I Love... 1982
 

by Andrew Curnow

I know you probably heard me the first time, but I feel the need for a further declaration of my love for 1982.

This morning I watched part 3 of Earthshock. I haven't seen it for, at a guess, about ten years, and I found myself coming to it quite fresh. On the one hand, of course, it's dated, and considering that it's over a quarter of a century since it was made it would be more of a surprise if it hadn't. The once-acclaimed Cyberman design looks, if this doesn't sound stupid, very 80s; and from today's point of view their marching doesn't stand up to much scrutiny - being spoilt now by choreographed monster movement on a weekly basis, the old school monsters clearly lumber in a variety of methods and to differing degrees depending on the particular preference of the extra behind the mask. And of course, it belongs to a slower age of television drama - the plot of episode 3 of Earthshock, almost twenty-five minutes of screen time, can be fully summed up in six words: The Cybermen Take Over The Spaceship.

But none of that matters; and even more pleasingly, none of it bothered me at all this morning as I saw the Cybermen take over the spaceship while eating my Rice Krispies. Far from it, I found myself enthralled and totally engaged by it. I didn't find myself wanting the story to get a move on; I didn't worry about the irresponsibility of teaching a generation of children that you can impersonate a Cyberman by hiding in a cupboard with a plastic bag over your head; I didn't even flush with fanboy embarrassment at the sight of Cyber-costumes riding up Cyber-asses.

Instead I marvelled at, for example, how superb the redesign of the Cybermen was. It's easy to look at it now as just another costume in the history of the creatures, but that's to overlook how radically different they looked in 1982 - that silver jaw moving behind the mask is just one innovation, and is a simple but effective way of highlighting the fact that these aren't just robots. Like the rethink of the Cybermen when they came back in 2006, it showed a real attempt to think beyond the tradition of handle-headed monsters, and reinforce and redefine the horror of the concept.

I also mentally applauded some of the action scenes, particularly around the revival of the Cybermen. When they come to life and burst out of their containers, looming into view around the troopers, there's not only a real sense of power, but through some ingenious direction & editing, there's the suggestion of a genuinely sizeable army. Peter Grimwade's layered pictures means that we see Cybermen appearing in the background, in the foreground, from the side of shot, convincing us with only a handful of costumes that the spaceship hold is being overrun.

The drama on the bridge, the frantic attempts to stop the Cybermen breaking through, Davison's frantic activity, the music, the whole package, belongs to an age of TV drama that was still nearer to the theatre than the cinema, and even the slickest of old-school Who is a historical piece today. It's easy today to be cynical about old Who, to be a little bit patronising, but the truth is that nobody ever became a fan because they hated it. It is, and always has been, a show which could do and be anything, and for just twenty-five minutes this morning, for all its flaws and limitation, I didn't have a care in the world except for whether the Doctor's jury-rigged anti-matter shield could possibly save the day. Doctor Who at its best is exciting, engaging, enthralling, entertaining.

And I love it.

by Andrew Curnow

1982 was the year I wrote Castrovalva.

Before you all dive for your copies of The Doctor Who Programme Guide (more likely the Internet nowadays) to pour clearly-printed scorn on that claim, I’m not actually suggesting that I created and scripted the original TV story. But 1982 was the year when for Doctor Who and the Curnow Brothers (think of us as the Mitchells without the attitude, accents, or gratuitous violence, but with hair) everything came together.

We had actually had a tape recorder since just before the start of season 17 in 1979, but although we had diligently recorded each episode to listen to again later, we never kept the recordings for very long. I don’t remember now why this should be, but I would suggest that it was probably driven by us lacking the resources to buy a new blank cassette every other week, and consequently we probably had to re-use the one and only tape we had. Or maybe we just assumed that we could record over our copies with equanimity safe in the knowledge that Pamela Nash was looking after an original for us, I don’t know.

