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

Dragonfire

I remember the frozen mercenaries very clearly. I was eleven and still scared of brain washed zombie people after the whole Roboman affair. Their having their memories wiped by the deep freezing to turn them into Kane’s slaves was enough to put me off so I don’t remember the dragon, I don’t remember Kane’s face melting and I don’t remember the silly little girl. I vaguely remember it being set in a freezer centre because we used to go to a freezer centre each month. This was back in the old days when there were small, independent freezer centres with a maze of chest freezers from which we would get a month’s worth of frozen food. It is a bookies now which is not only a sad indictment of society but a reminder of how small it was. Shops from the old days always seemed massive but Tesco and other hyper markets have totally changed the scale. The “big” Sainsbury’s where we used to do the BIG monthly shop is about ten minutes walk from where I now work. I pop in there occasionally – it is a handy little shop.

I got the video of Dragonfire for a mere £4.99 from Manchester’s HMV. It was 25 days after its release. I know this because it is in my diary. I counted. As I’ve said before, a pound off a new release was massive in those days. Less than half price in under a month? I would’ve posted it on the internet if I’d heard of the internet. I was pleased with myself when I reached the café where I was meeting father. That was when he told me I’d have to go for my interview at Durham University on my own. I wasn’t pleased but as you’ll remember from the Aztecs it turned out all right. It wasn’t the third visitation of the Sylvester McCoy Curse. What? What Sylvester McCoy curse? Patience, dear reader, patience.

The final memory is of coming home one weekend from the aforementioned university and being alone in the house that Friday afternoon. I think someone had been tidying dark corners as there was a Scalextric box lying around, covered in dust and completely irresistible. I put on the first video which came to hand – Dragonfire – and built myself a basic circuit. Like most Scalextric sets it didn’t work as well as you hoped it would. The cars spluttered in and out of life as they chugged their way around the track. I think I got bored of Scalextric within the seventy five minutes Dragonfire ran. I put it back in the box and, less dusty than it was before, put it back in the pile of stuff found in the dark corner. I never saw it again – our loss was the tip’s gain. Not that I minded – it was my brother’s.

Remembrance of the Daleks

This one I remember pretty clearly from BBC1. Mr Bronson – terror of Grange Hill, Daleks going up stairs in direct contravention of every Doctor Who joke except the knock knock one, an extra specially scary Dalek with a massive gun and a spooky girl who was more than she seemed. Yes, this was one for the scrapbook. When I came to start collecting stories it was top of my list. I read the novel – a far cry from the novelisations of the 1970s and 80s. This one added depth and had strange scenes from the Special Weapons Dalek’s point of view. It told of how each blast from his mega cannon drove him a little bit more insane. It was a cracking book, bought from the school book shop one lunchtime and read ferociously. Then came a DWM summer special which leant heavily upon Remembrance of the Daleks – that disappeared in the second visit of the Sylvester McCoy Curse. Yes, the curse again.

The first part of the curse – the one which didn’t make it a curse yet - was when I bought Remembrance of the Daleks in the anniversary Dalek tin. I’ve mentioned it before – in the Chase – but that was the day we went to London. London in those days was exciting – everything was bigger. It was like America but with recognisable packaging. I’ve never understood American cardboard video boxes which are open at the bottom. As for their E-120 tapes – that just made the entire store look wrong. I understand now why they had E-120s instead of the obviously correct E-180 but for years it was a mystery. It had been a fairly uneventful trip until I rode the escalator in the big HMV and at the top there were a pile of silver tins. On the video wall – they had video walls in HMV in the 1990s – was Remembrance of the Daleks. I’d completely forgotten (or just didn’t know) that the tin was out this week. I watched for a few minutes – this was exciting stuff – before going back to the pile of tins and snapping one up. On the way home I did the best I could reading the Dalek booklet inside. It was going dark (this was a September evening) but I stretched and straineded to read as much as I could.

There was no doubt which I was going to watch first. So eager was I that I didn’t really take in m’brother meeting us at the door with a message for pops to call his brother, no matter what time they got back. I put the tape in and started watching it but I could hear voices from downstairs. I paused it and went to listen. On some level I’d already guessed what had happened so I wasn’t surprised a few minutes later when they came upstairs to tell me. My grandfather had been ill for many years – he’d been in and out of hospital, hooked up to a dialysis machine – and it seemed only a matter of time.

The Happiness Patrol

I watched this late at night during the Christmas hols. I remembered the Kandy Man of course – no one of any age could watch Doctor Who and the Liquorice Allsorts Man and not remember it years later. I’ve never liked liquorice allsorts but I don’t think we can blame Doctor Who. They are just revolting and that’s all there is to it. So are the fruit allsorts they brought out quite recently and they don’t even have liquorice in them. Odd. Also odd is that I can never, with any confidence, remember how many episodes this story has. You’ll have gathered by now I have a fair trove of facts and figures in my head thing but is the Happiness Patrol a three-parter or a four-parter? I’ve no idea. I think it’s a three parter but I could be wrong. I’m only guessing that because I have the list of stories in front of me while writing this and I think I can count up to fourteen. It doesn’t really matter – it had some very short skirts but worn by women who didn’t interest me. I understood the symbolism and agreed with most of what it was saying but it didn’t engage me. It wanted so hard to be a graphic novel but not enough people making it read graphic novels – this was Watchmen made by the BBC Light Entertainment department. Not that I’d heard of Watchmen at the time but it sounded cooler to name check it than use ten times as many words describing a serious graphic novel which can look a bit silly when you flip through it but which has far greater depth and imagination than first impressions would convey et cetera. Ten words? That was thirty and it still doesn’t say what I want it to say. Let’s move on shall we?