendency for in-depth planning. Griffiths launches himself into the project with minimal preparation (apparently deliberately so). He often knows nothing about the locations he is visiting, occasionally not even being entirely sure where they are, or when they might be open, or how long it might take to get there. He is supposed to be taking photos as he goes, but often only has his mobile to hand or, on one occasion, has to go and buy a cheap camera in Argos*. I really don't know many Doctor Who fans like that. If I'm not being cynical about this (i.e. assuming the lack of preparation is indicative of a lack of interest in the project as anything beyond a money-making exercise) then I suspect it is supposed to be a kind of endearing point-of-identification with the inept, planning-incapable audience except, as I say, I don't really know any Who fans like that. It felt contemptuous of the reader but maybe it is just the laddish face of Who fandom.
The passages about Griffiths' mother sit, more awkwardly than anything else, among the ramshackle anecdotage of the rest of the book.
4. ... one of the super-sekrit Doctor Who mailing lists I am on (as opposed to the, no doubt many, super-sekrit Doctor Who mailing lists I know nothing about) has a tendency to refer with distain to mechandise aimed at those Doctor Who fans who will pay money for anything with the logo on the cover, regardless of the quality or effort put into the contents. More than anything else, this felt to me like something in that category. A cheap throwaway piece of writing (several sections are cut-and-paste from websites - mostly whenever Griffiths feels he ought to give a bit of background information on a location), following a manic and ill-prepared dash about Southern England and Cardiff. Only the passages about his mother feel like they are coming from someone investing more than the bare-minimum of effort and they belong, I think, in a different book.
*These pictures are not in the book but are, apparently, online somewhere. I can see why the publishing decision was taken to do this but I'm not convinced it is at all successful. A lot of words are spent in achieving these "money shots" but I can't say I've been inspired to actually attempt to find these photos (especially given how many are, apparently, blurry efforts taken with a mobile phone). In five years time (or whenever) when e-books are better established, I can see something like this working. As it was the regular, in text, references to (pic 7.2) were more off-putting than anything else.
I was actually surprised how alienating I found this book. Obviously Who fandom isn't a monolith by any stretch of the imagination, but I this was the first time I've read something by a Doctor Who fan with whom, it would seem, I have virtually nothing in common.
This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/15481.html.
1. It's not a guide book. A guide book to Doctor Who locations was published in the 1980s, called Travel without the TARDIS by Jean Airey and Lauried Haldeman, two female American Who fans who I don't recall ever hearing of again. I was mildly charmed by it, though mostly by the fact the authors appeared to have no conception that anyone non-American might be reading and so supply lavish advice on getting to the UK and operating while here, including about two pages of entertaining invective against the then British phone system. Anyway it's full of facts, addresses and directions. Who Goes There is devoid of much helpful information for locating these places and all too frequently contains the injunction that, actually, you shouldn't visit such-and-such a place because Griffiths was trespassing when he did so. Not a guide book then.
2. It's not a travel memoir. OK, so I'm not really a connoisseur of travel memoirs but Griffiths a) doesn't like people much (nothing wrong with that, I don't like people much, but the interesting people met along the way often form a large part of the few travel memoirs I recall) and b) doesn't like sight-seeing much. He works up a fair old enthusiasm about some of the Who-based locations but, during the course of the book, his wife insists they visit various non-Who related tourist attractions which he, without fail, finds too dull for words.
3. I think maybe it's meant to be a personal memoir, a kind of rite-of-passage book. The anecdotal style, recounting Griffiths' trips to various Who locations, is interspersed with very personal passages in which he discusses the death of his mother and his reactions to this. He's already published one memoir, Dalek I loved you which, I gather, described growing up as a Who fan and I'm guessing this book was intended to be more of the same. With less material to cover, the wander around Who locations provides a substitute for the passage of time.
The problem with treating it as a memoir, really, is that its selling point has to be the way it connects to the experiences of existing Who fans and Who Goes There sits alongside Jackie Jenkins in presenting a face of Who fandom in which I identify with virtually nothing. Jackie Jenkins was a column in Doctor Who Magazine which (I recently discovered) was based on Bridget Jones and purported to chronicle the life of a female Who fan. I had no points of identification with the bright young thing, booze and party lifestyle it presented. Similarly I found little to identify with in the pub-and-club fandom described by Griffiths, in which women are long-suffering and often sceptical bystanders, and you freely refer to some of them as "stupid bints". Moreover the Who fans I know are typified by an attention to detail and a tendency for in-depth planning. Griffiths launches himself into the project with minimal preparation (apparently deliberately so). He often knows nothing about the locations he is visiting, occasionally not even being entirely sure where they are, or when they might be open, or how long it might take to get there. He is supposed to be taking photos as he goes, but often only has his mobile to hand or, on one occasion, has to go and buy a cheap camera in Argos*. I really don't know many Doctor Who fans like that. If I'm not being cynical about this (i.e. assuming the lack of preparation is indicative of a lack of interest in the project as anything beyond a money-making exercise) then I suspect it is supposed to be a kind of endearing point-of-identification with the inept, planning-incapable audience except, as I say, I don't really know any Who fans like that. It felt contemptuous of the reader but maybe it is just the laddish face of Who fandom.
The passages about Griffiths' mother sit, more awkwardly than anything else, among the ramshackle anecdotage of the rest of the book.
4. ... one of the super-sekrit Doctor Who mailing lists I am on (as opposed to the, no doubt many, super-sekrit Doctor Who mailing lists I know nothing about) has a tendency to refer with distain to mechandise aimed at those Doctor Who fans who will pay money for anything with the logo on the cover, regardless of the quality or effort put into the contents. More than anything else, this felt to me like something in that category. A cheap throwaway piece of writing (several sections are cut-and-paste from websites - mostly whenever Griffiths feels he ought to give a bit of background information on a location), following a manic and ill-prepared dash about Southern England and Cardiff. Only the passages about his mother feel like they are coming from someone investing more than the bare-minimum of effort and they belong, I think, in a different book.
*These pictures are not in the book but are, apparently, online somewhere. I can see why the publishing decision was taken to do this but I'm not convinced it is at all successful. A lot of words are spent in achieving these "money shots" but I can't say I've been inspired to actually attempt to find these photos (especially given how many are, apparently, blurry efforts taken with a mobile phone). In five years time (or whenever) when e-books are better established, I can see something like this working. As it was the regular, in text, references to (pic 7.2) were more off-putting than anything else.
I was actually surprised how alienating I found this book. Obviously Who fandom isn't a monolith by any stretch of the imagination, but I this was the first time I've read something by a Doctor Who fan with whom, it would seem, I have virtually nothing in common.
This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/15481.html.