Smaller on the inside

There’s a wonderful post here about canon being a redundant concept for Doctor Who. No, come back! It’s cogent, funny, and provoking.

Reading it made me reflect on the conservatism often displayed by so many fans of the show. I started watching it in 1979 (nineteen – seventy – nine!), and I loved not knowing where each story was going to take me. I think that that was a good time to discover the programme, because change was in the air: a year later I witnessed regeneration for the first time, as Tom Baker became Peter Davison, and, before his first season, the BBC showed a series of repeats of stories from each Doctor. This meant, in my first three years as a regular viewer of a programme new to me, I saw the lead character played by five separate actors, and watched stories made in three separate decades, with all the attendant differences in approach and house-style that involves, including two of them being in black and white. That’s not bad going for an eight-year-old, is it?

And I swallowed it all whole. The most exciting bit was always the opening moments of episode one, as you looked to see where this story, and therefore the next few weeks, was set. Where were we? And when? Then, an indication that something was amiss, or that something was lurking in the shadows, and, soon after, for the Doctor to get involved – that was what I wanted. But, in that happy, open, time of transition, it didn’t matter who was playing the Doctor, or who his companions were, or when the story had been made… the essential ethos of the programme was enough. No, more than that, watching those old repeats, I was excited by the variations on a theme dictated by the change of production teams (not that I would have known about such things then, of course): not only in terms of the iconography, blatant and not-so-blatant – different title sequences, different police box prop – but also tonally. Even as a seven-year-old, I could discern that there was a murkier morality guiding the characters’ actions in An Unearthly Child to the more straightforward malarky of The Three Doctors, and I knew that something had happened between the first two seasons I’d watched (Tom Baker’s final two, the latter of which was stylistically very different to what had gone before, much more sombre and, superficially, ‘sciency’), though there was no way I could have told you precisely what.

And that, more than anything, I think, is what hooked me; that each week you tuned into a programme that bore the same title, but you never quite knew what you were going to see.

Which is why I’m always disappointed when other fans react against the programme’s continual and inherent idiosyncrasies (I was going to say ‘against the programme taking risks’, or ‘doing something peculiar’, but neither of those is quite right). I loved the casting of Christopher Eccleston as the ninth Doctor, precisely because, for a minute or two, as I read the news, it seemed so wrong. He didn’t seem like a Doctor, and yet, that’s the best reason for casting him; the whole concept of regeneration is rendered meaningless unless you exploit its potential for difference. I love The Happiness Patrol, a barking story from 1988 that brazenly pushes its studio-bound limitations in your face, demanding an explicit reaction, and so getting a positive one from this viewer. I love The Gunfighters: a Western? On a children’s show budget? With real horses? And scenes linked by a specially-written ballad? In 1966? But, of course!

I know the feeling, though. Even if it’s a vivacious eclecticism that draws you in, the longer you watch, the more you invest, and become attached to the invented world. I enjoyed each episode of the 2005 series – but only on the Sunday, after I’d watched for a second time, because I was too nervous, as each was transmitted, THAT THEY’D HAVE GOT IT WRONG!!! 45 minutes is a long time to be holding your breath, believe me. And it’s a small step from affection to making a fetish of the surface details; it’s one thing to have a small smile of recognition at a neat reference to a previous story, quite another to have a Cyberman with a visible paunch because of some boss-eyed idea that it actually matters that he’s played by the same actor that played the part twenty years earlier.

Some years ago, at the last convention I attended (oh, that’s gone and done it now!), I was in a queue and, being a sociable sort, I struck up conversation with the man in front of me. Being a convention, the conversation was about the Big Finish range of Doctor Who audio dramas. I was asked my favourite, and waxed lyrical about Creatures of Beauty: a well-written Peter Davison story, most memorable for having a fragmented, non-linear narrative, which demanded attention from the listener, and repaid the effort with a tense, involving, and satisfying tale. “Oh yes, that was a good one,” agreed my fellow fan, “though I wish they’d re-edited it so it was all in the right order.”

Semiotic Thickness: The Joy of the Fanzine

Interesting article on the BBC website today about fanzines becoming historical artefacts.

Back when the universe was less than half its present size, and I was a good half-dozen belt notches under my present size, fanzines were a gateway to a wider, exciting, alien, and more adult world. The ones I bought didn’t concern punk bands or football teams; that leaves only Doctor Who, which is indeed what they covered.

