Classic Who
Doctor Who has always been a part of my life. I suppose I must have started watching it because my Dad did - or, I wonder now that I know Who fans with children, did he start watching it seriously partly because he had a little kid to enjoy it with? Anyway, my memories of it stretch back at least to the age of three (more on this later), and I've kept up an active interest in it ever since.
I've tended to occupy a rather odd position somewhere in between hard-core fandom and passing interest, though. I carried on watching it well into the Sylvester McCoy years, when I suspect that popular interest had largely waned - but even then I know I gave up bothering well before hollyione did. Then, at both Bristol and Oxford Universities, I joined the local Doctor Who societies - but at Bristol, it was largely because hollyione was deeply involved with it, and at Oxford it was because I was continuing an established habit from Bristol, and, once again, because an old friend from school (WINOLJ) was a member. I've watched a hell of a lot of 'Classic Who' as a result of all this - but I'm generally watching it from a very uninformed perspective. I was attending talks by New Adventures authors, watching rare episodes or listening to early audio adventures throughout my late teens to mid-twenties - but had no idea who these people actually were, or why it was so exciting to be able to see or hear whatever-it-was for the first time in 20+ years.
Put simply (and with a little help from Wikipedia), this is generally the level of difference between me and a serious fan:Serious fan: It may be a controversial opinion, but I really think The Talons of Weng-Chiang is one of the high points of the Tom Baker era. I just love all the Sherlock Holmes references in it!
Me: [slight pause] Er - is that the one with the giant rat in the sewer?
Over the last year, though, my fandom for New Who has increased to such a pitch (thanks to the overall excellent series 3) that I've decided it's about time I ploughed back into the archives. Time Crash probably played a pretty big role there, actually. If New Who was going to reference Old Who so explicitly, then I decided it was about time I enhanced my appreciation of both by rediscovering the original - and maybe just a little bit of my lost childhood along the way.
So, while I was ill, one of the things I did was get onto YouTube and start exploring a little of the Peter Davison era. First, I watched The Caves of Androzani - partly because I'd heard of it, partly because a chap in a documentary clip about Peter Davison which I'd watched first said it was really good, and partly because the whole thing was there for the viewing. Overall, I didn't think it was as good as the bloke on the documentary did, largely because the type of story involved is just not to my taste. It revolves around three different groups of people who all have grudges against or murderous designs upon one another, while the Doctor and Peri get caught in the crossfire. The difficulty with this sort of scenario for me is that I find it hard to care about the political wranglings of the various groups involved - especially when they have names I'm not familiar with, so that it generally takes me until about three episodes in to work out which of the other characters is being cursed to oblivion by his enemies, or indeed who actually is enemies with whom, at any given time. (This, incidentally, is the same reason why I am almost certain never to develop an interest in series such as Star Trek (especially Deep Space Nine) or Battlestar Galactica).
That said, it had some interesting content, too. Like a hand-wavey explanation for Five's celery, some good cliff-hangers, lots of excellent Peri-Doctor dynamics as the two of them become afflicted with spectrox poisoning, and of course Five's regeneration into Six - which, whatever you think about Six, automatically counts as one of Classic Who's classic moments. And an interesting discovery, too. I had, in fact, seen the first episode before, at the time of its original broadcast. And I know this because I vividly remember the cliff-hanger at the end of it: the Doctor and Peri are tied up in front of a firing squad, and veiled in red hoods. The squad fires, aaaand.... *Vreeeooooww! Diggerdydum, diggerdydum, diggerdydum, dum-tee-dum* - you'll have to wait until next week to find out what happens!
