“There’s got to be monsters."

           Liking Doctor Who is normal now. Isn’t that weird? Since 2005, it’s socially acceptable to admit to liking the show and even to discuss it in public. I can wear my “Calm Down And Don’t Blink” t-shirt without fear. It’s probably a bad idea to make a habit of loudly cataloguing one’s DAPOL collection as a form of polite dinner conversation – not everything has changed – but being a Doctor Who fan is no longer as socially catastrophic as joining the BNP.

            In 2001, this sea-change had yet to happen. There were no rumblings from Cardiff. We were on our own. This was when I met my wife. She wasn’t my wife then. That would have been odd. She was this fantastic, wonderful woman who was, for some reason, allowing me to orbit her. I certainly didn’t want anything to ruin it.

            We’ve all done it at some point, I expect. Nervously ushering a loved one in the direction of some classic eps in the hope they will abandon the Not-we and throw in their lot with the Time Lord. It’s certainly better than adopting the missionary position: “No, honestly, it’s really good and the sets don’t really wobble, and some bits are really scary and Douglas Adams wrote for it once...” That never works. So, in 2001, I began the process of indoctrinating my wife-to-be.

            I’d had practice. Not with a girlfriend, but the principle was the same. I met Simon at university and we discovered a number of shared interests, including science fiction. He was a Blake’s 7 fan; I was a Doctor Who fan. We agreed to exchange. He showed me The Way Back and Pressure Point and The Harvest of Kairos; I showed him Spearhead From Space and The Brain of Morbius and Shada.

            The conversion worked (both ways). A few years later, Simon and I ended up sharing a London flat – just me, him and my video collection, now bursting at the seams thanks to UK Gold. Many an evening ended up with me selecting a four-parter for us to watch. Some happy Doctor Who memories there – Simon saying how good it would be if the Ice Warriors weren’t the villains of The Curse of Peladon; Simon’s disdain for The Greatest Show In The Galaxy; most of all, the moment when, shortly after midnight, episode five of The War Games came to a halt and Simon turned to me and said, “Go on, put the other tape on!”

            Perhaps I should have realised that this was different. After all, Simon was already a sci-fi fan. It’s no great leap to go from Blake’s Seven to Doctor Who. This time, I would be working from scratch. She’d agreed to watch one. I had to choose carefully.

            Pyramids of Mars. Atmospheric opening. TARDIS scene. A-list Doctor-companion team. Pseudo-historical lusciousness. Scary Mummies. Great first cliffhanger. I’d always thought it was a perfect story to be someone’s first time. In went the video and we snuggled up to watch as Ron Grainer pumped through the room.

            She fell asleep. Part way through episode 2, I realised I was watching by myself. She was bored. Undaunted, I upped my game for the second onslaught. City of Death. Probably the best story ever. Another A-list team. Funny, imaginative, charming. This time, she didn’t even make it to the first cliffhanger.

            When would you give up? I gave it one last try, inspired by her admission that she’d been under the impression he fought the Daleks every week. Remembrance. Granted, Sylvester McCoy isn’t exactly your go-to when selling the show, but this was the most recent Dalek adventure. Explosions, excitement, Dalek-on-Dalek action. A bit of doomed romance and political commentary to wash it down with.

            Whaddaya know, she liked it. Ben Aaronovitch, you are a hit. Thus we came up with a formula for watching Doctor Who from now on. “There’s got to be monsters,” she insisted. So, there were – she met the Autons, the Haemovores and the Cybermen. She also enjoyed The Five Doctors, although she decided Patrick Troughton was annoying.

            Over-confidence brought me down. One day I discovered that, while I was out, she’d voluntarily polished off the remaining episodes of The Ark In Space, which we’d started the day before. Euphoric, I spun it off into a Season 12 marathon. She was horrified by the sadism in The Sontaran Experiment and couldn’t believe I hadn’t shown her Genesis before. Then we hit Revenge of the Cybermen, a personal favourite of mine. By episode 3, she was in the other room, tidying. I’d lost her. (Not as a fiancée, you understand. Just as a fan.)

            When the series returned in 2005, the goalposts shifted. She enjoyed the first couple of episodes, but it was Father’s Day that blew her away. She sat there with tears streaming down her face and, to my surprise, so did I. Doctor Who had never had this effect on me before. The Parting Of The Ways sealed the deal. Nina liked Doctor Who.

            She still won’t watch the old stuff, mind you. We may describe Doctor Who as a 48-year old programme, but the other viewpoint – that it’s only been on for 7 years, inspired by an old series that ended in 1989 – holds water. After all, I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but find it hard to sit through an old episode of Shatner’s shenanigans. The difference is no less stark.

