The Two Doctors

I was sitting outside on a bench the other day, thinking. It was perhaps the first day this year when it's been warm enough to sit out in short sleeves without getting cold. As I sat there, my gaze fell upon a patch of ground in the neatly kept gardens in which I was enjoying my lunch, and I began to daydream.

"What if..." I wondered, even though it's as good as impossible, EVEN THOUGH it's never going to happen, what if the TARDIS appeared in front of me, bold-as-you-like, in all it's battered blue glory? The Doctor and Peri would step out, and then who knows? Summer days always get me thinking like that, and for some reason they always take me back to 1985. I've never really felt I "had" my own Doctor. Every kid has "his", apparently, but they tended to arrive like buses when I was young. Should I lay claim to Tom, because he was technically my first, or Peter because he was manning the TARDIS when I first began to adore Doctor Who, or Sylv, the Doctor I grew up with? And then there's Colin, of course. The one that didn't work out. The one who wasn't the Doctor for most of the time that he was. And suddenly I realise that despite that, and despite the hiatus, and despite being taught since then that it got to be not much good, Doctor Who was really great in 1985.

Because it was far more than the collection of episodes we can analyse today, far more even than a random hatful of moments we've retrospectively tarnished as being "too violent". It was "Going Live!", and "Jim'll Fix It", and Sarah Greene and Longleat. It was bright, and it was loud and it was touching. Remember "never more a butterfly"? Once, my sister wanted to be Peri. We never thought she was helpless or whiny (that was Tegan wasn't it?). Somebody once said the Sixth Doctor lived fast and died young. And that was it. A breath of life! An era which crammed confrontations with all the greats (The Master, the Sontarans, the Cybermen, the Daleks) into one season whilst still creating foes worthy of later returns (Sil and the Rani), almost as if it KNEW it had been given only so long to live. If any era had to be cut short, at least it was the one that really flourished whilst it lived.

"The Two Doctors" is the epitome of it all, the summation of everything that made it tick. It's rich, loud and brazen. We have the lovingly handled demise of Stike, stretched over at least three deaths and culminating with his leg being left behind in the hacienda! We have Shockeye, the walking nightmare, and we have the Sixth Doctor, fishing for Gumblejack. As Rassilon said...

But beyond that we have so much more. Adventures like "Battle Planet" and "The Sinister Weed" from the Annuals, the comic strip tales are rightly lauded as the best of their genre, and even "The Two Doctors" itself spilled over into "In A Fix With Sontarans". Doctor Who was everywhere, in the papers, on the radio, the subject of Saturday morning TV phone-ins. We can't fully appreciate this era now because it was more a TIME than a set of episodes. Everyone got a bit self-indulgent and looked tacky in the mid-eighties, just ask Bob Dylan fans. But Doctor Who belonged to us, all of us, for possibly the last time.

How could I forget? What did anything else matter then? Yes, it would be the Sixth Doctor that would step out the TARDIS in my daydream, and perhaps I'd leap off my bench to join him. My Doctor. And we could go anywhere, Telos or a Spaceship in the Madeline Cluster, or even that mysterious icy jungle place on the inside cover of the 1986 Annual. Or best of all, back to 1985, where Doctor Who was something joyously fantastic.

Please don't let me forget again...