Nostalgic Saturdays
It’s come to my attention that nostalgia is pretty much a
prerequisite of being a Doctor Who fan. I’m sure this is hardly a great
surprise to any of the members of PS, as almost everyone seems to have
posted something about their nostalgic memories of watching the show as a
kid. However, it’s an interesting subject worth exploring, in a similar
vein to my post on the ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ thread (or SOD, as we
like to call it) from a couple of months ago.
It’s heart warming to realise that even younger fans of the show have
their own nostalgic memories of when they first watched Doctor Who, even
if those memories aren’t of watching the series on its original
transmission. I can easily relate to this, as every time I watch Death To
The Daleks, Day Of The Daleks or Revenge Of The Cybermen, it instantly
reminds me of my middle teenage years when I would visit my friend’s house
after school to watch his spangly new copies of these stories fresh from
BBC Video. Even hearing the fanfare BBC Video jingle now gives me goose
bumps. This scenario also proves how powerful nostalgia is to us Doctor
Who fans, as we’ll gladly sit down now and watch that ‘first story’ again
just to wallow in nostalgia, even if it happens to be a generally slated
story such as Time Flight or The Twin Dilemma. How many of you have voted
for a story in the PS polls or included it in your 40th Anniversary top
ten simply because it’s one of the first stories you watched? I know I
have.
Of course, watching your ‘first’ Who story again now doesn’t just remind
you of when you saw it the first time round, it also provokes strong
memories of your life during that particular period. And it’s amazing what
you can remember when you really get into a nostalgic fame of mind. The
book that I’ve written on the subject of growing up with Doctor Who came
about mainly due to some heavily nostalgic recollections I had a couple of
years ago, and once I got into it, I started to remember all sorts of
stuff that had lain forgotten in my mind for years. Not only was it a
pleasure to remember growing up watching Doctor Who, it’s also been an
extremely enjoyable experience simply to jump into my own virtual TARDIS
and travel back to a time when life was a lot simpler and the
responsibilities of adulthood were years ahead of me, and to that end I’d
like to share with you a small section of the book which describes a
typical Saturday for me in the late 1970’s.
This is the bit where your screen (or printed page) should start to ripple
and blur, accompanied by generous swathes of stock BBC harp music, but I
haven’t quite figured out how to do that bit yet!
Nowadays I crave every extra second that I can spend in bed on a Saturday
morning, so it’s hard to believe that I used to get up at around 6.30am
when I was five or six years old. I would jump of bed and slip on my
dressing gown and slippers (or ‘sippots’ as I used to call them – answers
on a postcard, please). I can still remember my dressing gown to this day
- a classy number in brown felt-like material with orange and brown
candy-stripe piping – but cannot recall the appearance of the slippers,
although from the description of my dressing gown it’s probably just as
well. I’d then hurry down stairs to the kitchen and throw a couple of
Weetabix and some milk into a bowl and rush into the living room, switch
on the telly, and proceed to gobble down my breakfast. As it wasn’t even 7
o’clock in the morning, there was never a huge choice of quality viewing
to be had from the 3 channels that were around at the time, but for some
reason I always seemed to end up settling with BBC2 which at that time of
the morning was showing programmes from the Open University. These
programmes used to fascinate me intensely, even though I didn’t have a
clue what they were about, but I marvelled at the strange diagrams and
equations that appeared on the screen. Even more alarming were the
presenters themselves, who more often than not sported flared trousers and
a tank top of some sort, and wore thick rimmed black glasses and
Crusoesque beards. As for the male presenters, well, they were even worse.
I’m not sure how long I used to sit and stare at these strange images, but
I must assume it was an hour or so until the fabulous Swap Shop started at
around 9am on BBC1.
