RT’s Patrick Mulkern recalls watching the missing episodes, being more scared by Patrick Troughton than the Daleks and becoming a true fan during the Jon Pertwee era.
“Kids love to be frightened. To them it’s like creeping up to the top of the stairs in the dark, which is surely a healthy emotion” – scriptwriter Terry Nation (Radio Times, 1973)
Can it really be 2023? As we Doctor Who fans prepare to celebrate the Diamond Anniversary in November, I realise with distinct unease that I’ve been following this extraordinarily long-lived television programme for some 56 of its 60 years. Not always as a fan, mind you. It actually took me quite a while to become one of those, as I will relate, and even then across the decades my appreciation has soared and faltered.
All fans have a story to tell of their obsession with the Time Lord’s adventures, and RadioTimes.com has kindly allowed me to express mine here. My Doctor Who memoir. My “Who-moir”. In several chapters, I will revisit my childhood, adolescence and “mature” years and reflect on my changing relationship with the series and the work it has provided, the friends I’ve made and the characters I’ve met along the way – from fellow fans to people who’ve worked on the programme.
The 1960s
I might be expelled through the clenched sphincter of fandom for this admission but, although I’m old enough and lucky enough to have watched Doctor Who in the 1960s –including many episodes now missing from the BBC archive – I wasn’t exactly captivated from day one. I know lots of people who were instantly hooked at jumping-on points across the decades, but as a toddler in the 1960s I had an aversion to Doctor Who. It spooked me. Not just the monsters but Doctor Who himself – Patrick Troughton. Strike me down but back then I found the American sci-fi series Lost in Space far more appealing. One of its main characters, Judy Robinson (Marta Kristen), was my first crush.
I was born in the mid 1960s halfway through William Hartnell’s tenure as the original Doctor. Yes, I’m that ancient… albeit too young to remember any of his episodes on first transmission (apart from his brief return in The Three Doctors in 1972/73). The Sixties may often be perceived as a black-and-white world. Sure, television was monochrome for most of the British population, but everything around us was vibrant with colour and bursting with innovation. I have excellent recall of those formative years. The fashions, the pop music, the cars, the toys and, yes, the telly… Especially the telly.
Unfortunately, Doctor Who simply wasn’t on my parents’ radar. Saturday TV meant an afternoon of sport with BBC1’s Grandstand and the football results, then we’d most likely switch to ITV. It was at my cousins’ homes that I was exposed to Who. They were older, braver and they loved it. As a toddler, the throbbing, hissing theme tune alone was enough to make me flee the room; doubly alarming was the sight of Troughton’s face bubbling up in the swirling patterns of the title sequence. To my young eyes, he had sinister features. The Dark Stranger no child must speak to. Years later, I realised that he’d actually been smiling in that intro and quite benign.
So my earliest Doctor Who memory? It’s an odd one. In the early 1980s, a creaky old episode was screened at a Doctor Who Appreciation Society convention – and my mind went “Ping!”. It was part three of The Underwater Menace, a derided Troughton story, and I knew I had seen the “dance of the Fish People” (a sort of aquatic ballet with strident music) when I was tiny in January 1967. Similarly, something clicked years later when clips surfaced from The Macra Terror of companion Polly screaming at a giant crab claw.
I have a clear memory of the summer of 1967, toddling round to our neighbours, my dad’s cousin (who looked like Dusty Springfield) and her hunky husband, who was the first adult Who nut I encountered. Enthusing about “an abominable snowman in Tibet”, he coaxed me into their living room but, after one glimpse of the hairy monster on a hillside, I fled home for my tea, thus forsaking the first Yeti story, The Abominable Snowmen – and my only opportunity to see a classic serial now mostly missing from the BBC archive.
Roll on, spring 1968. My mum was heavily pregnant with my sister Karen, so most Saturdays I was farmed out to my grandparents who lived in the big house up the hill. It was there, finally, secure in the company of my grandad (nicknamed Pampa) that my viewing of Doctor Who began in earnest. Pampa had enjoyed the series from the start, often telling me about the Daleks (whom I’d never seen), about his favourite adventure when the “old” Doctor met Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and about how silly the “new” Doctor had seemed when he first walked on with his tall hat and recorder.
