Growing up with the Doctor – Part 7

Growing up with the Doctor – Sylvester McCoy (1987-1989)
 
I was overjoyed when Doctor Who was returning, as the Trial of a Time Lord had been rather a muddle, but the start of Sylvester McCoy's time as the Seventh Doctor – "Time and the Rani" – was quite frankly an embarrassment. There were a number of good actors – Wanda Wentham, Mark Greenstreet (fresh from the BBC Classic serial "Brat Farrar"), Donald Pickering, and of course Kate O'Mara.
 
But while the effects and the alien costume design was effective, the script was a travesty of spoken English. It was horrible. The actors struggled to overcome its limitations valiantly, and it was easy to see why Andrew Cartmel, the new script editor, was deeply unhappy at the curate's egg that he had been saddled with.
 
Rani: Prepare the Doctor's cabinet for occupation.
Mel: Well, that'll be a waste of effort. You've got to find him first and then catch him.
Rani: I need neither find nor catch him. The bumbling fool's ready made as a sacrificial lamb.
Mel: He's shrewder than you think. Underestimating the Doctor is a common fault.
Rani: Really?
Mel: He's got qualities you'll never have.
Rani: Such as?
Mel: Something I'd call humanity.
Rani: Huh. You're as sentimental as he is. Get on with your work.
 
The late Kate O'Mara manages to do a very funny impression of Bonnie Langford at one part of the story, but it was a sad swan song for her in Doctor Who. She is probably better remembered for her role in Dynasty, the American TV show, but I fondly remember her in Triangle, a British drama about a passenger ferry company, which had a ferry, some sea, a very small crew, Kata O'Mara, and virtually no passengers! No wonder the show stopped; the ferry company must have gone bankrupt!
 
The first season with Sylvester McCoy was patchy. There were moments of greatness in Paradise Towers, Delta and the Bannerman, and Dragonfire, but also moments that made me cringe. And sometime the script had large holes in it. The cliff hanger in Dragonfire was dire, and so was some of the dialogue that Sophie Aldred had to say. And who heard of a villain who, while searching for a power source for a thousand years, decides to run a freezer centre?
 
But there was a potential there – Sylvester McCoy was settling into the part, and showed he could bring a strong presence to the Doctor. Sophie Aldred was more promising than previous companions.
 
The year of the first Season, 1987, was the year that the Great Storm hit Jersey and the South of England. Trees were uprooted. Roofs blown off. I remember driving home on the night of the storm – having just co-produced the opening night of the Grouville Church history pageant – and thinking it was hard to drive at 11.30 at night.
 
The wind was tugging at my mini (and no power steering back then) and I was going along Victoria Avenue at a steady 20 mph. In the morning, the scene was like the Blitz. Trees uprooted everywhere. Huge roots sticking in the air; huge holes in the ground. Broken water pipes gushing water. While we have recently experienced very turbulent weather, the number of trees felled in that one night has yet to be approached.
 
Season 25 in 1988 was a brilliant opening with Remembrance of the Daleks. The script and effects played to Doctor Who's strengths, and even now, it still stands out as a fine piece of television. Sylvester McCoy shows how good he can be, with the right script, and so does Sophie Aldred as Ace. Suddenly, we have a sea change in the series, and a companion who would not be out of place in 2005 – feisty, independent, with a real character of her own, and not a screamer. The Daleks return to 1963 London, Coal Hill school, but there are two factions, still hating the unlike as Daleks have since their inception, but also hating each other for being different.
 
And this is a story about race, about prejudice with "No Coloureds" on the windows of lodging houses, and a wonderful vignette when the Doctor talks to a Jamaican about the nature of choices over whether or not to take sugar:
 
Café: (The sign says open, but there are no lights on and no customers. A Jamaican man comes out from the kitchen.)
 
John: Can I help you?
Doctor: A mug of tea, please.
John: Your tea. Sugar?
Doctor: Ah. A decision. Would it make any difference?
John: It would make your tea sweet.
Doctor: Yes, but beyond the confines of my taste buds, would it make any difference?
John: Not really.
Doctor: But
John: Yeah?
Doctor: What if I could control people's taste buds? What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those that cut the cane.
John: My father, he was a cane cutter.
Doctor: Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter.
John: If this sugar thing had never started, my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be an African.
Doctor: See? Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge, rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.
John: Life's like that. Best thing is just to get on with it.
 
This doesn't advance the plot, but it adds background and texture to it. Remembrance of the Daleks is very good at that, and apart from the smallest lapse – "rice pudding", it is a strong opener, and shows how much promise there could be, even in a series where CGI was still mostly in the future.
 
And 1988 was a year of new beginning for me as well. I met Angela, who was to become my wife, and went on a trip with Rosemary and Mark Hampton to the Festival des Remparts (a Medieval festival weekend) in Dinan as a kind of recce to see if we could do something historical over there. We never did, but it was fun wondering about dressed in medieval clothing – I was in a brown friar's outfit!
 
1989 was the year I was married in Grouville Church, with my friend Terry Hampton officiating. It was a time of change.
 
And that year, Doctor Who changed as it began its final season of the "classic" era, with some fine stories, of which "The Curse of Fenric", especially now it has been re-edited with missing material reinstated, is one of the finest of the McCoy era.
 
This is a much darker, more manipulative Doctor, more sombre, and Ace, as before, continues to excel as a companion, becoming much more of a character in her own right rather than a mere foil for the Doctor.
 
ACE: There's a wind whipping up. I can feel it through my clothes. Is there a storm coming?
LEIGH: I wasn't expecting one.
ACE: The question is, is he making all the right moves or only going through the motions?
(Ace leads Leigh away around the corner, and the Doctor runs across the open space unseen into the guard room. The keys to the cell are in a desk drawer. The Doctor frees Sorin and they leave.)
LEIGH: What are you doing here?
ACE: You have to move faster than that if you want to keep up with me. Faster than light.
LEIGH: Faster than the second hand on a watch?
ACE: Much faster. We're not even moving yet. Hardly cruising speed. Sometimes I move so fast, I don't exist any more.
LEIGH: What can you see?
ACE: Undercurrents
 
But all too soon, as the year drew to a close, the final episodes of Survival were shown, and the Doctor and Ace disappeared into history.
 