But from the start of 1982 we somehow found ourselves able to record AND KEEP every episode of Doctor Who that aired. And from somewhere, both bruv and I decided that we would therefore write ‘the book of the film’ from those tapes. Again, I don’t remember now exactly why – perhaps we were going through that phase of wanting to be Terrance Dicks when we gwew up? Or, conversely, maybe we were going through that pompous fanboy stage of thinking that Terrance Dicks’ Target books were becoming rubbish, and that we could do a lot better ourselves?

Of course, it’s all very well to have these good intentions, but even if we hadn’t suddenly been faced with two episodes a week rather than the more traditional one, it’s unlikely that we could ever have kept up with the quick turnaround. I seem to recall that most Episode Ones that year would briefly rekindle our interest, but as with the first three stories of season 20 the following year, we neither of us got any further than about ten minutes into the story before finding something else to do…

…except for me, and Castrovalva. I’m forever citing it as my favourite story, and it is, and for many reasons. As I said above, everything came together Whowise in 1982. The year before we’d had the first regeneration in living memory (for me at least) followed by the almost unbelievable spectacle of vintage repeats (and unless you were there, you really can’t know how thrilling it was) and then a K9 Christmas Special… And all that excitement was in a sense just the warm-up act for 1982, and before the Christmas holidays had even ended, we had seen two whole episodes of a brand new Doctor and a brand new series.

In fact, we’d seen three whole episodes, albeit two were the same. At that time we lived in Carlisle, and if you went out of our house, turned right, turned left at the traffic lights and then kept on going, you’d be in Scotland within fifteen minutes. For reasons now lost to the McMists of McTime, BBC Scotland aired Castrovalva part one in the afternoon, as opposed to rest of the UK, who watched it at the peakier time of 7:35. So Dad retuned our telly (I have to assume he was having a quiet day, with no extinct electrical equipment needing imploding) which meant that we were able to pick up BBC Scotland in the afternoon, and then BBC UK in the evening. What better start for the new Doctor than for us to see his first episode twice in a day?

In an age before VCRs (at least for us – we didn’t get one until episode thirteen of The Trial of a Timelord, and I don’t think I even saw one until 1983) it was an inexpressible thrill. Add to that the Curnow obsession with TARDIS-bound scenes (when the video age kicked in later in the decade, we would judge each ‘new’ story on several counts, but one was always whether or not we got to see inside the TARDIS) and it almost goes without saying, therefore, that Castrovalva part one could not have been a better viewing experience. Er, experiences.

And from the audio tapes ("mere notes for a fiction I had a mind to write") I wrote in book form the whole story, all the way from "I… oh… um" and "These are secure premises" through to "Well, whoever I feel like, it’s absolutely splendid!", via such sundry delights as "So this air-stewardess person is flying the TARDIS?" and "My we-e-e-e-b!"

The one-and-a-half exercise books containing this fictional tome still exist… somewhere, amidst the boxes of Star Wars comics and old Lego toys still stored at my parents’ house. I daresay that some 24 years later the prose-style will be slightly more than mortifyingly embarrassing. I do remember, for certain, that never having come across the phrase "bodily inertia" before, I gleefully assumed it to be a reference to the Castrovalvan commuter belt, "bodily in Esher"… despite the rather unfortunate and obvious fact that it doesn’t make any sense.

But the actual end-result isn’t really that important now. It is, or was, just the sheer delight of doing it, and perhaps even more, the memory of the sheer enthusiasm that made me do it. There are lots of other great memories from the transmission of season 19 – on the audio front both the "This is Enlightenment and I am Persuasion" and the "I have the power of life & death over ALL of you" cliffhangers got played endlessly (the former to the exasperation of our babysitters at the time) and then of course there’s the actual content, the prestige of a ‘pure’ historical, the jawdropping return of the Cybermen, the jawdropping (yes, again) demise of Adric, even the shock cliffhanger end to the season with the apparent loss of my beloved Tegan…

…but the excitement, and the freshness, and the wonder of that whole time can be summed up in my memory by the story of the story of Castrovalva.

