Exciting Adventures in Time and Publishing

I happened across a DVD the other day in Forbidden Planet. It seemed to go rather well with DWM’s ongoing history of themselves and "That Was the DWM That Was" which is a regular and fascinating attraction on this very webthingy. Back in 1989 a slightly hairy Nick Briggs recorded a documentary about the then ten year old Doctor Who Magazine. In 1999 he went back to record a second documentary as the mag became twenty. In 2004 he sat next to Keith Barnfather and reminisced about both of them at more or less the same time as he went to speak to the current Dynamic DWM Duo of Clayton and Tom in their Tunbridge Wells pad. Reeltime Pictures have started re-releasing their vast Myth Makers back catalogue on DVD with the lure of two tapes per disc to encourage people to upgrade. I’m slightly critical of the way they have decided not to put parts one and two of Terrance & Barry on the same disc but instead paired each with a less popular release but on the whole it is a good way to release the range. Thankfully both DWM tapes are on the same disc and at £10.99 it seemed too good to miss.

I’m terribly ignorant. I am – there’s no need to protest verbally or in writing – it’s just one of those things. I marvel (no pun intended unless you thought it rather witty) at how a magazine like DWM was physically put together before the days of computers. These days it is terribly simple to put something half decent together (decent still requires talent but half decent just needs software) but I’ve never really known how they coped in the olden days. Seeing the old Amstrad computers they used to write articles made me both nostalgic (I knew someone who had one when they were the height of technology) and amused (they were so primitive – can it really only be fifteen years ago???) Frustratingly the documentary didn’t go into any real detail beyond vague mentions of cutting bits of paper into shapes and gluing them together again. I have a horrible feeling that was meant literally.

There were interviews with people who, until the recent DWM history articles, I had never heard of. John Freeman, Dez Skinn, Sheila Cranna – names that mean a lot to people who read the mag in its early days but to me were strangers. Then DWM introduced me to them and now I was seeing and hearing them in all their 1980s glory. There were a couple of familiar people – Jeremy J Bentham was there, looking like a cross between Andrew Lloyd Webber and a pimp as you can see - and I'm sure John Levene was sporting a pair of comedy glasses in the background of John Freeman's office. Freeman himself looked remarkably like the man who played Professor Cawston in a couple of the early Tomorrow People stories. But a bit of research tells me that he was named Brian Stanion so there is another rumour to be flushed down the same toilet as the "Marilyn Manson was Paul in The Wonder Years" myth. But I digress. We get to meet some of the artists who tried valiantly to capture the face of Sylvester McCoy (not easy because, according to a professional, it changes from frame to frame), we visit the printing presses and get a not-very-clear explanation from a woman who was so dressed up that she obviously didn't realise the crew weren't from "proper telly".

But the undoubted star was Mister Gary Russell. With his Amstrad standing proudly in the background and a half eaten packet of biscuits on his desk, Grussell was without a doubt the Hugh Grant of late 1980s Doctor Who. His infectious enthusiasm and spectacular hair are a sharp contrast to his laid back cool ten years later. And his even more laid back - and frankly quite erotic - pose during the recording of Zagreus, which I point you to here for a cheap laugh.

The 1999 documentary is set at a convention organised by the magazine to celebrate its birthday. Jeremy Bentham now no longer looks like a pimp but has settled on Alan Wicker as a role model. Gary Gillatt (the G is pronounced as in Jill not as in goat) compares the event and if ever there was a poster boy for the "He may look like a sad geek and he may sound like a sad geek but underneath it all he is not a sad geek" campaign it is Gary Gillatt. Running a magazine like DWM is a very tricky job. On the one hand you know your core audience because they’re people very like yourself and your colleagues. But on the other you have to remember it is a professional magazine and must be produced to professional magazine standards in both style and content. Fanzines are written by fans but magazines are written by… never mind. The point is that DWM was the official publication, licensed by the BBC, and so couldn’t adopt the cynical and sneery attitude of DWB and the like. Gillett, following the lead of his predecessor Grussell, spoke wisely about the ethos of the magazine being enthusiasm.

That enthusiasm could take the form of Andrew Pixley’s legendary Archives (Pixley appears on camera in the documentary and looks nothing like I expected him too), the often damning but constructively written reviews (Vanessa Bishop also puts in an appearance) or the more eclectic pieces that we all know and love. I don’t think the Time Team had started in 1999 – a shame as we might’ve glimpsed the Lovely Jac – but that is a classic example of the enthusiasm ethos. Not afraid to say they didn’t like something but saying it in a way which shows you still care.

It ends with some fairly embarrassing shenanigans with a cake, the bumps and singing but we’ll gloss over that.

The 2004 update is a little eight minute piece in which Clayton Hickman sports a very brown shirt and enthuses about the magazine’s future. In 1999 Gary Gillatt said sales were a very steady 25,000 per issue and that it was the stability of sales which made the magazine so attractive – a fad mag may sell ten times that many but you can’t budget six months or a year into the future based on a fleeting craze. Clayton has hinted in interviews and editorials that sales are increasing (not surprising now a new series is on the way) and it is a very positive note on which to end the disc.

DWM may look over priced at £3.40 for 52 pages but with far more on each page than similar genre mags, very few adverts, genuinely interesting features, access to new information which you would think was impossible in this day and e-age and an importance to the fans that is still so powerful that Big Finish have decided to produce 13 proper Doctor Who plays each year instead of 12 so each DWM will have a new story to preview, it has managed to thrive and grow in the most inhospitable of conditions. They’ve survived the apparent death of the franchise, the bankruptcy of their owners, endless disappointments, flood, famine and cosmic wars.
 

DWM is indomitable and this splendid DVD gives us a unique look at why.

Post script - Apropos of nothing, just as this is tacked on to the end of the above column so there was a bit added on to the end of the 1999 documentary. Briggs interviewed a silhouetted figure who claimed to be The Watcher - famed DWM columnist and man (?) of mystery. Well, for what it is worth, although the voice was disguised I am pretty sure it was Nick Pegg's. He was very distinctive as Rev Thomas in The Marian Conspiracy and this was the same voice passed through a modulator.