I think I bought my first one after seeing it advertised in Celestial Toyroom, the newsletter of DWAS (Doctor Who Appreciation Society) (which, I’m amazed to discover from Google, is still going!). There used to be adverts for them scattered throughout CT: small boxes featuring pencil drawings of Roger Delgado’s Master and promising such delights as ‘Michael Craze interview!’ or ‘Season 18 re-evaluated!’. I’d send off my postal order, or maybe I’d badger my dad into writing a cheque, for 90p or £1.20 or somesuch, and a few weeks later a bulky A5 envelope would drop through the door. The heady excitement of this cannot be overemphasised; I was 12 or 13, I didn’t receive much post, so the moment I clapped eyes on it, my heart started to beat faster. The handwriting on the envelope was enough: unrecognised, often a bit self-consciously quirky, and adult. OK, it had probably been addressed by someone only five or six years older than myself, but that distance is vast at that age. This was grown up territory.

Opening the envelope and taking out the photocopied booklet would be the cue to section off the next couple of hours for the sole purpose of poring over the reviews, the interviews, the letters, the whole intoxicating package. Its amateur status made it all the more beguiling; I knew what to expect from a Target novelisation or Doctor Who Monthly. I had no idea what would be inside this smudgy, black and white effort.

Some fanzines, yesterday.

That these publications were written by fans, rather than professional writers, was important for two reasons: it allowed a delicious degree of irreverence when discussing the show, which was completely alien to me from the official publications, and it demonstrated that there were other people out there who loved the programme as much as me. This is a crucial point in this day and age – when BBC3 screens repeats on an almost daily basis, when you can access all the information you need (and plenty you’ll never need) at the click of a mouse, when you can argue with someone on the other side of the world about UNIT chronology, when you can follow the minute-by-minute movements of people connected with the show on Twitter… No interest or pursuit can feel solitary anymore, as there’ll be a Facebook group or a forum for it somewhere, but back then… I can remember that I’d feel slightly unnerved if I saw someone else looking through the small number of Target novelisations in WH Smith. I was the only person I knew who bought them – who was this?! How I’d have loved to have joined an online forum in the early 80s, to talk to other people and break out of my shell a bit, with the security of a computer monitor between us. Approaching strangers in WH Smith simply wasn’t an option. (Incidentally, this is something to bear in mind when reading the glut of social-networking scare stories doing the rounds at the moment. I’m sure they can be a wonderful means for teenagers to test the social world without them having to leap in feet first).

Being able to communicate with other, like-minded people – even if it was only by writing a letter dismissing the new Cyberman design, even if it was only by reading such letters – was a valuable step on the ladder of self-exploration. This really came into its own during ‘the wilderness years’, when it looked like the BBC had given up on the programme, and fans, having exhausted the ‘primary text’ (come on, in an article about fanzines, you can forgive me for sounding as though I’m writing for one!), turned in on themselves, and started writing about what it was like to actually be a fan. For the authorised channels, this resulted in the clever fun of Gary Gillatt’s editorship of Doctor Who Magazine, while in the world of fanzines, this was most eloquently expressed by the sublime Cottage Under Siege – the first ‘official’ acknowledgement that there was a vibrant gay sensibility underpinning much of fandom (astonishing as it now seems, there was a time when that didn’t seem the case). But, I digress.

The concomitant of it being fans out there producing this stuff was the realisation that I could join in. And I did; not voraciously or prolifically like Paul Cornell or other names that you’d recognise on the bylines of articles across a plethora of titles, but nonetheless I wrote my fair share of story reviews and analyses. If I were to read any of them now, no doubt they’d seem gauche, naive, simplistic and clumsy, but then I was only fourteen. I was young and getting to grips with what it meant to write and think critically – and I was having fun. This wasn’t homework, it wasn’t imposed on me. I chose to do it. And I’ll always be grateful that fanzines existed, to give me a training ground, to throw words at a page and see them in print and know other people were reading them, and to evaluate my own writing, and to care about it.

In the article that prompted this one, Professor Atton laments the passing of the printed fanzine, argues that readers have a more serious level of interaction with it than with a website, and opines that, in moving to the web, ‘fanzines lose many of the characteristics that made them so appealing’. I don’t think it’s contradictory to agree with that, while acknowledging that there are many good, fun sites that are continuing the knockabout irreverence of the old stapled A5 ‘zine; Tachyon TV, for example, is a thriving presence that takes in podcasts, a blog, webzines, and Twitter in its determination to take the piss wherever it can, and that creative impulse will always be with us, while there’s a passion to share with others, especially if that passion is out of all proportion to the subject itself.

This is how it goes; all things have their moment and then pass. But I’ll always have an affection for the convention reports that detail the writer’s drunken hi-jinks across 8 pages, the editorials that discuss at length the problems with the photocopier that resulted in the January issue becoming an Easter ‘special’, the impenetrable heavyweight literary criticism applied to four cheap black and white episodes of a children’s programme that ran after Grandstand in the late 60s, the slanderous and inventive spoofs of not only the programme, and the people involved in making it, but also the fans themselves… the glorious, lunatic, passionate, non-profit-making love that finds a shape on photocopied white paper, folded into a fat bulge, and named incongruously after a ropey BBC prop.

IN SUMMARY: Staples corrode.