Sitting on Pampa’s lap, aged nearly three, I had my second chance with the Yeti – though my mind computed them as bears with torch eyes, looming out of shadowy tunnels and roaring at soldiers. Compelling stuff. The Web of Fear subsequently became my all-time favourite story but for decades was another long-lost classic. I was overjoyed when most of the episodes were recovered in 2013 and I was staggered that many of director Douglas Camfield’s moody set-ups matched my hazy memories.
With Pampa, I also braved chunks of Fury from the Deep. That six-part classic is entirely lost now (bar the odd clip and its soundtrack), but the madcap helicopter rescue out at sea is etched in my mind, as is the sorrowful farewell to companion Victoria. The following week we watched another now missing instalment, the start of The Wheel in Space. A tense piece with mood music by the Radiophonic Workshop’s Brian Hodgson, it follows the Doctor and Jamie clambering through the corridors of an unmanned spaceship, prising open sliding doors, all the while observed and pursued by a comical, waddling Servo Robot.
Sadly, I’ve only the vaguest sketch of the repeat of The Evil of the Daleks: a Dalek gliding through a gloomy mansion. It was the summer of 1968 – I must have been out playing. The first episode that I steeled myself to watch at home alone was the delirious opener to The Mind Robber. Jamie and Zoe get lost in a white void and are hypnotised by “white” robots. With no one older around to explain, I was confused why the duo were trapped in the Blue Peter studio (whose set was a similar vast white space). Funny to think that Don Smith, the Radio Times photographer and years later a dear friend, was standing alongside them on the day of recording at BBC Television Centre.
I’ve always loved Unit (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) and the role it has played in the series over time: Soldiers v Monsters. Bring it on! And happily I witnessed its origins. In The Invasion, Lethbridge-Stewart (familiar from The Web of Fear) was now a Brigadier and brought to life in a charismatic, chipper performance by Nicholas Courtney. There was an exciting, action-packed sequence in episode four (now missing) where a Unit helicopter rescues the Doctor and his young friends from the rifle fire of the bad guys. People always seemed to be “saved by chopper” in Doctor Who back then. I recall that rescue mission, and the Doctor repeatedly venturing into the ultra-modern lair of evil Tobias Vaughan, but as for the Cybermen… Nada. They barely featured across the eight episodes of The Invasion.
As the months passed and led into 1969, my Doctor Who viewing tailed off. I can still see the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe running through mine tunnels and tumbling down a shaft in The Space Pirates (yes, another lost chunk). Troughton’s last stand The War Games sprawled over ten weeks and ended with him captured and put on trial by the Time Lords. Three weeks later Star Trek debuted on BBC1 in the same 5.15pm Saturday slot. The American sci-fi series was a sensation, far slicker than Doctor Who, and our families lapped it up. It mirrored the excitement in the air as the world anticipated the first Moon landing. While the real events unfolded on TV, I was inadvertently inhaling Bostick glue fumes as my dad helped me build an Airfix model of the Apollo rocket. That summer of 1969 was an exciting time to be alive as a young kid. The future was in the stars. Or so it seemed…
1970
Colour television had finally arrived in Britain. BBC2 had been broadcasting in colour for a few years, but it was only at the very end of 1969 that BBC1 and ITV followed suit. Not that the majority of the country could receive the signals or had upgraded their aerials and TV sets. My parents certainly couldn’t afford to until well into the decade, but Pampa always kept up with technology. In the vales of the Chilterns where our home town Chesham lies, the signal was patchy, but he and my Nan had a fully operative, colour telly installed in early 1970. For me, aged nearly five, this was nothing short of a marvel. I could gaze at their screen for hours. At any image. Sitting up so close that my eyebrows tingled from the inch of static energy radiating from the glass, I pored over the ever-shifting dots that made up the colour picture.