What's particularly interesting about this from a personal history point of view is the insight it gives me into what watching Doctor Who was like for me as a child. At the time of broadcast (March 1984), I would have been 7 and three-quarters. Clearly, I was affected by the cliff-hanger, since I still remember it (though nothing else about the story), but I also know that I obviously wasn't organised enough to actually watch the follow-up episode the next week. I know this because I also remember having to ask hollyione what had happened after the squad started firing, because I knew she that had watched the next episode, whereas I hadn't. Furthermore (and we are really getting deep into personal confession-time, here), I was obviously also just about old enough to be starting to develop a kind of weird child-like crush on the Doctor - or was it Peri? That hadn't occurred to me as a possible alternative at the time, but in retrospect I do seem to have been suspiciously interested in her... ;-) Anyway, I actually also remember working out my own fantasy version of how the Doctor and Peri escaped from this awkward situation in my head (something to do with escaping through a trap-door in the wall behind, I think), with me playing the role of Peri. There was nothing outright sexual about the fantasy at the time, as I was far too young - but I was clearly aware of a certain 'frisson' attached to the idea of being tied up and blindfolded along with another attractive human being, even if in a rather fatal situation!
*Ahem* Anyway, that watched, I decided to explore the other end of the Davison era, and picked his first ever story, Castrovalva. The first two sections (i.e. about 20 minutes of the first episode) of this are currently missing from YouTube, but between the Wikipedia plot write-up and regeneration compilation videos such as this one, which cover the Four / Five regeneration at the start of the story, it was pretty easy to get up to speed. And what an excellent choice it was, too! More celery-explanation, a plot that was much more to my liking, and some excellent set-design. Long before the strange nature of Castrovalva's geography was revealed as part of the plot, and while everyone was still very much the same way up and not looping round on each other, I was actually sitting there looking at the column capitals and the arches, and thinking, "This is very Escher-esque architecture". So I was very impressed when it turned out that this was in fact deliberate, and designed to support a literally Escher-esque turn of the plot.
This one also very much paid off in terms of background-to-New-Who value. There were some elements in it which have very definitely been picked up with Ten - particularly the idea of the Doctor being indisposed as a result of his regeneration, and of course also the OMG he's the frickin' Master moment! That latter I might in fact have enjoyed less had I been seeing the episode on a normal-sized TV screen, since I suspect that that way it would have been pretty clear that the Portreeve was being played by Anthony Ainley all along. But as it was, in a blocky 4" by 5" window, I genuinely hadn't realised, and so it was every bit as much of a surprise for me as it had been while watching Utopia to realise that the kind and apparently trustworthy old man was in fact EVIL INCARNATE (muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!).
There was nothing in Castrovalva I remembered from my childhood, though, so my next mission was to find out what I really did remember of the Tom Baker era. Davison took over from Baker in January of 1982, when I was five and a half years old, and although I was pretty sure I remembered both Baker and K-9 (though not any of the companions) being on TV when I was tiny, I was starting to wonder - if I didn't remember Castrovalva, did I really remember anything from the Baker era, or was I just imagining it in retrospect? Well, I have two quite specific memories of the Fourth Doctor, which I know date from my childhood, and not from later viewings. And in fact, I have been asking Serious Who Fans about both of them for years, trying to work out what episodes they might had come from. However, no-one has ever been able to help me. These days of course, though, we have Wikipedia et sim at our disposal, and I am happy to say that I have been able to pin both of them down at last!
One is not so much a memory of Doctor Who per se, as a memory of the memory of it. You see, family lore has it that, at the age of around four years old (i.e. late 1980 / early 1981), I was taken to Madam Tussaud's, where, at the time, they had a special exhibition of Doctor Who characters. The Doctor and K-9 I was apparently fine with, but the exhibition also featured some recent monsters from the programme, which I absolutely refused to go past because I was so scared of them. The exhibition itself I don't really remember, and nor do I remember watching whatever episode the monsters had appeared in. But I do remember my Dad winding me up for months afterwards by pretending to be these monsters, and me screaming and running away - but giggling at the same time, because I knew that it was all just a big game and the 'monster' was really my Dad.
So, I set out into the wilds of Wikipedia to see what I could work out. I couldn't remember much about the monsters themselves, other than that they were large and shaggy-furred, but I did know that my Dad's way of pretending to be one had been to lurch from side to side rather like a zombie, arms outstretched to catch me, and making some sort of growling / roaring / groaning noise. My technique was simply to flick through all the Wiki write-ups of the Tom Baker stories broadcast from about 1979 onwards, looking at the monsters and seeing which one seemed to fit the bill. On that basis, I'm pretty sure that what I was so damned scared of all that time ago was the Mandrels, from the story Nightmare of Eden (Nov / Dec 1979):
I'd have been a little under three and a half at that time, which makes even the memory of the memory very early indeed - but the dating does tally with the Madam Tussaud's story, and I can't find any other monster from that era which matches my memory so closely. I'd like to see footage of the Mandrels in action to be completely sure about it, so that I can see whether they have the right kind of lurching / swaying movement that my Dad used to imitate. But alas, none of Nightmare of Eden seems to be up on YouTube, so I will have to leave it as a working theory for now.
