Growing Up With The Doctor – Looking Back

Well, after almost three months of daily columns, I’ve finally reached The Last Post, as it were. It is the end, but the moment has been prepared for in the form of this, a final look back at my experiences of Growing Up With The Doctor.

In the day-to-day life of a Doctor Who fan, it’s sometimes very easy to see your love of the series become overriding and all-encompassing. It’s true that I think about Doctor Who every day, whether it be a story I’m currently watching, or an ongoing discussion with someone on PS, and most recently for me, the almost constant tweaking and refining of these articles ready for posting. But of course, Doctor Who is, at the end of the day, just a quirky little television series which for all intents and purposes ended its run on mainstream television 15 years ago. It doesn’t really rule our lives, nor should it, but as much as we try to be sensible and put its relevance into perspective, but being a Doctor Who fan really does affect our lives in an amazing number of ways.

Without Doctor Who, I wouldn’t have been fortunate enough to have had Andrew Clancy as my best friend for the last 17 years or so, nor would I have been lucky enough to stay with his family for 6 months when I was forced to vacate my house share at the time. If it wasn’t for my friendship with Andrew and his family, I’d never have been on holiday to the US three times and played in the New Orleans Jazz Festival two years running. I may never have learnt to play the trumpet properly and go on to play in various jazz bands on and off for over 10 years - in fact I could write pages of detail about all the positive outcomes over the years of knowing Andrew and his family. If I wasn’t a Doctor Who fan, I’d never have found Planet Skaro and subsequently made lots of new friends. Doctor Who also inspired me to write a book of sorts, a book which eventually saw the light of day (albeit in a very truncated form) as the very posts that you’ve been reading and hopefully enjoying over the last 12 weeks. This in turn opened up the world of writing to me and inspired me to write lots of things on various subjects and get so much enjoyment out of it all. Of course, many seemingly insignificant things which occur in our lives can have major influences on future events, but for me, Doctor Who really has shaped my life in so many ways that it’s impossible not to hold it in the highest regard, even if it did produce abominations like The Space Pirates, Timelash, and, Lord help us, The Tamaras Crisis.

If there’s one overriding quality of Doctor Who fans, it’s our infinite capacity for nostalgia. This direct link stems from childhood of course, as for most of us it was at this point in our lives that we discovered the delights of the series. The fact that the show has been around for over 40 years in one capacity or another has a major influence on our nostalgia, and that in turn means that generations of us have gone through the cycle, whether starting in the early 60’s or the 21^st century. I’m a great lover of all things nostalgic, and I’m not sure if Doctor Who is directly responsible for this, but there’s no doubt that the process of writing Growing Up With The Doctor has been a hugely enjoyable experience. I think the term ‘wallowing in nostalgia’ sums it up nicely, especially as these posts have focussed more on my own experiences with the show rather than how the show developed with me, as was the case with the original manuscript.

After a few years of neglect in the late 1990’s, Doctor Who is now enjoying quite a renaissance in my life. I’m regularly watching videos and DVD’s, to the point now where I’m now hungry for more and thus slowly starting to build up my threadbare collection and obtain all the episodes in one format or another (I can’t say I’ve ever been interested in the Big Finish audio dramas, but this is largely to do with cost). Almost a year ago I discovered Planet Skaro and that, of course, has been pivotal in reinvigorating my interest in the series. As for the future, I’m looking forward to the New Series, though I’m expecting something completely different to what we’ve been used to in the past. My other half has finally come to terms with the fact that Doctor Who isn’t going away and will always be part of my life, as much as he may have no interest in it himself.

I’ve been trying to think of a suitable image to include with this final post (it’s been difficult enough to sustain this over the three-month run, I can tell you – especially when the subject matter has covered the likes of 1970’s video recorders and silly audio stories with no visual references), but I couldn’t really come up with anything truly inspiring. To that end, I’ve rather indulgently decided to include the one remaining screen shot from The Tamaras Crisis which I couldn’t find a suitable place for earlier on. In a way I suppose it is rather fitting, as building a Police Box and using it in our own production was perhaps the absolute peak in the culmination of years of growing up with the series, my friendship with Andrew and our overwhelming passion for all things Who. And besides, it does look bloody good!

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for long enough now – almost three months in fact – so I’ll sign off for the moment, but I can’t do that without acknowledging a couple of people, namely Lissa for hosting all this nonsense in the first place and putting up with my incompetence with all things technical in the IT department, but most of all my best mate Andrew and various members of his family for helping me with various anecdotes, photographs and most of all for correcting my fuddled brain when my memory failed me, something which occurred with alarming regularity.

I think I’m probably more a Leo Sayer than a Leo Tolstoy (and even that’s being generous) and thus I accept that this hasn’t exactly been a literary prize-winning effort, but it’s been hugely enjoyable to write. If it’s been only slightly enjoyable to read then it was worth every strike of the keyboard.*