DOCTOR: They've been taken back to the wilderness. The place is different but the hunt goes on. You know all about the hunt, don't you, Ace?
ACE: I felt like I could run forever, like I could smell the wind and feel the grass under my feet and just run forever.
DOCTOR: The planet's gone, but lives on inside you. It always will.
 
It was also the year (at its close), when our son Martin was born, in mid-November. And although it was later corrected, it was still a shock to know that he was born with talipes, more popularly known as "club foot". We felt joy and grief combined. Just as Doctor Who had grown darker, troubled with stories of pain and loss with Ace and her past history, so had our own personal world of the future, as well.

But the story continued, as the Doctor and Ace left to go into the sunset. I didn't know if it would ever be back. But I hoped that it would. Hope is the expectation of things yet to come; we all need that in our lives.

DOCTOR: There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold.

Growing up with the Doctor – Part 6

Growing up with the Doctor - Colin Baker (1984–1986)

Colin Baker's tenure with the Doctor began with the "Twin Dilemma", and set the tone for the years to come. Arguments, violence, and poor production values, along with a catastrophic choice of costume made this probably one of the worst in the programme's history. The programme, not unlike my relationship with my girlfriend Marilyn, was coming apart at the seams.

It was not Baker's fault. He had shown himself a good actor in other productions, and later in Doctor Who audio drama, he was an excellent Doctor Who – given the right script. But his opening script was the first in a long line of flawed writing, with little in the way of high concept ideas or social comment.

The often best cited of his tenure, "Vengeance on Varos", was full of casual violence, and for all its pretensions to be a satire on the sadistic elements in modern television, it was a profoundly ambiguous one.

But most of all, what really was eating away at the programme was an obsession with continuity and looking backwards to the past, albeit extremely badly. "Attack of the Cybermen" took the Doctor back to Telos and the Tombs, homage for fans, but they didn't look anything like the grand sets of the Patrick Troughton story. A gantry, and a few empty rooms with doors, was presumably all the budget could manage.

The mythical element was being lost. Even when Doctor Who tried to draw on its roots, as in "Timelash" by presenting us with the young H.G. Wells, it was done in a lazy fashion. The smallest research would have shown that H.G. Wells was a cockney, and here he is instead a somewhat effete posh speaking young man, wholly unlike the historical character. The story and acting in that tale were pretty abysmal as well. At least George Stevenson did have an accent, even if "Mark of the Rani" with its fake moving tree, also hit the odd low.

I watched Doctor Who, because I've always watched Doctor Who, but I hoped for some kind of improvements. The move to a 45 minutes story, dragged out over two episodes, seemed slow, and left a lot of room for endless Tardis scenes, and lots of shouting arguments between the Doctor and his companion Peri. This show lacked pace, lacked decent scripts, and lacked good production values.

And the level of violence had increased. Hands bleeding as the Cybermen crushed them, death by being knocked into a pool of acid by the Doctor, a stabbing in the neck by one character using a syringe in "Revelation of the Daleks", and a fatal stabbing in the chest in "The Two Doctors", as well as the Doctor himself despatching a villain by using a cyanide soaked cloth on their face. This was no longer a children's programme. It was becoming a nasty sadistic television show, and losing the potential that was there.

And then it was cancelled for 18 months in 1985 by Michael Grade. Grade never liked Doctor Who, and this current series certainly provide plenty of ammunition for him. But the same team remained in place, with Eric Saward in charge as script editor, the man who thought you needed to show violence to be realistic.

In my own life, I was looking at a historical figure whose life spoke of peace and non-violence, and yet was a charismatic figure, one that people would look at for centuries after his death. In a way, he embodied much that Doctor Who should be about, and the disparity between his story and the last series of Doctor Who only highlighted the divide, and showed how far the show had fallen from its moral roots. His name was Francis of Assisi.

I had been contacted by Rosemary Hampton, an old friend, and the wife of the Rector of Grouville, Terry Hampton. They wanted to do a celebration of the life of St Francis. There would be music, well known hymns stemming from the life of Francis, where the audience could sing with. But in between, she needed some short playlets which would tell episodes in the story of St Francis, and also in the middle, a short slide show with narrative to give more background, and paintings of Francis, and picture of Umbria. It worked very well, and I managed to rehearse and largely control my somewhat unruly friars!

Doctor Who meantime was due to return in "The Trial of a Timelord". The violence had been toned down, but what remained was muddled and largely unwatchable. I did watch it, but the narrative was broken up by endless trial scenes, in which the Valeyard would shout at the Doctor, and the Doctor shout back at the Valeyard.

Such gems of dialogue in the stories were:

"I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum."
"I would appreciate it if these violent and repetitious scenes could be kept to a minimum."
"Nobody likes brain alteration"
"There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality"
"A megabyte modem"
"How utterly evil!"

The courtroom scenes, far from enhancing the narrative, disrupted it because of the heavy handed way in which they were fed into the whole long story arc over 4 different stories. The "Key to Time" sequence, where references to the quest were at a minimum and stories could stand on their own two feet showed what could be achieved, but instead this was a disaster than went steadily downhill.

Probably the best story was the one with the Vervoids, a kind of Agatha Christie with added alien plant monsters, but even that was hardly gripping, and again suffered from discontinuity – the story jumps to the Doctor standing with an axe over a broken communication panel, with no real explanation of why it jumps except for another Courtroom scene. And what was an axe doing on a spaceship anyway?

But I soldiered on watching it, hoping against hope that it would get better. There were the occasional flashes of brilliance – the character of Glitz, a kind of interstellar spiv, and the different Mr Popplewicks. But there was no real pace, and no sense that the cliff-hanger should be something exciting, when the viewer wanted to tune in next week.

Back in the real world, the St Francis playlets being a success, Rosemary Hampton had a much more ambitious task ahead. She had shown me a church in England which had produced a kind of historical pageant, in which music from each period was interspersed by the same family coming in the costumes of that period. But it wasn't really dramatic, and she wanted something based on Grouville Church history -and there were certainly enough saintly and villainous characters there to fashion something from.

