Marco Polo

Marco Polo obviously no longer exists in the archives so you’ve a break from splintered memoirs of UK Gold when it was any good. My first exposure to Marco Polo – aside from conventional wisdom that it was magnificent, something I’ve yet to realise for myself – was when I was delighted to find poor quality copies of missing episode soundtracks on a P2P network. Not that I was delighted that they were poor quality. Just to find copies was exciting as hell in the days before they came out on CD. I downloaded them and just owning them was enough for me. Then a colleague – Ian of this site fame – suggested we try a Time Team type experiment. I burned copies of the soundtracks and sent them off to him, listening to them myself at the same time. I had an afternoon off – it was the summer of 2002 though I don’t remember why I would’ve taken an afternoon off unless it was a World Cup match day and something exciting might’ve been happening. I popped on the first CD and tried to follow the terrible recordings. On the one hand it is a miracle they exist but prior to Mark Ayres and his clever fingers they may as well not have existed. Muffled, howling, distorted voices and tinny, echoy, howling music bored me senseless for three hours. I tried to follow it. I tried to like it but it was like pressing my ear to a theatre fire door and convincing myself I was enjoying the show. I found out later – when the proper CDs were released – that it is quite a dull story and not my cup of tea anyway.

Between the crap CDs and the good CDs came the Loose Canon reconstruction. For the unaware, reconstructions (recons) take any surviving source material – photos, clips, sound tracks – and combine them with whatever new material they can produce – photoshopped images, new model work, on screen text – to reconstruct missing episodes as best they can. The Marco Polo one was the first black and white recon to be made in colour. Using colour pictures and colourised pictures they told the story of Doctor Who and Marco Polo. Even this didn’t help. I turned the colour off after a few minutes because LC’s VHS-only policy means their hard work in creating colour was rendered flickering, smearing and distracting. It probably took them months to colour all those pictures and the simple act of tape-to-tape duplication rendered it pointless. The highlight of it was a particular photo of the Tardis crew – this one to be exact –

- and the face Susan is pulling. We saw this picture a lot in episode one and it never failed to make me chuckle.

The Keys of Marinus

The problem with watching omnibus Doctor Whos on UK Gold was that long stories would invariably bore the pants off me. Especially from this era where the pace is – shall we say – leisurely. The one exception was the Keys of Marinus which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is the perfect story to watch all in one sitting because it never stays so long in any one place for you to become bored. Most people dismiss it as not very good but it is well up there in my Hartnell pantheon of greatness. I remember describing it in my diary of the time as “four perfect mini adventures”, sentiments which embarrass me now – as all such things written in diaries will do – but it is a fair summary. I watched it when my parents were away so my grandmother was looking after us. She couldn’t find the plug for the tumble dryer so had to go home to dry the washing. She phoned at some point during the exciting court room drama to ask if I’d found the plug and I said yes. I was down by the side of the machine. It wasn’t a long call and I was able to pick up where I’d left off despite the complexities of The City of Millennius’s unorthodox legal system.

The Aztecs

Back in early 1994 I was being courted by several universities, one of which was Durham. They invited me up in January for an interview. I remember reading Paul Cornell’s baffling “No Future” on the train going up but this isn’t a book feature so I won’t mention it again. I’ve no idea what it was about. After the interview I had four hours to kill in Durham town centre before the return train. I don’t know if you’ve been to Durham but there is nothing to do there. There might be some history or whatever but I didn’t want history. I wanted shops and I wanted not to be out in the snow. Because it was snowing but I’m assuming you’d guessed that because it was Durham in January. Apart from sitting on a bench and being talked at by an extremely drunk and completely incomprehensible Geordie (a not unscary few minutes) I spent most of the time alternating between going to WH Smith, being in WH Smith and leaving WH Smith. It was from there that I got my video of the Aztecs.

I think my bench was against that church wall and facing the statue. Drunk Geordie not pictured.

Now that I think about this – and my pre-planning has been minimal and I’m hoping to pass this laziness of as a stylistic decision if it works out – it was the Aztecs which put the kibosh on UK Gold’s evening broadcasts for me. There is no accounting for taste. Though I suppose slogging through An Unearthly Child (which drags in the cave scenes), Edge of Destruction (which is just plain weird) and then ending up with a theatrical performance about the political machinations of ancient Mexico is enough to dampen the spirits of anyone who had watched the Time Meddler a few months earlier and assumed old Doctor Who was always that jolly.

The Sensorites

The low point of my Saturday morning omnibus mop ups was the Sensorites. Despite everything I’ve written since, despite the love and adoration I have for it now, I hated it at the time. Seven o’clock I had to get up at to watch the dullest Doctor Who I’d ever seen. It just went on and on and on and none of it was any good. I felt tired, sick and miserable and there was still two hours to go. I can’t believe it now of course – the adventures of Captain Maitland, Carol and the man John are among the highlights of my video collection. But that’s now. Then it was torture. You’ll be asking yourself why I didn’t just – perhaps – stop watching it when the pain started? That’s silly talk. I’d started it so I had to finish. Besides, what if I stopped watching it and the cable box went weird? Or my video recorder suddenly stopped? Or something else which might prevent me owning a copy of the story on video occurred? I had – literally had – to be there to make sure. And to remove the adverts. Adverts in Doctor Who never bothered me as long as I could pause the tape and not record them. There were ructions in fandom (such as it was in those days – I have only the letters page of DWB with which to judge) but there are always ructions in fandom.

Years later I grew to love it and now actually own two copies on video. It was part of a boxed set in which the BBC dusted what was left of the Hartnell era into a very sturdy cardboard box and hoped no one would read too closely. My first copy came when I bought the set for real. I was connecting up my new TiVo when the postie knocked with an enormous parcel. This was in the days when Amazon used to pick the biggest box they could find, attach your smaller item to a sheet of cardboard using plastic wrap and then place it serenely in the middle of the enormous outer shell. You’d open the big box and find your little video boxed set in the centre like a holy relic on a pedestal. Nowadays they just put it in whatever they’ve got to hand and let a low rent courier kick it from the depot to your neighbour’s house.

Obviously it wasn’t the smash hit they’d hoped for and copies made it to the cheap book stores a few months later. By now I’d discovered my love for all things Sensoritey and a fear gripped me that if I didn’t pay £7.99 for one of these boxed sets now, my lone copy of the Sensorites would immediately snap and be rendered useless. By which point the shop would’ve sold out and I’d be stuck forever more. I’m occasionally logical, occasionally rational but never both at the same time. Still, I found people willing to pay eight pounds each for the other two videos in the set so I was quids in, I had two copies of the Sensorites and I didn’t need to worry any longer. Unless both of them snapped. Shit, I didn’t think of that.

The Sensorites also gives us I think the first of what will be an irregular series - bits of Doctor Who which I use in every day speech. Not the big, famous quotes. Just little snippets which don't make sense to anyone but me and I like it that way. The Sensorites gave me (and the world) "That's settled that little bit of solution" so if you ever hear me say that and think I'm peculiar, now you know. Now you know.