Catmachine

There remains very little else to tell. In some ways it feels odd that a series of memoir-based blog entries could have started with vague black and white memories and ended up in the present, but on the other hand given the subject matter that's exactly what I should have expected. So... previously... Season Four had ended with a overblown bang and the news that there would be another hiatus in 2009 broken only by five hour-long "specials", guest appearances for the Doctor in two episodes of season three of Sarah Jane Adventures and a week of Torchwood on BBC1. How would the poor fans cope deprived in such a manner? Don't you think he looks tired? It's not as if David Tennant was using the hiatus to put his feet up and relax. Far from it - he took the opportunity to pursue the actors' Holy Grail of playing Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company . I didn't see that even though it was recorded, broadcast and released on DVD and BluRay, but did watch al...

There have probably been countless terabytes of information written about the new Doctor Who since its return five years ago. Whilst I am loathe to add to this data pollution, as a wise Icelander once said, " I've started so I'll finish... " The first few months of 2005 were torture. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but it seemed to take a long time to get to Easter when the first episode was due to be broadcast. All sorts of bit of information were leaking out in the press. The new Doctor was apparently going to be played by Christopher Eccleston whom I remembered from The League of Gentlemen and 28 Days Later but didn't know much else about. What I'd seen of the costume made him look more like The Navvy than The Doctor, but I would suspend judgement until I'd seen him in action. I was more worried about the casting of the companion. Billie Piper ? In my mind this seemed like a big mistake - dangerous stunt casting. Had they learned nothing from the cas...

Previously on DTC... At a time when, aside from the 1996 McGann TV movie, there had been no new Doctor Who for over ten years, I suddenly came across a double cassette in Borders - not an audio book, but a proper brand new, full-cast, audio-effects, four episodes, theme music and everything story starring the fifth Doctor and Nyssa. Well of course I bought it. It wasn't half bad either; neither Peter Davison 's nor Sarah Sutton 's voices seemed to have changed that much (unlike Steven Pacey who, in the brief audio Blake's Seven comeback of The Sevenfold Crown and The Syndleton Experiment seemed to have turned Tarrant into an unrecognisable gruff voiced old toff) and it being audio they were free to do stuff they'd never have attempted on TV. They were being produced by a company called Big Finish who seemed to have achieved the impossible by being granted a licence to produce official Doctor Who by the BBC (I was aware of previous unlicenced productions which ...

So that was it for Doctor Who, I thought. A shame in many ways but probably for the best, I thought. I was wrong on both counts. 1991. The first sign of the Doctor's return occurred in the basement of Forbidden Planet (in its larger home in New Oxford Street). A confirmed geek, I'd been continuously visiting the store in its various locations since foundation. In those pre-internet days it was often the only way to get news about what was going on in my favourite fictional worlds without crossing the line into the scary territory of fanzines or hanging out at the Fitzroy Tavern , something which, for some reason, I was unwilling to do. That had obviously been my undoing. This rebirth as a series of books entitled The New Adventures of Doctor Who published by Virgin was apparently masterminded by a cabal of uberfans. Flicking through these new novels they seemed to be self-consciously more adult than the former TV series and its Target novelisations , with chapter titles tak...

1985. So, no more Doctor Who, at least for the time being. What was I going to do? To be honest, it couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was about to finish my second year at university and so would probably benefit from being able to concentrate on my coursework in the third year without obsessing about some old TV show. However, instead of knuckling down to my studies I started obsessing about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll instead. On the final day of my second year I lost my virginity; thinking about it in the context of this memoir I wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something? Was I being advised to put aside childish things in exchange for this new world of sensual experience? Probably not. Like all human beings I am seeing patterns in things that aren't there. For good or for bad I spent the hiatus year enjoying myself, and thanks to a conveniently timed bout of glandular fever, didn't even have to sit my final examinations. I ent...

After the dramatic spectacle of the Fifth Doctor's exit , the Sixth Doctor really had something to live up to. And this time we weren't going to have to wait a whole year to see what he was like. For the first time (in a never to be repeated experiment) the regeneration had taken place before the end of the season. This was a move as bold as the transmission times being shifted to mid week. I couldn't wait, and what's more wouldn't have to. I must admit I was dubious about the casting. Actor Colin Baker had already appeared not long before as Time Lord guard Maxil, who had attempted to execute the incumbent Fifth Doctor. Would they attempt an in-story explanation for the remarkable similarity? Furthermore I was already familiar with him from his appearance in Blake's Seven as Bayban the Butcher. Did this mean that the Sixth Doctor was going to be played as a violent maniac in leather and studs? They passed on the leather and studs, but kept the violent ma...