So my task was to write a slide sequence history for the middle section, as before, and a series of different acts, some of which would involve seeing the same family present at different periods, but which would be based on real historical incidents, from Norman times to Victorian times.

As the odd Rector had been taken away by officials, and imprisoned, or dealt corruptly with farmers, there was plenty of scope for drama. I saw that we could also fit in a miracle playlet and I wrote a pastiche about the woman caught in adultery. There was the pardoner, seeking coins from the family to let souls out of purgatory, a wonderfully over the top performance by Simon Hicks, with blacked up teeth to give a grotesque gap tooth appearance. And the drunken soldiers from the Militia, one of whom is now the present Constable of Grouville, John Le Maistre, who provided some much needed humour (and always got a laugh). And finally a Victorian piece, with the saintly Abraham Le Sueur and the very officious and villainous Peter Briard (a role I grabbed for myself!)

The narrators, in the meantime, would fill in the gaps and link the playlets together. As there was more information to put out, I decided on two narrators. And to make it more interesting, one would be mainly concerned with the church building, the fame of some Rectors, and a triumpalistic tone, while the other would be more prophetic, looking at the more spiritual side, and also the church's failings.

Narrator 1 By the fourteenth century, the Church was doing rather well. It had become prosperous and respectable. It is around this time that the list of Grouville Rectors was begun with the name of Pierre Faleyse, Dean of Jersey and Rector of Grouville. He was a staunch upholder of the rights of the Church! The Church had Its own Courts of Law, distinct from the Civil Courts. Pierre fearlessly defended these against the Civil Authorities - even against the Bailiff.

Narrator 2 Pierre upheld the rights of the Church. But what good are rights without justice?

Another example from the Victorian section:

Narrator 1: The Victorian age saw the Church in decay, badly in need of restoration. The floor was raised two feet above the damp that was seeping through

Narrator 2: Yes, the Church was in decay. Pews - with a good view of the pulpit - had been bought by the rich; the poor were shunted to the back of the Church. Was this God's house - a place where position could be paid for?

Narrator 1: But a general restoration was under way, brought about by Abraham Le Sueur, Rector of Grouville from 1851.

Narrator 2: He also cared for the poor and needy, encouraged education for all young children, and took an active interest in the Jersey Female Orphans Home.

The idea of two narrators, driving the narrative with a degree of conflict between the differing viewpoints, came of course indirectly from "The Trial of a Time Lord" and the Courtroom scenes. It couldn't be an exact fit, of course, because none of my narrators was actually on trial. But the idea of opposing viewpoints came from Doctor Who, even if the execution was different.

Sometimes the contrast between narrators was sharp, and at other times, more complementary; it had to be tailored to the drama unfolding. But there was often a sense that one narrator was very much putting the more materialist viewpoint of the other on trial. With one narrator male, and one female, it also gave contrasting voices to make the narrative links more interesting to listen to.

I am sure that Rosemary Hampton never knew the subtle influence from Doctor Who, nor did anyone else who took part. It was, after all, not a slavish copy, but simply a good narrative device, and unlike "Trial of a Timelord", it worked well.

Despite the Great Storm of 1987 disrupting the Friday night performance (postponed until Sunday night), the event went ahead and was a success. The drunken soldiers ad libbed about needing to cut down branches with bayonets on the way to the church. The historical hymns between each act captured each period well.

But another kind of storm was coming at the BBC. The script editor Eric Saward had left acrimoniously after an angry dispute with the producer John Nathan Turner. And the "Trial of a Timelord" had not been a success. Controller of BBC1, Michael Grade, decided one last try for the show was in order, but without Colin Baker. He was blown away by the fickle fate that had dealt him such a bad hand. Trees had fallen in the Great Storm, and the key actor and script editor had fallen from Doctor Who. Was there any hope left for one last blaze of glory, or had the programme had its day?

Growing up with the Doctor - Part 5

Growing up with the Doctor - Peter Davison (1981-1984)

"A man is the sum of his memories you know, a Time Lord even more so." (The Five Doctors)

At the start of Peter Davison's tenure as the Doctor, I was back in Jersey, doing accountancy preparation, which then mostly involved analysis of cheque stubs, manual trial balances, and the use of a calculator on which you entered numbers, cranked a handle, and watched a paper roll emerge.

I was also involved in typing of minutes (when the regular typists were off ill), and setting up our magnificent computer, the DEC PDP 11/03 to deal with the Annual Company Returns. This was a machine the size of a filing cabinet, with two large circular disks about a foot in diameter, one with the program, one with the data. And they held a whopping 3 MB of data. It was the computer age!

But the hard science of Chris Bidmead's time as script editor was fading, one last gasp of glory in the first Davison story "Castrovalva", which explored recursion, M.C. Escher, and the idea of space folding in on itself. After that, the stories become more straightforward adventure narratives, with the exception of Kinda, a wonderful exploration of the unconscious dark side of human nature. Although the next season would have the excellent Snakedance, and Enlightenment, two stories which explored inner space as much as outer space.

Snakedance explores the lust for power, and how when we externalise evil, we forget it originates within our own psyche. Enlightenment has a space race with sailing ships, and a race to obtain "enlightenment" which it turns out is a choice, and not a thing. Alongside that sat Maudryn Undead, with split time zones, and the return of the Brigadier, an excellent story, with a short flashback sequence that was a wonderful surprise; alas, the production team did not realise the value in a glimpse of the past was successful because it was unexpected, and instead began to generate flashbacks and continuity references to the detriment of the stories.

Peter Davison was the youngest ever Doctor, almost my own age, and I was also re-inventing myself. I had a longish gold coloured coat, not unlike his, and for about a year I died my hair blonde like his. What those about me must have thought, goodness only knows! Fortunately, no men in white coats came to take me away to the home for mostly harmless Geeks. There's even a photo of me at my god-daughter's christening with blonde hair. Clean shaven, of course, like the Doctor. And fortunately, the only photo of me in my Geek phase.

The Tardis now had a computer screen whose pixels rather resembled something out of the BBC micro. There was a massive surge in home computers of all kinds, but those of the BBC Micro, Acorn and Clive Sinclair's ZX81 dominated the market. And then, in 1981, IMB launched its first personal computer, and things would never be the same again.