Meanwhile, the other memory I had related to just one scene. I remember a statue on a pedestal, I thought outside some kind of stately home, which had seemed perfectly innocent and ordinary up to that point, but then suddenly disappeared from its pedestal and turned out to be both alive and dangerous in some way. This one I have now tracked down with complete certainty via Wikipedia, and it turns out to have been The Keeper of Traken, first broadcast in Jan / Feb 1981. I don't remember anything else at all about the story or any of the characters, but I do know that we were round at my paternal grandparents' house when I saw it. So I suppose that the excitement of being in another setting, but being allowed to watch Doctor Who all the same, coupled with the shock! (to a tiny child) of the statue turning out to be eeeeviiiiilll must be why I remember it. This time, I would have been four and a half - so, given that the Mandrel thing isn't a direct memory, that must count as my earliest actual memory of watching Doctor Who itself on TV. And yes, it was Tom Baker, so it had been true all along - I really did remember watching him as a child, and hadn't just made that up on the basis of later experience.
Finally, that little matter settled, I was able to snuggle down and begin enjoying UKTV Drama's latest Doctor Who re-runs - which this month just happen to have started with Tom Baker's first ever story, Robot. This was pretty much exactly what I would have chosen to watch next anyway, given my rediscovery of my childhood memories of the Fourth Doctor, so it was very much appreciated. And I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the story was not laughably dated and transparent, as I had been secretly fearing, but in fact rather good! As for Davison's first story, the episode begins with the Doctor behaving a little oddly as a result of his recent regeneration, but it is nothing like as serious as in Five's case. Rather, Four just seems to need to sleep a lot at first, and also rambles on a bit - but Four does that anyway, so it's nothing too unusual. I was impressed by the ease with which Tom Baker slipped into the role, so that by the second episode, you've forgotten that he hasn't been playing the Doctor already for years. It's not so surprising, though, I suppose, given the legendary extent of his identification with the role.
The plot this time revolves around a 'Think-Tank' of megalomaniacal scientists, who try to use a super-intelligent robot they have created to hold the world to ransom under the threat of nuclear war, so that those of 'superior intellect' (i.e. themselves) can take control, as they should. That's already a pretty interesting set-up right there, touching as it does on issues of scientific ethics, the right to rule (looking right back to Plato's philosopher-kings) and of course the contemporary fear of nuclear holocaust. Add a frankly awesome Sarah Jane to the mix, and all of a sudden you have explicit references to feminism and the nature of artificial intelligence too - and well, frankly, what more could you want? OK, so they stretched the limits of their budget to near-breaking-point when the robot of the title grew to giant size, and began flickering around the edges and picking up a doll that was meant to be Sarah Jane. But this was the '70s, when people still had imaginations, so I guess they could get away with it.
The next story, The Ark in Space, begins tomorrow, and I'm already looking forward to it. More Baker will be excellent, but actually it's my appetite for more Sarah Jane Smith that's really been whetted. I don't remember her from my childhood (for the simple reason that she left the series in the year I was born!), and I obviously can't have seen much of her since then, either. When she appeared in New Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, I pretty much assumed that her very self-reliant and adventurous attitude was a modern enhancement of her character, and that all she'd ever really done back in the '70s was stand there and scream - just like any female companions from that era, right? Wrong! There she is, right there in Robot, zipping around in her two-seater MG, breaking into scientific institutions and reasoning with powerful, dangerous and slightly unhinged beings with the best of 'em. Her character in New Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures is actually exactly in keeping with how it's always been - and I'm havin' me some more o' that, please!