            Simon, incidentally, got married to a sceptic and also used the Eccleston/Tennant years to turn his wife into a Doctor Who fan, but my own conversion attempt was less successful. My wife was the Craig Owens to my Cyber-wimp. It took a higher power to convince her – and not just her. Now, at school (I’m a teacher) I hear children discussing old Jon Pertwee episodes. They’d never even have heard of Pertwee if they hadn’t seen Tennant and Smith. RTD was trying to convert the entire world at once and he couldn’t have been better at it if he’d had the big plot-device-gate thingy from The End of Time. He remade the nation’s viewing habits in his own image.

            You – Will – Be – Like – Us.

"How long have you been into Doctor Who?”

            “How long have you been into Doctor Who?”

            The question startled me, and I took refuge in imprecision: “Ages.”

            My mumbled response was misunderstood and let to a triumphant retort. “Eight years? Right. Then why do you like it, because Doctor Who’s been shit for the last eight years!”

            It was a rhetorical question and my interrogator had no interest in eliciting an actual response from me, which was good as I didn’t have one ready. I was 13, he was older (probably around 18, but I would have guessed somewhere in his 20s at the time) and I was finding the situation rather intimidating.

            This was a fairly typical meeting of the Cardiff local group of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.

*

            My name is Chris, and this is my blog. I’m going to talk quite a lot about Doctor Who on here, though I may digress from time to time. If you’re reading this, I’m going to hazard that you’re interested in Doctor Who. Unless you know me personally. In which case, thanks for coming and try not to get too bored.

            If, however, you’re not familiar with Doctor Who fandom, you might be surprised to hear such sentiments voiced at a DWAS meeting. Why would a fan say that a whole eight years of Doctor Who was “shit”? An adult (or thereabouts) who was making a special effort to hang out in the YMCA on a Saturday afternoon purely out of affection for this TV show?

            This was 1989 (ish). My fellow fan was condemning all Doctor Who made with Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, something which many newspapers and media commentators have also done. Received wisdom has it that the show was fantastic with Tom Baker, then terrible in the 1980s (like so many other things), then revived in 2005 to be fantastic again. But that doesn’t explain people like me, does it?

            It’s been about 23 years, but I finally feel ready to answer his question.

            “Eight years? Right. Then why do you like it, because Doctor Who’s been shit for the last eight years!”

            “Has it? Really? Everything from Castrovalva onwards? That’s astonishing. And yet you’re still watching it? I have to admit, if I’d enjoyed a programme when I was 10 years old, then throughout my teenage years it was shit, I doubt I’d still be watching it at 18, let alone attending fan club meetings. Might I suggest that actually some part of you must still be enjoying it?

            “Secondly, are you sure everything’s been awful since 1981? Did you really hate Earthshock, Enlightenment, Caves of Androzani, Vengeance on Varos, Remembrance of the Daleks and The Curse of Fenric? Or are you tarring 40 individual stories with the same brush because you don’t like aspects of the production style?

            “Thirdly, let’s put your own beloved eras under the microscope, shall we? For every Tomb of the Cybermen there’s a Wheel in Space; for every Genesis of the Daleks there’s a Destiny of the Daleks; and The Mind of Evil is quickly followed by Colony in Space. I’m not trying to claim that the 80s Doctors were better than their 60s or 70s equivalents – they probably weren’t. But the nature of Doctor Who has always been that it’s patchy. And even if the last 8 years have been patchier than others, that still leaves many patches of greatness.

            “Fourthly, I was five years old in 1981. I knew little of your UNIT Family or Classic Holmesian Double-Acts. I’d never read Doctor Who Magazine and had no idea who Sydney Newman was. I didn’t even know about the Daleks. I started watching this show because I enjoyed Full Circle. After five stories, Tom Baker was replaced by the bloke from All Creatures Great And Small, and this was even more exciting. When they started releasing old episodes on VHS, I started watching them, but this didn’t stop me enjoying the new output.

            “You see, it’s all about context. To you, seasons 19-26 were a disappointment compared with the previous 18 seasons. (Well...maybe the first 16. I reckon you didn’t like 17 or 18 either.) To me, they were something new and exciting I’d discovered. And they still are.”

            Is that too long-winded for an answer? Maybe I’d have been better with “Piss off.” But the fact is, I turned 18 five years later. Then 28 and, before too long, 38. And I can still see good stuff in that era, and every other era. Which is why I watch it, read about it, talk about it, think about it and – finally – write about it.

            In 2012, I will be contributing to fanzines – my first attempt at this has just been published in issue 13 of The Terrible Zodin. I’ve also got a contribution in a book called You And Who, which should be published any day now. So I thought I’d better have a blog too.

            I hope you enjoy what you read. If not, please feel free to read other things.