I remember going round to the States fledgling IT department, and hearing that the latest strategy was to put the DEC PC onto every civil servant's desk. They thought the DEC Rainbow would be around for ages, and could have done with a Tardis to avoid making what must have been an expensive mistake.

Around the end of Peter Davison's second season, I decided to place an advertisement in the personal column of the local newspaper. In pre-internet and mobile phone days, this was in fact one of the ways that people got to meet and date other people.

I seem to remember the advert was suitably quirky; I believe it had "Dislike of discos and Dalmatians" which I rather liked because not only was it alliterative, it also was a good conversational opening. I have around five replies, mostly from women who didn't like discos, and the opening question was usually to ask what I had against Dalmatians. I had nothing against Dalmatians; I just wanted to see if it would spark curiosity, and it did.

At least my girlfriend Marilyn, whom I met as a result of that advertisement, did not have to put up with blond hair. By this time it was long but brown, but I had taken up learning the recorder (a trait of the second doctor), so she had to suffer some of my playing.

For my part, I had to enjoy watching Boy George and Culture Club singing Karma Kamelion on Top of the Pops, while they glided down a river on a barge. It was I suppose marginally better than the robot Kamelion in the Doctor Who story "The King's Demons" which was a rather dire two part quasi-historical story. Having lost K9, John Nathan Turner was keen on the latest gimmick, a robot programmed to speak, but not, unfortunately, act.

Marilyn also had to endure "The Five Doctors", which was not bad as an anniversary story, but had some remarkably bad lines, delivered without the slightest attempt at mitigation. The Castellan shouting out "No, not the mind probe" sticks in the memory. On the other hand, when I went round to her parents' house, I had to watch Jim Bowen and lots of rather obese men throwing darts in the game show "Bull's-eye" and Ted Rogers and Dusty Bin in the game show "3-2-1". I've never liked games shows much, and those didn't cause me to change my mind.

Doctor Who itself under Eric Savard as script editor was something of a mixed bag. The final season had risible stories like "Warriors of the Deep" in which Ingrid Pitt gives a karate kick to a monster that looks to all the world like a Doctor Who monster version of a pantomime horse. Even the Dalek story was incoherent, and had a long very self-indulgent fan flashback sequence of all the companions. The continuity of the programme was beginning to overbalance it.

There were good stories lurking there - Christopher Bidmead's Frontios, and Peter Davison's swan song - the Caves of Androzani by Robert Holmes. But the series was becoming more of a cult status, more appealing to its fan base than trying to reach the general public.

The Caves of Androzani was partly about power politics, and the economics of greed. It was a very suitable mirror to the deregulated society of laissez faire capitalism of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and the rise of the yuppie (young upwardly mobile person), and the emergence of the rich bankers and stock market managers with their bonus culture.

And so Peter Davison's era came to an end at a time when the miners were striking in the coal industry. The miners were no longer to be seen in Doctor Who, which had lost touch with stories with an edge, a moral comment on society. Instead, the strife in the Tardis was mostly from disputes amongst the crew and the Doctor, first with Tegan and then Peri. Long time script writer Terrance Dicks had revealed in a documentary that he often used short quarrel scenes when he had to fill a bit of extra time. Unfortunately, Eric Saward took this very much to heart, and instead of the odd argument, the Tardis would become the scene of endless bickering, which had about all the subtlety of painting a picture with a large broom.

Despite the glimpses of greatness, Doctor Who seemed to have withdrawn from real world issues, and become more self-indulgent, losing its way. It was, unfortunately, to lose its way even more with the next Doctor.

Growing up with the Doctor – Part 4

Growing up with the Doctor – Tom Baker (1974 to 1981)
 
When Tom Baker became the Doctor in 1974, I had turned 17, and was just about to embark on 13 driving lessons, after which I was finally deemed to be safe enough to drive on the roads of Jersey. I was stopped, incidentally, shortly after passing my test, for what a police motorcycle rider told me was "careful driving". I was going so slowly and timidly that he thought I was drunk!
 
Tom Baker saw me through the 6th form at school (what is now termed, confusingly to me, year 11 and year 12) and onward through my student days at University. And he was definitely the student's Doctor, with his witty repartee, and his bohemian clothing. It was only in his final year, that John Nathan Turner decided to change the image, and replaced what had been just clothes – albeit with a technicolour scarf – with a uniform – question marks on the shirt, a long burgundy coat, and a scarf that was now just burgundy, plum, and red scarf.
 
Tom Baker also managed to get engaged and married. Myself, I only got engaged during my time as a student to a girl called Ruth, and unhappily the engagement was broken with much heartache on both sides. Baker's marriage ended soon after he left the show.
 
The very early Baker stories were a gradual move from the old style Pertwee stories, and a very mixed bag. For every atmospheric Genesis of the Dalek and Terror of the Zygons, you had the more plodding and traditional Robot and Revenge of the Cybermen.
 
But after that, the show moved on to become a Gothic delight, with the historical settings given the full strength of the BBC production values, giving the show a rich sumptuous look, which can be seen at its best in stories like Pyramids of Mars, Masque of Mandragora, Talons of Weng-Chiang, gradually fading but still present in Horror of Fang Rock, Image of the Fendahl. Even the non-historical stories drew upon roots in literature, Planet of Evil (Jekyll and Hyde), The Brain of Morbius (Frankenstein), The Robots of Death (Agatha Christie), The Seeds of Doom (The Thing from Another World).
 
These were the years after the end of the Heath government, when Harold Wilson came to power, and clashes over pay negotiations with the Unions led to Jim Callaghan's Government "Winter of Discontent". Inflation rocketed, and by the end of 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, prices of everything from food to cars and houses had soared.
 
There was little reflection of this in Doctor Who. Unlike the Pertwee era, comment on the topical issues of the day had largely vanished. That's not to say that Doctor Who had lost its moral compass – far from it. Genesis of the Daleks confronts issues of warfare and takes the Daleks back to their post-war roots in reflections on Nazi Germany. Planet of Evil looks at scientific responsibility. And The Deadly Assassin presents government power struggles, and the corruption that power brings. The Doctor is still fighting evil, and he takes pains to tell Leela not to use weapons to kill. But the moral imperative was more universal rather than specific.
 