by Chris Wake

We all have to start somewhere, and I started here. Of course I'd heard of Doctor Who - everyone had. I knew about the police box, the robot dog and the unfeasibly long scarf; my best friend even had the Action Man-stylee Doctor, complete with a TARDIS that made him "disappear". In hindsight I can recall a few fleeting glimpses: big, black, furry monsters, the Doctor mending something with the help of K-9 (hmmm, could be anything, I suppose.), the Doctor running through a big room with lots of weirdly dressed people (turned out to be Traken, but could could have many other applications). I clearly remember making a brave attempt to watch a whole episode with guys in orange spacesuits and, er, lots of white, but at the same time I remember not understanding a word of it.

Then they got the guy from "All Creatures Great and Small" in. And some time in January I stumbled across the city of Castrovalva and ended up more trapped than the characters themselves at the end of the episode. At least they broke free from the illusion: I'm still trapped inside.

I've no idea what I was doing in the first week of the year, nor how I came to finally watch the programme properly from episode 3 on, but I was hooked. I was really into history, so Four to Doomsday got me all interested with the dates and tribes and stuff, but the best bit was the end of The Visitation, where we find out that the Doctor caused the Great Fire of London. Cool! That was the moment that sealed it for me, much to the future chagrin of my English teachers, who probably longed for me to write a story about something else. And just when things couldn't possibly get any better, along came Black Orchid. Not that spectacular, you might think, but when you combine a fascination for Doctor Who with an obsession for cricket. The cricket match in episode 1 is quite possibly the zenith of my TV-watching life. At least it was then, anyway.

Before the year was out I had my first book (The Daemons) and had read The Making of Doctor Who about ten times. Everything after the Sea Devils remained a mystery to me for years.

The weird thing is comparing my reaction at the time to viewing with hindsight and to the "received opinion" of fandom. I thought Timeflight was great - it was even my favourite of the whole series - and I don't remember any dodgy sets. I certainly didn't notice the see-sawing haircuts and the trick with the cricket ball seemed realistic enough to me. Of course now that I am a proper grown-up fan I can appreciate Kinda for the masterpiece it was, but at the time it kind of passed me by. Of course I was excited about the Cybermen (I'd already read the Making of. by then), and I didn't even notice that Adric was annoying.

And I thought the silent titles were dead moving.

by Si Hart

I Love Doctor Who 1982. 22 years ago? It doesn't seem possible that it was 1982 22 years ago, and yet today marks the 22nd Anniversary of the end of Season 19, and it was a day pretty similar to today, all sunny and bright. Its a day etched on my memory, not alas for the fact that the very exciting final episode of "Time-Flight" was broadcast, but because it was the day my little brother, Jonathan, was born.

1982 is wrapped in those two things for me. Doctor Who and my brother. There was a new Doctor, with lovely floppy hair and a wonderful hat who joined us at the start of the year. I was a bit too young to appreciate the huge wave of optimism that apparently flowed through fandom at the time, but its certainly true to say that no new Doctor since has had such an easy ride into the role from the fans. Even Christopher Eccleston has been criticised and he hasn't even filmed a scene yet.

Doctor Who without Tom Baker seemed almost unthinkable. He was and is my hero, and yet Peter Davison seemed to settle in with little opposition from me. He was the Doctor, a different Doctor, just like the ones in the books Mum read to me at the time, and just like the ones I'd seen on the telly at the end of the previous year. He arrived, got lost in the TARDIS (which was very exciting, I'd always wanted to see more of the rooms!) and by the end of the season he was more than established, he was just the Doctor.

It was much the same with my brother. His arrival had been awaited for some time (and he was late!) and there was the mounting excitement of when he'd be with us. Everyday at school my teacher Mrs Sargent would ask whether he was here yet. I'd always have to say no until this day 22 years ago when Dad found me in the playground and told me I had a new brother. He met with no resistance, he was just my new brother and he slotted seamlessly into our family in much the same way Davison did into the TARDIS.