A journey has definitely begun here, and I'm looking forward to pursuing it further. I don't think I'll ever try to be a completist, because I know that would involve sitting through an awful lot of dross. But Operation Classic Who is go! ...at least until New Who begins again in the spring. :-)
I've tended to occupy a rather odd position somewhere in between hard-core fandom and passing interest, though. I carried on watching it well into the Sylvester McCoy years, when I suspect that popular interest had largely waned - but even then I know I gave up bothering well before hollyione did. Then, at both Bristol and Oxford Universities, I joined the local Doctor Who societies - but at Bristol, it was largely because hollyione was deeply involved with it, and at Oxford it was because I was continuing an established habit from Bristol, and, once again, because an old friend from school (WINOLJ) was a member. I've watched a hell of a lot of 'Classic Who' as a result of all this - but I'm generally watching it from a very uninformed perspective. I was attending talks by New Adventures authors, watching rare episodes or listening to early audio adventures throughout my late teens to mid-twenties - but had no idea who these people actually were, or why it was so exciting to be able to see or hear whatever-it-was for the first time in 20+ years.
Put simply (and with a little help from Wikipedia), this is generally the level of difference between me and a serious fan:Serious fan: It may be a controversial opinion, but I really think The Talons of Weng-Chiang is one of the high points of the Tom Baker era. I just love all the Sherlock Holmes references in it!
Me: [slight pause] Er - is that the one with the giant rat in the sewer?
Over the last year, though, my fandom for New Who has increased to such a pitch (thanks to the overall excellent series 3) that I've decided it's about time I ploughed back into the archives. Time Crash probably played a pretty big role there, actually. If New Who was going to reference Old Who so explicitly, then I decided it was about time I enhanced my appreciation of both by rediscovering the original - and maybe just a little bit of my lost childhood along the way.
So, while I was ill, one of the things I did was get onto YouTube and start exploring a little of the Peter Davison era. First, I watched The Caves of Androzani - partly because I'd heard of it, partly because a chap in a documentary clip about Peter Davison which I'd watched first said it was really good, and partly because the whole thing was there for the viewing. Overall, I didn't think it was as good as the bloke on the documentary did, largely because the type of story involved is just not to my taste. It revolves around three different groups of people who all have grudges against or murderous designs upon one another, while the Doctor and Peri get caught in the crossfire. The difficulty with this sort of scenario for me is that I find it hard to care about the political wranglings of the various groups involved - especially when they have names I'm not familiar with, so that it generally takes me until about three episodes in to work out which of the other characters is being cursed to oblivion by his enemies, or indeed who actually is enemies with whom, at any given time. (This, incidentally, is the same reason why I am almost certain never to develop an interest in series such as Star Trek (especially Deep Space Nine) or Battlestar Galactica).
That said, it had some interesting content, too. Like a hand-wavey explanation for Five's celery, some good cliff-hangers, lots of excellent Peri-Doctor dynamics as the two of them become afflicted with spectrox poisoning, and of course Five's regeneration into Six - which, whatever you think about Six, automatically counts as one of Classic Who's classic moments. And an interesting discovery, too. I had, in fact, seen the first episode before, at the time of its original broadcast. And I know this because I vividly remember the cliff-hanger at the end of it: the Doctor and Peri are tied up in front of a firing squad, and veiled in red hoods. The squad fires, aaaand.... *Vreeeooooww! Diggerdydum, diggerdydum, diggerdydum, dum-tee-dum* - you'll have to wait until next week to find out what happens!
What's particularly interesting about this from a personal history point of view is the insight it gives me into what watching Doctor Who was like for me as a child. At the time of broadcast (March 1984), I would have been 7 and three-quarters. Clearly, I was affected by the cliff-hanger, since I still remember it (though nothing else about the story), but I also know that I obviously wasn't organised enough to actually watch the follow-up episode the next week. I know this because I also remember having to ask hollyione what had happened after the squad started firing, because I knew she that had watched the next episode, whereas I hadn't. Furthermore (and we are really getting deep into personal confession-time, here), I was obviously also just about old enough to be starting to develop a kind of weird child-like crush on the Doctor - or was it Peri? That hadn't occurred to me as a possible alternative at the time, but in retrospect I do seem to have been suspiciously interested in her... ;-) Anyway, I actually also remember working out my own fantasy version of how the Doctor and Peri escaped from this awkward situation in my head (something to do with escaping through a trap-door in the wall behind, I think), with me playing the role of Peri. There was nothing outright sexual about the fantasy at the time, as I was far too young - but I was clearly aware of a certain 'frisson' attached to the idea of being tied up and blindfolded along with another attractive human being, even if in a rather fatal situation!