Orwell looked at Charles Dickens, and concluded that Dickens is a moralist. In his novels, he fights particular evils in society where he encounters them, but he has no clear cut remedy of his own, and no political agenda like socialism. That's very much like the Tom Baker Doctor. He enters the situation, and defeats the evil, and leaves. There's no word of advice or comment like Jon Pertwee's Doctor sometimes used to give at the end of a story. Baker's Doctor has done what was needed, and that is all the improvement he needs to do. And of course, he is far less an establishment figure than his predecessor, much more of a maverick. It's like playing the joker in the pack.
 
Coming from Jersey, I found at University everyone wanted political labels. Were you Conservative, Liberal or Labour? Fellow students found it hard to understand that there could be a form of politics, as in Jersey, where party systems did not exist. I rather relished the fact that like Tom Baker's Doctor, my politics could not be pinned down, pigeonholed, and neatly categorised. People love labels; it makes them secure.
 
Gothic stories, by their very nature, are dark, and the violent nature of the stories, albeit enfolded in a fantasy setting, drew criticism from Mary Whitehouse, and her self-proclaimed "National Viewers and Listeners Association"; now it goes under the name of "Mediawatch" which at least does not try to suggest a spuriously large membership. The NVLA eventually gained about 150,000 members, which is about the size of York.
 
As a result of prolonged criticism, and one drowning sequence in particular which it was agreed did overstep boundaries, Philip Hinchcliffe was rapidly moved on, and Doctor Who under new producer Graham Williams was under strict instructions to tone the level of violence down.
 
The Williams period was a mixed bag. There were some extremely good stories, such as many of those in the "Key to Time", and a high note with "City of Death". But there were some very silly stories, and the sets began to look too over lit, too lacking in detail. Watching "The Invisible Enemy" and "The Sun Makers", despite being good stories, the sets are a failure, with far too many bright and cheap looking corridor scenes. Inflation was also beginning to bite very hard at Doctor Who, and without the benefits of modern digital technology, some of the monsters – the giant prawn in "The Invisible Enemy", the weather balloon with phallus in "The Creature from the Pit", and the Mandrels in "Nightmare of Eden" opened the show to justifiable ridicule.
 
Even in the student common room, attention was waning during Doctor Who, and sometimes I remember a tussle over continuing to watch "Happy Days" on ITV or turning over to "Doctor Who". The latter always won, but that there could be a conflict was an indication that even the core audience was becoming alienated. I rather liked seeing a bit of "Happy Days"; the alternative was to watch "Basil Brush" on BBC1, an exercise in endurance as we groaned at the ""Ha Ha Ha! Boom! Boom!"" jokes. Basil Brush is wonderfully described in Wikipedia as a "fictional anthropomorphic fox", primarily portrayed as a "Glove Puppet".
 
I eventually moved out to student digs, a flat in St David's Hill Exeter, where we had the flat on the first floor, and the ground floor was taken up with fellow students, most of whom were doing theology degrees and looking for ordination in the Church of England. Their standards for house-cleaning, however, were so bad that the one girl down there rapidly moved out. The Young Ones may have been a wild exaggeration, because we all did study as students, but in terms of cleaning, the downstairs flat could well have passed muster as a set. I had to go down with my friend Charles to look it over before Christmas, as he was nominally in charge of both flats. The mantelpiece had a glass with something green and purple growing in it. The kitchen sink was full of dirty grey water and dishes, and the bath was home to a family of slugs.
 
After Exeter, and a year at St Lukes, I had spent a short spell teaching mathematics at Bideford, and then Gloucester. Both schools, and others that I applied for and visited, were redolent of the decay of the early 1980s, with plasterboard cracked, paint peeling. Bideford had a good maths team, however, and I enjoyed my brief stay there. Gloucester was a larger comprehensive, where caning was still enforced by the headmaster. It was a troubled time for me, and I had to witness the beating with a cane on the hand of a boy who had apparently threatened another with a knife.
 
Change was also happening in Doctor Who. John Nathan Turner was bringing a more serious tone to the series, going back to concepts based around hard science supplied by his script editor Christopher Bidmead. Gone were the informal clothes, and in came an outfit. The production values gained a glossier look to them. The swirling patterns were replaced by an exploding star field. Some of the stories from this time were memorable, but despite the emphasis on hard science, there were still moments of silly scripting – the Master presenting an ultimatum to "peoples of the universe" with a cassette tape recorder. But there were some fine stories. It was as if the Baker years had sought a last gasp of the early greatness before the end. The thread that binds the universe together.
 
It was the end, but the moment had been prepared for. The final Baker story saw Tom change into Peter Davison. It was a moody gloom laden story about entropy and decay, about things falling apart, and it more or less mirrored the period of intense depression that I was undergoing at that time. But as Peter Davison took over, so the fragments of my life would gradually reassemble themselves.

Growing up with the Doctor – Part 3

Growing up with the Doctor – Jon Pertwee (1970-1974)

It is probably a truism that one of your most favourite Doctors is the actor who was playing the part of Dr Who during teenage years; certainly this is true for me. I suppose it is the time when you are starting to come to maturity, and your comprehension of drama is changing from child to adult in the process.

A child sees the plain story, but the adult sees how the story is being told; there's a degree of reflection. I can probably illustrate it best with an extreme example, and a digression onto American TV. The TV series Batman ran from 1966 to 1968, and when I saw it through the eyes of a child, I saw menacing super villains, and our superheroes defeating them, exciting cliff-hangers; I saw an adventure series. When I watched it years later, I noticed it very much as pop art camp comedy.

But by the time I was thirteen, I was far more aware of how the story was told. The Pertwee Doctor was down to earth as well, injecting a note of realism into the series not present in many Troughton stories. Krotons on the Planet Gond were a distant threat. Plastic shop window dummies coming to life and breaking out of shops were a threat so close that I never went past a shop window display without feeling the shadow of those images. I also visited Madame Toussaud's in England, another spooky location from "Spearhead from Space".

