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Doctor Who, What, Where, When, Why and How
A personal Doctor Who viewing memoir

The Two Doctors

The only thing I remember about this from 1985 is the title. That shows just how exciting it was – less than 18 months after the Five Doctors – to be doing a multi-Doctor story. The cellar where so much of the entertainment happened is one of those half memories that I think I remember but then I realise its just a cellar and lots of programmes have a cellar. Attack of the Cybermen has sewers which looked like cellars for one. I got the video for Christmas in 1993 and was able to watch episode one before going out to see the elderly aunts (one of whom is still with us at the admirable age of 99). I loved it – I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Which seems to be a trend with Eric Saward stories (I know Bob Holmes wrote it but you can’t tell me this wasn’t heavily Saward-influenced) – the initial buzz is mighty but it soon wears off and you’re left feeling rather confused and hollow. At the time I was limited to wondering why Jamie became a savage beast after a few days hiding in the space station maintenance ducts and why the Second Doctor had grey hair all of a sudden. Now I have more detailed questions but this isn’t really the place for them. I also wondered why the cover painting makes it look like someone has let too much air out of Patrick Troughton’s face but cover paintings are easy to mock. I prefer the Photoshop DVD covers we get today but I know I’m in a minority. Most people prefer their own Photoshop covers.

The Two Doctors is also one of those stories which I’m reminded of regularly because a line from it has become part of my day to day vocab. Every time something turns out well thanks to a bit of prep on my part I am liable to say "I was right to lay the plans I did". You’ll have noticed how middle class I am that I’d use the words “vocab” and “prep” in a single paragraph. On a similar note, you’ll often find me muttering the snippet of music accompanying the Sontaran advance on the space station. You know the one – dum dum… duh-duh-duh… duh… dum dum… etc. I say muttering because it isn’t humming, it isn’t whistling and it isn’t singing – it’s that sort of tutting, clicking, annoying sound people make when they don’t realise they’re muttering along to a bit of incidental music.

The last thing I think of when I ponder the Two Doctors – ignoring how fab the commentary (and the DVD in general) is with Colin, Frazer and the unparalleled Jackie – is putting it on when I was ill in 2003. What basically happened is that we were told we were being closed down and about a week later my general constitution just decided “oh fuck it” and I ended up being off for a week with quotes nervous exhaustion. But I wasn’t ill-ill if you know what I mean. Which you don’t because it is absurdly vague. I wasn’t being sick and I didn’t have a cold and I wasn’t covered in spots. I was well enough to walk to the post office on the first morning – I had to because the day before I’d come down with whatever it was I’d got, I put my first batch of DVDs up for sale on Amazon Marketplace. I got off to a flying start but it did mean having to brave outside when I wasn’t keen. Later that afternoon, in an attempt to prove I really wasn’t well, I tried to go to sleep. Because that’s what ill people do. I couldn’t sleep – why would I? I wasn’t tired even though I hadn’t slept properly because I was haunted by the bad feedback I was going to get from my first buyers because all internet users are vindictive bastards and you just can’t please them. To try and get to sleep I put the Two Doctors video on. Something nice and familiar to ease me into the land of Morpheus. It didn’t work and after half an hour of trying I ended up making the best of a wasted afternoon with the help of Peri in those powder blue shorts.

Timelash

It is fitting that Timelash should’ve ended up being a cock up. I was away in the dreamy halls of academe and recording Timelash was father’s job. But he forgot. They went out for a walk and when they got home they realised they’d forgotten something important. To his enormous credit he phoned UK Gold to see if he could get a copy of it for me. The person he spoke to wasn’t helpful. In fact he gave pops a lecture on how it was illegal to record something off television. So the confessional phone call came – I don’t think I was annoyed because I’d been around long enough to know its reputation – and it went on the list of things to do next time. What I did do was go out and get a copy of the novel. I don’t remember where I got it from – it appears it was only released once (in 1986) and this would’ve been early 1995 so the shelves of Coventry wouldn’t have been groaning under the weight. I probably went to Forbidden Planet – the same store I was so delighted to see while peering out of a window on my first trip to the metropolis. Ok, it was a McDonald’s window. I wasn’t always right. I was eating a cheese burger and generally wondering how many more cheese burgers I’d eat there over the next three years (the answer isn’t that many – I discovered a chip shop round the corner which I preferred) when I noticed the familiar logo. Not that it was familiar – Forbidden Planets were rare in those days. Manchester didn’t have one for a start. That’s the store I got Adrian Rigglesford’s book from – the one which turns out to have been embellished and not terribly well checked. At the time I thought it was fantastic and read it from cover to cover. So anyway, I got the novel of Timelash and it really is much better than the product we see on screen. It means I can hold my head up high in the company of older fans because I know exactly what it must’ve been like in the 1980s having to rely on books rather than videos. Their plight was my plight. Their pain was my pain.

Revelation of the Daleks

I used to have a problem with recording stuff whenever I went away. There was just too damn much of it. It shames me to my toenails that I once went away for a weekend and recorded eleven hours of programming across three videos. Going away for a fortnight meant I had to be tough. I only used two videos – one upstairs and one downstairs. The downstairs let me down because I got a date wrong and it didn’t record Wrestlemania. Fortunately it was only Wrestlemania IX and that show sucked. Upstairs I forget what else I recorded but I taped the final two parts of Revelation of the Daleks. That sounds like a fair amount of trouble to go to for a show I hadn’t officially stated liking yet (if you believe everything else you’ve read about being in the bath and the Five Doctors and so on). I sympathise but I remember being in one of our more popular high street shops and seeing Doctor Who videos on the shelves. This was during the repeats which I was watching and taping and I still wondered openly (but thankfully silently) why anyone would buy Doctor Who on video. So getting the Five Doctors was as pivotal as I’ve claimed. My recording Revelation of the Daleks from six thousand miles away was the behaviour of an obsessive compulsive personality which hadn’t quite decided on its main locus.

But this was far from my first brush with R of the D. It is the one Colin Baker era story I can remember watching with any clarity. The nights were lighter (or the lights were nighter as I originally wrote) and I was playing outside at someone else’s house. I realised Doctor Who and the Daleks was on. I rode home in a hurry to see it. The clearest memory of Colin’s time – by far – is the very end of the episode. “I know – I’ll take you to…” was etched word for word in my memory. I thought it was the most fantastic cliff hanger for the next series. Little did I know why it was really done.