*Ahem* Anyway, that watched, I decided to explore the other end of the Davison era, and picked his first ever story, Castrovalva. The first two sections (i.e. about 20 minutes of the first episode) of this are currently missing from YouTube, but between the Wikipedia plot write-up and regeneration compilation videos such as this one, which cover the Four / Five regeneration at the start of the story, it was pretty easy to get up to speed. And what an excellent choice it was, too! More celery-explanation, a plot that was much more to my liking, and some excellent set-design. Long before the strange nature of Castrovalva's geography was revealed as part of the plot, and while everyone was still very much the same way up and not looping round on each other, I was actually sitting there looking at the column capitals and the arches, and thinking, "This is very Escher-esque architecture". So I was very impressed when it turned out that this was in fact deliberate, and designed to support a literally Escher-esque turn of the plot.
This one also very much paid off in terms of background-to-New-Who value. There were some elements in it which have very definitely been picked up with Ten - particularly the idea of the Doctor being indisposed as a result of his regeneration, and of course also the OMG he's the frickin' Master moment! That latter I might in fact have enjoyed less had I been seeing the episode on a normal-sized TV screen, since I suspect that that way it would have been pretty clear that the Portreeve was being played by Anthony Ainley all along. But as it was, in a blocky 4" by 5" window, I genuinely hadn't realised, and so it was every bit as much of a surprise for me as it had been while watching Utopia to realise that the kind and apparently trustworthy old man was in fact EVIL INCARNATE (muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!).
There was nothing in Castrovalva I remembered from my childhood, though, so my next mission was to find out what I really did remember of the Tom Baker era. Davison took over from Baker in January of 1982, when I was five and a half years old, and although I was pretty sure I remembered both Baker and K-9 (though not any of the companions) being on TV when I was tiny, I was starting to wonder - if I didn't remember Castrovalva, did I really remember anything from the Baker era, or was I just imagining it in retrospect? Well, I have two quite specific memories of the Fourth Doctor, which I know date from my childhood, and not from later viewings. And in fact, I have been asking Serious Who Fans about both of them for years, trying to work out what episodes they might had come from. However, no-one has ever been able to help me. These days of course, though, we have Wikipedia et sim at our disposal, and I am happy to say that I have been able to pin both of them down at last!
One is not so much a memory of Doctor Who per se, as a memory of the memory of it. You see, family lore has it that, at the age of around four years old (i.e. late 1980 / early 1981), I was taken to Madam Tussaud's, where, at the time, they had a special exhibition of Doctor Who characters. The Doctor and K-9 I was apparently fine with, but the exhibition also featured some recent monsters from the programme, which I absolutely refused to go past because I was so scared of them. The exhibition itself I don't really remember, and nor do I remember watching whatever episode the monsters had appeared in. But I do remember my Dad winding me up for months afterwards by pretending to be these monsters, and me screaming and running away - but giggling at the same time, because I knew that it was all just a big game and the 'monster' was really my Dad.
So, I set out into the wilds of Wikipedia to see what I could work out. I couldn't remember much about the monsters themselves, other than that they were large and shaggy-furred, but I did know that my Dad's way of pretending to be one had been to lurch from side to side rather like a zombie, arms outstretched to catch me, and making some sort of growling / roaring / groaning noise. My technique was simply to flick through all the Wiki write-ups of the Tom Baker stories broadcast from about 1979 onwards, looking at the monsters and seeing which one seemed to fit the bill. On that basis, I'm pretty sure that what I was so damned scared of all that time ago was the Mandrels, from the story Nightmare of Eden (Nov / Dec 1979):
I'd have been a little under three and a half at that time, which makes even the memory of the memory very early indeed - but the dating does tally with the Madam Tussaud's story, and I can't find any other monster from that era which matches my memory so closely. I'd like to see footage of the Mandrels in action to be completely sure about it, so that I can see whether they have the right kind of lurching / swaying movement that my Dad used to imitate. But alas, none of Nightmare of Eden seems to be up on YouTube, so I will have to leave it as a working theory for now.