These were exciting years for science. Harold Wilson had been talking mostly technobabble about "the white heat of the technological revolution", but his finger was definitely on the pulse of the nation. Science was cool. The moon landings, which began in 1969, continued throughout the Pertwee era on Dr Who until 1972, and cheerfully stole from "2001: A Space Odyssey"; the BBC played the same thunderous opening notes from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" used in that film for shots of the Apollo rockets heading into space.

"The Sky at Night" with Patrick Moore rocketed  in popularity, if you'll forgive the pun, and "Tomorrow's World" was also compulsory viewing, as was The Burke Special (1972–1976). The end of Pertwee's era would also see ITV's show "Don't Ask Me" with Magnus Pyke. Science shows were popular and prime time viewing.

Hard forms of science fiction were also in drama with Doomwatch and Moonbase 3, and for children, Timeslip explored the ethics of technology, with subjects such as cloning, longevity, global warming and human experimentation.

And books also reflected this trend, popular book on "Extraterrestrial Civilisations" and "The Black Hole", as well as publishers putting out UK paperback versions of Isaac Asimov's many popular essays on science and scientific history.

At school, I discovered that aside from an ability with mathematics, I was also quite good with science subjects like physics and chemistry. The Doctor-Scientist was very much my Doctor, and the show reflected concerns about environment, social justice, pollution, waste, war and peace.

 Just look at a list - The Silurians (race harmony), the Mind of Evil (prison reform), Day of the Daleks (enemy occupation), Curse of Peladon (the Common Market), The Green Death (pollution), Monster of Peladon (fair deals for workers) - all mirroring in one form or another, contemporary concerns. Pertwee was above all a very moral Doctor, bringing resolution to conflicts, and teaching others about the right thing to do. Here is a speech from "Planet of the Daleks" which typifies this Doctor:

The Doctor: Throughout history, you Thals have always been known as one of the most peace-loving races in the galaxy.
Taron: I hope we always will be.
The Doctor: Yes, that's what I mean. When you get back to Skaro, you'll all be national heroes. Everybody'll want to hear about your adventures.
Taron: Of course.
The Doctor: So be careful how you tell that story, will you? Don't glamourise it. Don't make war sound like an exciting and thrilling game.
Taron: [smiles] I understand.
The Doctor: Tell them about the members of your mission that will not be returning. Like Maro, Vaber and Marat. Tell them about the fear. Otherwise your people might relish the idea of war. We don't want that.

I did take time out from science to have my first real girlfriend, Julie Pallot, and a world away from Dr Who, where David Cassidy appeared on Top of the Pops, and Donny Osmond sung "Puppy Love". I still found time to watch the last episode of "The Three Doctors" at her mother's flat, though. It's very hard to keep away from Dr Who.

But all too soon, much as my love affair faded away, the Pertwee era was also coming to a close. Jo Grant left, and soon it was time for Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier to watch while Pertwee's Doctor   collapsed dying and changed into the Tom Baker one.

The moon landings had ceased. And the glory days of popular science would wane. The technological heat had been extinguished with the three day week, nuclear power was seen not as cheap energy, but as a radioactive menace, and the great hope of C.P. Snow that science and government would go forward side by side was ending.

Growing Up with the Doctor – Part 2 (1966-1969)

While the Hartnell era is somewhat fuzzy in my memory, my memory of the Troughton era is much stronger indeed. This is often called "The Monster" time, and with good reason. The historical stories were phased out, and I can remember little of the "Highlanders".
 
In its place, we had monsters, usually revealed in a cliff hanger moment. These were the scary moments clearly designed to make small children suddenly shudder in fright. The Moonbase, when the Doctor goes round the medical lab, and asks if the crew have checked the beds. Just as he comes to one bed, the Cyberman whips off the sheet and stands up. It's sudden, and it was (to a young boy) quite unexpected.
 
It is astonishing how often the monster was kept under wraps for one whole episode, suddenly appearing just right at the end, but that writing, keeping the monster in the shadows, also made the reveal more effective. It couldn't happen easily nowadays, but back then, the main source of information for the Doctor and television in general was "The Radio Times". A few cryptic remarks, "The Doctor faces an old foe" was as much of a spoiler as you got!
 
It was the "jump out" at you aspect of Doctor Who which made it so compelling. Again, in Tomb of the Cybermen, at one cliff-hanger, a Cyberman suddenly swings out, and a weapon is fired. Probably adults could see that was going to happen, and when I look at these scenes now, they seem much slower than I remember them, but I am looking with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, it was not "behind the sofa", but it was perhaps, hide behind hands, peering out to see what was about to happen. That moment which made you shudder briefly.
 
And there were other scary moments. I have vivid memories of the often maligned "Underwater Menace", with the fish people – they swim convincingly on wires when seen in grainy 425 line television. Polly is strapped down. They are going to operate. She is going to be surgically altered to become a fish person. And a needle appears in the hand of the medical scientist. Cut to a shot of a fish person, then back as Polly screams, struggling. You don't get cliff-hangers better designed to scare children than that!  And it remains a vivid memory, and I do wonder if my dislike of needles and injections dates from that early visceral image!
 
I used to have lots of nightmares, with various monsters invading my sleeping hours, though probably my avid reading of a cache of my father's old Horror Comic Books did not help either. I was never that worried about the nightmares, because the Doctor was always there. It was very much as G.K. Chesterton said – the dragons were already in children's nightmares, but the fairy tales introduced St George to slay the dragon. Although my nightmares were peopled with Daleks, Cybermen, Vampires, and Zombies! And I didn't have St George, but the Doctor in his trusty Tardis.
 
Another maligned story was the Krotons. I rather liked the Krotons, although a lot of criticism has been given to this story in later years. For a child, however, it was a great story, Troughton delivering a wonderful performance, and the crystalline Krotons very different, and speaking in a South African accent. Of course, as a child, I did not notice that; I thought they had Jersey accents, which are quite similar in some respects! A monster that spoke in a local accent – how cool was that?
 