The format of Saturday morning epics such as Swap Shop have changed little
over the years. It seems that only the presenters’ dress sense and
hairstyles have been updated, though not always for the better. In Swap
Shop we had Noel Edmunds, Keith Chegwin and John Craven prancing across
the screen in glorious Technicolor whilst interviewing guests, playing
games or showing cartoons, but I always longed for the section of the show
where you could phone up and swap items with other callers. I always hoped
that someone would offer tons of Lego, for which I would have been only
too happy to relinquish any of my other toys or games. This never
happened, of course, as I couldn’t have phoned up the show as we had a
phone but the line wasn’t connected. As I became bored with Swap Shop (I
could never watch it all the way to the end for some reason), I suppose I
must have got washed and dressed, but now my memory becomes slightly fuzzy
as I’m not sure what happened after that. I probably retreated to my
bedroom and got the Lego out of the cupboard. The next thing I can clearly
recall doing during the day on a Saturday is going shopping with my mum
and my sister Paula to the Arndale Shopping Centre in Wandsworth, and I
can remember the visual experience rather well. The Arndale Centre was, at
the time, a testament to 1970’s design with brown and orange tiled floors
and swathes of concrete elsewhere. I always detested going shopping; it
was one of my most hated experiences as a child, and my father not being
around forced me into having to traipse round after my mum and my sister.
If I take a typical Saturday to be in 1978 for example, it would make me
at least 6 years old and Paula at least nine-and-a-half. Thus, she was at
possibly the worst age as far as being ‘girly’ is concerned. She was
rather well developed for her age, and I can recall the seemingly endless
hours that were spent wandering round Marks & Spencer or BHS looking for
various items of underwear that she was growing out of faster than my mum
could buy replacements.
This of course, necessitated my being dragged through acres of lingerie
and other assorted items of female underwear which frightened the hell out
of me at the time (some things don’t change), and as a result of my
embarrassment it nearly always resulted in me detaching myself from my
family at the earliest opportunity and running to the relative safety of
the boys wear department. When I say safety, I actually mean that the
surroundings were now at least familiar to me, and I felt relaxed in as
much as if any other boy of a similar age saw me I wouldn’t want the
ground to open and swallow me up. As I was not very tall at the time, it
was fairly easy for me to conceal myself within the clothes racks, and
this gave me valuable time to try to regain my dignity. After a few
minutes, I would peep out from between a couple of pairs of brown corduroy
trousers (this was 1978, after all) and see the familiar sight of my
mother and my sister rushing around the shop trying to locate me with
either a shop assistant or a security guard. As this was by now a familiar
and predictable pattern of events for them, I was soon found and dragged
out by the ear from my hiding place.
This repeated sequence of events was obviously of great annoyance to my
mum – and most probably to Paula – but it seemed necessary for me to show
my defiance after being made to suffer such embarrassment. I can
understand now why a few years earlier my mum had put me in child reigns
whilst shopping to stop me escaping (these were uncivilised times), but I
was now too old for these medieval instruments of torture and so now
nothing short of handcuffs would prevent me from fleeing to freedom.
However, my mum being my mum always knew that I hated the Arndale Centre
ritual, and so I was always given a treat to appease my misery. This
usually consisted of a small item of Lego being purchased from WH Smith –
usually a car or a truck of some sort – which came to the princely sum of
around 60p (I had expensive taste in those days), and a milk shake from
the café that we passed on the way back to the multi-storey car park. For
some reason I always had strawberry flavour (does this prompt any memories
for anyone of Alberto the frog from Bod?), and I can recall sitting on the
green-painted cast iron garden furniture (not that we were either in a
garden or outside) and gazing in amazement at the spray from the nearby
water fountain falling onto the brightly coloured mushroom-shaped lights
that were below the surface of the pool underneath the fountain. As I
recall this I can almost hear the droning piped music ringing through my
ears, accompanied by the sound of the water fountain (which I’m sure made
me rush to the gents every time) as if it were yesterday. Another image
that sticks in my mind from these tortuous trips to the Arndale Centre was
the miserable looking cleaners strolling round the place with those huge
v-shaped mop-come-broom affairs, gathering all the debris on the floor
left by the surrounding shoppers. I used to stare at these contraptions
