A Growing Friendship and Our Lives As Doctor Who Fans

Although Andrew and I had been good friends at school, it wasn’t until we’d both left Wimbledon College that our friendship entered ‘best buddy’ territory. We spent nearly all of our spare time together, more often than not at this point in the company of his two brothers, and it was this solid friendship that generated a whole variety of Doctor Who-related activities, as well as our mutual love of Jazz and general socialising.

Both our sets of parents were amazingly tolerant of our friendship, especially as it revolved almost entirely around Doctor Who in one form or another. Having said that there was the odd occasion when tempers would fray, notably by my mum in the aforementioned missing VCR episode, and also by Andrew’s mum due to the sheer amount of time I spent at their house. As families, the Clancys and the Coxes (though my mum hadn’t been a ‘Cox’ since 1981) were fundamentally different. Ours was a broken family in that my mum had been married and divorced twice by this point and it was just her and I living in a small flat, whereas Peter and Linda Clancy had been married since 1970, as they still are today. As a family the Clancys were more in the typical English mould than my own; their culture was generally more formal than I had experienced with my own upbringing in an Anglo-Italian family. Saying that, I very much enjoyed being in their company as a result of their family life; I’m not saying that my own life was unstable because that’s not the case, but being with my best friend’s family was the stable 3-bed semi life that I’d never had.

As I had never had a ‘best friend’ as such before, other than one notable exception a few years beforehand, my mum embraced Andrew and his family as a welcome and positive aspect of my life, to the point where Andrew would also spend time at our flat, particularly at weekends when he would stay overnight. As my interest in Doctor Who grew, my bedroom was transformed from a run-of-the-mill room into a shrine to the series, with nearly every available inch of wall space given over to pictures, posters and other artwork, as can clearly be seen in this photo. Sadly, all of these items have long been disposed of, with the ironic exception of a Nicola Bryant postcard which I still have at home amongst some assorted photographs, the irony being that I’d probably have been more turned on by a Cyberman poster than a photo of Nicola Bryant. The more time we spent together, the more time we devoted to Doctor Who, and we got up to all sorts of activities including watching videos, recording silly home-made audio stories (both serious productions and humorous ad-libbed attempts), recording our own alternative versions of existing story soundtracks, listening to and playing around with the theme tune (often recording our own versions on electronic keyboards), attending conventions, signings and exhibitions, visiting filming locations and even producing our own Fan Video stories.

I’d like to share some memories with you from that happy period of the late Eighties to the mid-Nineties, as this was the time when we were at our peak as both friends and Doctor Who fans. Although most of the things we got up to were fairly random in the order they occurred, I’ll try and group the different activities together for the sake of clarity rather than try to be strictly chronological, starting with our serious attempts at audio stories.

Next Episode: Planet of Ice!