Monsters abounded, and they were not for the most part, generic monsters, but had their own distinctive traits. The Daleks, of course, returned with their electronic voices - "Exterminate!" Then the Cybermen returned, their strange buzzing voices, "You will be like us". And the Ice Warriors, semi-reptilian, given a wonderful start with Bernard Bresslaw from the Carry On Films, giving a hissing performance that suggested an alien trying to breath our atmosphere, and full of menace. I've always considered him a hugely underrated actor. The Yeti came, on the hillside in the Tibetan mountainside – really Wales, and the sibilant voice of the very ancient and possessed Buddhist Abbot, moving Yeti like chess pieces on a board. Around that time, there was an mild influenza epidemic, and our classes at school were decimated, so for about four to five weeks, we 'd have lessons where we did not work, but just played chess. And here were chess Yeti pieces on a board; the mundane become sinister.
 
And the beginning of the Mind Robber, with its white void, and strangeness, still sticks in the memory; I had no idea it was an addition at the start of a story, occasioned by the script editor, after another story had run short.
 
But the monsters were at their best down to earth – the Yeti in the Underground, with the glowing pulsating web, and when we went to visit relatives in London, and travelled by London Underground, it seemed that the monsters could be very close indeed, just luring in the shadows. Likewise, the iconic image of Cybermen walking down the steps outside St Paul's Cathedral grounded the story, and made it more terrifying. I didn't visit other planets, but I did go on tube trains in London, and visit St Paul's Cathedral. The monsters could be just round the next corner, or under the manhole cover.
 
And through it all, there were the companions and Doctor. I remember especially the last companion; Zoë was a clever as the Doctor, and definitely short, petite, and attractive to an eleven year old boy. And Jamie, of course, seemed to have been there forever; the perfect foil to ask the Doctor questions, and do any fighting.
 
One remembers some stories, and not others. The Moonbase, the Tomb of the Cybermen, the Wheel in Space, the Invasion – all stick in the mind, as do the Ice Warriors and the Seeds of Doom. The Yeti are memorable, and I have fond memories of the Quarks, and the ending of Enemy of the World. The novelisation annoyed me, because it told the ending in a different way to how I visualised it, Salamander falling through the vortex. I'm pleased to see from clips of the newly discovered episodes that my memory was right, and it still looks surprisingly good as an effect.
 
The War Games went on for ages and ages, but never seemed boring. At first, it looked like a historical, but suddenly General Smythe with his hypnotic glasses, and console hidden behind a panel made it mysterious and compelling; and I loved the idea of the different time zones. In my memory, a Roman army was heading towards the crew, and here memory misleads me, as it is one man with a chariot and a rather paltry few soldiers tagging alongside in the real version.
 
While I enjoyed watching Doctor Who, the Troughton Doctor never had the effect that the Pertwee one would have on my intellectual development. The series drifted between fantasy and science fiction, and the Doctor was a hero, but he was not yet the scientist-hero.
 
At school, we also had very limited experience of science. Most lessons were English, French, History and Mathematics, and when our fifth year teacher, Anton Dupoy, introduced a few very basic scientific experiments, it had the feeling of something new, but unfortunately something rather on the fringe of the school curriculum.
 
But as the Troughton era drew to a close, the first men were landing on the moon. I remember coming down in the morning, awakened by my father, to watch the grainy, shadowy image of Neil Armstrong stepping forth onto an alien world. I amassed a scrap book, cutting out with scissors and pasting in all the press cuttings I could find. The graphic work by artists in those days is something that has sadly been a lost and dying art, but it was very engaging; I still have a vivid picture of the jagged line connecting earth with the moon, with the caption, "President Nixon's historic telephone call from the White House to the Lunar Surface".
 
The age of science was just around the corner, beckoning, but I still felt a sense of sadness as Patrick Troughton's Doctor whirled around and faded away from our television screens.

Growing up with the Doctor: Part 1

When I was six, I was entranced by a new series for children on the BBC. I'd watch the endless interminable football scores, read out line by line, and then a camera would swing round, the jaunty music would start, and it was the end of Grandstand. And in a few minutes, I would be watching Doctor Who.

My memories of the earliest Dr Who episodes are rather hazy, as I suspect would be the case for many 6 year olds. Of the first story, I remember very little, but I had an Armada paperback which covered the story. I learned to read by the time I was seven, and read avidly. Struck down with mumps for what seemed like most of a school term, there was little else to do, and I enjoyed reading Malcolm Saville, and my latest book on Dr Who.

I remember the opening scenes, the crash on foggy Barnes Common, the mysterious Doctor with his everlasting matches, his granddaughter Susan, and Ian and Barbara, and their first exciting adventure on the planet Skaro, with the Daleks. It was called "Dr Who: An Exciting Adventure in Time and Space", written by David Whitaker, and I still have the battered old paperback, price, if I remember right, two shillings and six pence. I liked the story, but I never quite liked the first person narration. I wanted to be the Doctor, not Ian Chesterton.

Of course, none of that happened! The story starts in Coal Hill school, and the teachers go to where Susan lives, which turns out to be a junk yard, and they are whisked away by the Doctor, with Susan, to the Stone Age, where a tribe has lost the secret of fire. The Daleks don't pop up until the next story.

The mind plays tricks, and in the absence of modern DVDs, perception is shaped by how one reads the stories and recaptures the moment. It was, as John Nathan-Turner said, a case of "the memory cheats". But the memory did more than that; it substituted a false memory from the paperback in place of the original narrative. But the paperback was my way of recalling the story, of how I could remember it, and I read it many times.

The same happened, to a lesser extent with a hardback book by Bill Strutton that I borrowed with enthusiasm from the library - "Dr Who and the Zarbi", with the thrilling end, in a crescendo of pulsating rotating light from the creature known as the animus. It never happened with such good special effects in the TV version!

The third book I had was the Dr Who and the Crusaders, also written by Whitaker, but of the original story I remembered nothing; it was a cracking good story, and I enjoyed it very much, but the historical stories I remembered very little about. Even now, re-reading it, it is a superb piece of writing.

I've changed my mind on the historical stories. The adult can enjoy levels of story and drama that the child cannot, and watching "The Aztecs" on DVD brought it home how excellent the historicals could be. For a six or seven year old, I was very much the "whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school" as Shakespeare put it, except that I did enjoy school. I had a satchel though, for my books. I wonder when they went out of fashion and were replaced with today's back-packs?