with a strange fascination, always thinking that they looked like dead
pterodactyls being pushed around by the legs, eating up all the dust and
litter as they went. These thoughts turned to revulsion years later when I
learnt that my darling sister had apparently picked up a child’s dummy one
day from amongst the rubbish on the floor and stuffed it in my mouth……
When we eventually arrived home, I would immediately delve into the bags
of shopping until I retrieved my small box of Lego, and proceed to open
the box and deposit the contents on the dining room table (this was years
before they introduced the transparent plastic bags to contain the pieces
within the boxes). I would take one look at the instructions and then
dispose of them, preferring instead to look at the picture on the front of
the box for a minute and then put the toy together from memory. By this
time I had forgotten all about my harrowing experiences at the Arndale,
and was as happy as a sand boy playing with my new Lego vehicle, the
patterns on our garish 1970’s carpet serving as roads along which I could
push it. Unfortunately I always seemed to be in the way of my mum who
constantly tripped over me in her attempts to prepare the tea for us, thus
reducing me back to my former status as public enemy number one. This
further provocation on my part usually resulted in a swift verbal attack
or a ‘clip round the ear’, which I reacted to by bursting into tears and
scurrying to the nearest corner of the room to hide (bless!). I often
sought sanctuary in my sister at these times, even if she did try to
poison me with contaminated toddler’s aids, and she was of immense comfort
and support to me as a child. I do, however, find it hard to believe that
I can still retain these fond memories, as I recall further incidents such
as her taking me to the deep end at Putney swimming baths before I could
swim and then letting go of me, or encouraging me to eat weeds from the
garden whilst assuring me that it was in fact rhubarb. The one that makes
me wince most of all is the oft-recounted story of her changing my nappy
with a safety pin when she was only three-and-a-half years old….
Let’s now come to the point of all this reminiscing, and that is the
Saturday evening television line-up on BBC1 at the time. As we came in
from shopping on a Saturday it was usually about 4.30 or so in the
afternoon, and Grandstand was entering it’s last half hour or so, and that
meant that the football results were on. Now I not only hated Grandstand
(apart from the music, of course – how smashingly nostalgic it is) but
sport in general, and especially football. I would sit in front of the
television staring at the screen and listening to Len Martin’s voice
droning on about Partick Thistle losing 2-0 to Motherwell, and longing for
the familiar music to fade in and the credits to roll. We still had a
black and white television set in those days (as explained later on in
another chapter), and I can still see in my mind’s eye the daylight from
the balcony doors reflecting onto the screen and obliterating the
transmitted images. The television was high on a shelf and I was used to
sitting on the floor whilst watching it. I mention the balcony as our
second floor maisonette had a balcony off the living room, and I would
then jump up and draw the curtains so I could see the screen properly.
The following three hours or so were spent watching firstly the news
(though not really understanding or paying attention to it), having our
tea, and then watching either Basil Brush or The Muppets, and then of
course it would be time for Doctor Who to burst onto the screen. I mention
later on the fact that that monochrome television pictures always seemed
much creepier to me as a child than colour ones, and Doctor Who was no
exception, especially as the programme scared me anyway. The combination
of the tunnel title sequence and the howling theme tune used to frighten
me no end, even before the episode had begun, and it wasn’t helped by the
fact that my sister used to tell me that Tom Baker lived in the black hole
that appeared in the title sequence (thanks again, Paula), which really
made me feel at ease. I can’t honestly say that I recall any specific
stories or even moments from Doctor Who from this point in time, nor do I
remember if I understood what was going on within the stories or whether I
realised that a story was made up of more than one episode. I also can’t
remember if I had thought earnestly about last Saturday’s episode during
the six days that had followed, as apparently happened during the 1960’s
when kids would be seen running around the school playground pretending to
be Daleks. But what I do remember is that I was captivated by the show,
the larger-than-life character that was Tom Baker, and the fact that it
was compelling viewing that I wouldn’t miss if I could help it. Following
Doctor Who was usually The Generation Game and later on The Two Ronnies,
and these were a treat for my sister and I to watch before we went to bed.
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