Meanwhile, the other memory I had related to just one scene. I remember a statue on a pedestal, I thought outside some kind of stately home, which had seemed perfectly innocent and ordinary up to that point, but then suddenly disappeared from its pedestal and turned out to be both alive and dangerous in some way. This one I have now tracked down with complete certainty via Wikipedia, and it turns out to have been The Keeper of Traken, first broadcast in Jan / Feb 1981. I don't remember anything else at all about the story or any of the characters, but I do know that we were round at my paternal grandparents' house when I saw it. So I suppose that the excitement of being in another setting, but being allowed to watch Doctor Who all the same, coupled with the shock! (to a tiny child) of the statue turning out to be eeeeviiiiilll must be why I remember it. This time, I would have been four and a half - so, given that the Mandrel thing isn't a direct memory, that must count as my earliest actual memory of watching Doctor Who itself on TV. And yes, it was Tom Baker, so it had been true all along - I really did remember watching him as a child, and hadn't just made that up on the basis of later experience.
Finally, that little matter settled, I was able to snuggle down and begin enjoying UKTV Drama's latest Doctor Who re-runs - which this month just happen to have started with Tom Baker's first ever story, Robot. This was pretty much exactly what I would have chosen to watch next anyway, given my rediscovery of my childhood memories of the Fourth Doctor, so it was very much appreciated. And I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the story was not laughably dated and transparent, as I had been secretly fearing, but in fact rather good! As for Davison's first story, the episode begins with the Doctor behaving a little oddly as a result of his recent regeneration, but it is nothing like as serious as in Five's case. Rather, Four just seems to need to sleep a lot at first, and also rambles on a bit - but Four does that anyway, so it's nothing too unusual. I was impressed by the ease with which Tom Baker slipped into the role, so that by the second episode, you've forgotten that he hasn't been playing the Doctor already for years. It's not so surprising, though, I suppose, given the legendary extent of his identification with the role.
The plot this time revolves around a 'Think-Tank' of megalomaniacal scientists, who try to use a super-intelligent robot they have created to hold the world to ransom under the threat of nuclear war, so that those of 'superior intellect' (i.e. themselves) can take control, as they should. That's already a pretty interesting set-up right there, touching as it does on issues of scientific ethics, the right to rule (looking right back to Plato's philosopher-kings) and of course the contemporary fear of nuclear holocaust. Add a frankly awesome Sarah Jane to the mix, and all of a sudden you have explicit references to feminism and the nature of artificial intelligence too - and well, frankly, what more could you want? OK, so they stretched the limits of their budget to near-breaking-point when the robot of the title grew to giant size, and began flickering around the edges and picking up a doll that was meant to be Sarah Jane. But this was the '70s, when people still had imaginations, so I guess they could get away with it.
The next story, The Ark in Space, begins tomorrow, and I'm already looking forward to it. More Baker will be excellent, but actually it's my appetite for more Sarah Jane Smith that's really been whetted. I don't remember her from my childhood (for the simple reason that she left the series in the year I was born!), and I obviously can't have seen much of her since then, either. When she appeared in New Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, I pretty much assumed that her very self-reliant and adventurous attitude was a modern enhancement of her character, and that all she'd ever really done back in the '70s was stand there and scream - just like any female companions from that era, right? Wrong! There she is, right there in Robot, zipping around in her two-seater MG, breaking into scientific institutions and reasoning with powerful, dangerous and slightly unhinged beings with the best of 'em. Her character in New Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures is actually exactly in keeping with how it's always been - and I'm havin' me some more o' that, please!
A journey has definitely begun here, and I'm looking forward to pursuing it further. I don't think I'll ever try to be a completist, because I know that would involve sitting through an awful lot of dross. But Operation Classic Who is go! ...at least until New Who begins again in the spring. :-)