Most of my memories were Daleks, of course. An enduing image is Dalek doors, sliding up and down, and Daleks coming through. And I remember the playground at school. For a while, cowboys and Indians were put away, and we were Daleks and humans. To be a Dalek was easy. It was exactly as described in the later book "The Making of Doctor Who" by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. You held one arm with the elbow against your left side, the other extended fully - the weapon arm and the sucker arm. And you moved in a jerky fashion, and spoke in the clipped staccato tones of the Dalek - "Exterminate". To be the Doctor was just as easy. You grasped the lapels of your school blazer, and said "Hmm. Hmm."! You wanted to be the Dalek or the Doctor. Not Ian Chesterton, teacher, I'm afraid. In fact, while the teachers Ian and Barbara were supposed to be typical teachers, they were nothing like the ones we had, men who often smoked pipes in those days, and were bald and old ex-army types. The female teachers at my first school seemed ancient, and were more like Peggy Mount in "George and the Dragon". Later teachers were sweet old dears, on the verge of retirement, so must have been late 50s. There was no one like Barbara.

I do remember some of the more memorable other monsters. I have no memory of the Sensorites, but the Mechanoids I remembered, even though they scarcely appeared in more than one episode. And the Web planet seemed to go on for a long time, the Zarbi trilling, the Menoptra, and the Venom Bugs of Vortis; that was full of strangeness and wonder. I had, of course, little idea of what the story was about at the time.

And then there were the Daleks at the Cinema, on the big screen, "in colour". People forget now how TV was a grainy 425 line black and white box, which took time to come on when turned on, as the valves warmed up. Turn it off, and it would diminish to a small white dot, which would take ages to vanish. Against this background there was Dr Who and the Daleks at the cinema - in colour. It is worth remembering that not all cinema films were colour. I saw "Carry on Cabby" and it was black and white.

I liked Roy Castle as Ian, but I was rather disappointed at the Doctor, or Dr Who, as he was here, as he did not look at all like the Doctor as I knew him from the TV show. And the story as well seemed to be a familiar one, the same one as my well loved and much thumbed paperback told, of the Daleks on Skaro; I had expected something different, a new story to be told. But it was a fun story, and the Susan in the story was much closer to my own age of 8- Roberta Tovey, who played her, was 10. I adored her. I was in love.

When I was 11, I went with my parents and sister on a cruise ship on the Mediterranean, and we made friends with a girl with blond hair of the same age as us, and her name was also Susan. She was, in an Adrian Mole kind of way, my first girlfriend, and part of the attraction was undeniably that her name was Susan, a name I had on my list of favourite names from Dr Who!

I never saw the second Dalek film until years later on TV, and I actually enjoyed it more than the first. It has a faster pace, and like the Yeti in Tooting Bec, a Dalek in what looks like almost contemporary London has a lot more impact. And of course Bernard Cribbins is wonderful, and virtually steals the show from Peter Cushing - except of course, when Philip Madoc, show stealer extraordinaire, pops up for a few scenes as a villain! It was wonderful to see, because when first shown on TV, there were no Videos or DVDs, no way to see the past TV episodes; this was as close as it got.

I had Dalek toys, of course. A plastic Dalek in black, which I still have, but minus (as happens) all the sucker arm, gun and eye stick. And the small Dalek roll-a-kins, with a ball bearing to move, are long gone. Once they disintegrated, the ball bearings went into my marble collection. They were more valuable in the strange world of marble games at school, as well.

And then there were the Cybermen, strange almost human beings, with their inhuman sing-song voices, and vast size. Monsters in Doctor who, with the notable exception of the Daleks and one or two others, are usually men in monster outfits. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. The Cybermen invading the polar base worked for me. Part of that was probably the cracking good story, full of suspense, and also they are invading in the near future - 1983. Well, it was the near future back in 1966 when the serial first aired.

And of course, Dr Who also adorned the pages of TV Comic, where he had his two grand children , John and Gillian. I hated those grandchildren - they seemed so much like comic strip versions of the children you often found in films and TV of that time, who often couldn't act except in a very stilted British way, and who didn't seem like other children - my friends - at all. But the adventures were fun.

Meanwhile another comic, TV Century 21, as well as lots of Gerry Anderson comic strips - Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, and Stingray etc - also had "The Daleks" on its back page. Here the Daleks were the heroes, and I remember being fascinated by the dome shaped Emperor Dalek. The TV versions, with an honourable exception in Remembrance of the Daleks, never came quite as close. And I liked "Zeg", the Red Dalek. On the TV show, Daleks never had names.

I only ever had one Hartnell Dr Who Annual, the first one. I could probably tell you the plots of the stories as I read and re-read it so many times. These were the days before the Target novelisations, so you read what you could on Dr Who, which was very little. The uncredited writer was of course David Whitaker, and unlike some later Annuals, his prose was excellent, and he could tell a story well. The rest of the time - back to Enid Blyton's Famous Five, or the science fiction of Captain W.E. Johns, who wrote space adventures as well as Biggles. Not a lot of people know that!

And suddenly the Doctor fell down, and changed. Once moment, he was William Hartnell, and the next, this strange much younger character. People say that sometimes they took time to get used to the change, but as a 9 year old, I just took it in my stride. After all, the Daleks were back again, and within a few episodes, I was used to the Patrick Troughton incarnation of the Doctor, and William Hartnell had been forgotten. Such is the fickle loyalty of youth.

But the image of Hartnell, and the power of his presence remained with me as a firm memory. And he would pop up in all kinds of unexpected films. A showing (I didn't see it at the cinema) on TV of "Carry in Sergeant", and there was William Hartnell, giving a brilliant performance, again as a Sergeant in "Private's Progress", and a somewhat younger Hartnell in the excellent "Murder in Reverse". And of course, Hartnell in chain mail, as Sergeant for the Army of the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, leading the attack on America with Peter Sellers in "The Mouse that Roared"

Now there is a new drama next Thursday, by Mark Gatiss, called "An Adventure in Time and Space" about the people involved in the origins of Dr Who, Verity Lambert, Sidney Newman, Waris Hussein, Jacqueline Hill, William Russell, Carole Ann Ford and of course William Hartnell. It looks like being a very well written drama, and also a compelling walk back down memory lane.