University was a very different world. People there were, well, nice . After spending six years in the Arena of Bastards that constituted Highgate School, this was a revelation. My fellow students were now more interested in my opinions, in what I had to say than they were in making my life a living hell. Also there were girls there. It took some getting used to, but I felt I could live with it. And I no longer had to address anyone as "sir". The only real problem seemed to be getting to watch Doctor Who. There was a TV in the common room of each hall of residence, the trouble was though that you could end up running around campus only to find all the cool kids in each one watching the same show which needless to say wasn't Doctor Who. Due to the BBC's odd scheduling, at this time the programme was nearly always on opposite some alternative indie music slot on BBC2 or the new Channel Four - which of course was difficult to get bright young students to give up wat...

He'd been the definitive Doctor for what seemed like forever and a whole new generation of fans had been growing up with him in the role. Then all of a sudden he'd changed and there was someone else in his clothes. Someone who looked far too young. Would the programme survive such a drastic metamorphosis? No, I'm not talking about 1 January 2010. This was on 21 March 1981. A Saturday. I was a teenager, and the incoming Doctor was Peter Davison. In theory we'd have to wait until January 1982 to find out what this new incarnation was going be like. Back then a ten month wait such as this was an eternity - just what was I going to occupy myself with in the meantime? Well, there was always music. That was rather interesting in 1981. I'd become obsessed with Toyah , and there were any number of other fascinating bands around, such as Soft Cell , The Human League , Ultravox , Visage , Department S , Classix Nouveaux and countless other combos who, years later, would b...

I walked through the doors and then pushed through a heavy black velvet curtain, the top of which seemed lost in the tangle of dark confusion up above and suddenly found myself standing in a building on the surface of an alien world. I was on Traken. Or rather I was in a studio at the BBC Television Centre on the set of The Keeper of Traken (1981). A lot had changed for the Doctor since I'd met him in Wood Green . The series was undergoing a change in direction, similar to that experienced at the end of the Pertwee era . Once more the old Doctor was having to cope with a style of programme that would become his successor's stock in trade. The title sequence had changed; gone was the familiar time tunnel, to be replaced by a rather tacky looking starfield. Yes, we were definitely over the page again... Even more shockingly, Delia Derbyshire 's definitive arrangement of the theme tune had been replaced by a new one, realised by the Radiophonic Workshop 's Peter Howell ...

A second major problem in basing a memoir like this around Doctor Who is that as I start to describe things that happened when I was older, the memories are far better and more detailed. If I'm not careful I'm going to end up with a blow by blow account of every episode by the time I get to the 1985 hiatus which quite apart from being incredibly time consuming would probably make for very boring reading. Another script that my dad brought home ostensibly for me to draw on the back of was EPISODE 1 of SERIAL 4C , namely The Ark in Space (1975). For some reason the pages of this one were yellow rather than the more usual white; probably some BBC colour coding scheme. I found the story fascinating and a million miles (literally) away from the military-based runarounds and pompous galactic federations of the Pertwee years. Despite the lack of oxygen the episode was a breath of fresh air for the budding SF fan. A deserted space station in the far future with a crew in suspended ...

There was something different about Jon Pertwee's final season. To my youthful mind this difference was all wrapped up in its position in the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special; the as yet untransmitted adventures were listed "over the page" from the rest of the guide on a page of their own. This, and the fact that they lay in the future set them apart. Of course there were other major differences. There was a new "time tunnel" title sequence, Jo and The Master had gone and there was this annoying Sarah Jane Smith woman following the Doctor around and being over self-consciously "feminist" every other line, although they called it women's lib in those days. Even as a nine year old I remember thinking they were labouring the point to the extent that it almost felt as if the scriptwriters were taking the piss. I had no idea the character would still be around thirty-five years later. The final story Planet of the Spiders (1974) had a melancho...

Of course one problem in basing a memoir like this around Doctor Who is that it's all been done before and if I'm not careful, people are going to accuse me of ripping off 2006's Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf (so I'll have to be careful not to mention John Abineri) or even 2007's Dalek I Loved You (so I'll have to be careful to sound like I actually like Doctor Who). There was something about the beginning of the seventies that felt like a big change, even to someone as young as I was at the time. It still feels as if everything in my life up to the end of 1969 was in black and white, whereas in 1970 I started being broadcast in colour. Even though we moved to London in (late?) 1968, my memory has shifted this event to 1970 for dramatic reasons and so the move from Birmingham to London also seems to have been simultaneous with the transition from monochrome to colour. Likewise, I don't remember watching any episodes of Doctor Who featuring Patrick Trought...