January 1970 was the first time my dad took an interest in Doctor Who. Maybe he’d spotted the glorious cover of Radio Times somewhere (we didn’t subscribe to the magazine then) or caught trailers on BBC1, but I know he was lured in by the programme’s cool new star, Jon Pertwee. Dad loved radio comedy, which had been Pertwee’s milieu hitherto. Thus we sat down together at teatime on Saturday 3rd January and watched the first episode of Spearhead from Space. Dad chortled at the scenes of the befuddled Doctor in a hospital bed, demanding his shoes and retrieving his key, and pulling at his new/old face in a mirror. Dad rarely followed any series for long and, when the demands of the local football club took precedence, he drifted away. I kept watching, often at my grandparents’ house.
1970-vintage Doctor Who was utterly brilliant. In many respects it still is. There was nothing on television to match it. Go and watch a 1970 Doomwatch, Paul Temple, or Out of the Unknown… Nah. Boring! Actually, Catweazle and Ace of Wands were innovative and zany but still not a patch on Doctor Who. With strong storytelling, pacey, urgent direction and chilling cliffhangers, it had become a more adult-orientated show and presented a challenge for timorous little ones. I was barely five but up for the frisson of fear and dollops of horror delivered at teatime. Luckily, Pertwee’s charismatic dandy Doctor teamed with the dependable Brigadier and rather severe scientist Liz Shaw (Caroline John) provided a reassuring, mature presence, while taking every threat extremely seriously.
Nightmare images etched in my memory are the hideous plastic Auton crashing through woodland to hijack a Unit Jeep; another Auton jerking to life from a line-up of dummies in a factory; then a group of mannequins smashing through a shop window and killing a policeman… Hot on their tail were the mysterious lizard creatures that were driving adults insane in caves, one of their number creeping up behind Liz when she’s alone in a barn. Every fan knows what a Silurian is now and what its shortcomings might be, but back then the slow reveal over several weeks was bloody terrifying for kids. One foggy Sunday morning in February 1970, Pampa took me on a dog walk over the fields and assured me he could hear one of those heavy-breathing lizard men coming towards us in the mist.
To this day, Inferno is still one of the most gripping stories ever made. Unfolding over seven weeks and closing the 1970 season, it gave us a glimpse of the end of the world. Inferno had an augmented title sequence, which, in monochrome, appeared to be exploding mountains and a torrent of grey porridge. When I saw episode three on Pampa’s colour TV, those images became red and fiery, and he explained the alarming concepts of volcanoes and molten lava. That episode transported the Doctor to a militaristic, parallel world and gave viewers a nasty turn when the “Brigade Leader” spins round in his chair and has an eyepatch over a deep scar. Courtney played the Brig’s sadistic alter ego to perfection and in subsequent years got much mileage out of anecdotes about his eyepatch, but for weeks in 1970 I had a sickening horror of the gory hole that must lie hidden behind it.
Inferno depicted soldiers and scientists regressing into ferocious werewolves (Primords) and there’s a scene where the Doctor’s locked in a cell next to a man who is slowly transforming. Soon this Primord is raving and bending apart the cell bars to enter and attack. Decades later, I was at one of mega-fan Ian Levine’s dos, standing next to Ian Fairbairn, the actor who’d played that Primord. He was diffident, charming and taken aback when I dropped into the chit-chat, “I have to tell you, you gave me nightmares when I was a kid.” “Well, I can only apologise,” Fairbairn shrugged.
The Silurians, the Primords, the eye-patched Brigade Leader and the appalling roll of lava that signals the end of the parallel Earth would now be only fading memories, had Ian Levine and others like him not stepped in to halt the BBC junking its own precious material. Early ’70s Doctor Who is without question my favourite period of the programme, but very few episodes exist in their original format. The BBC made black-and-white film copies and colour conversions for overseas markets, and we fans are so lucky that every Jon Pertwee episode survives in one form or another. Devotees of Doomwatch and Ace of Wands are not so fortunate.
1971
The day after New Year’s Day 1971, the Mulkerns settled down for the start of Pertwee’s second season. BBC1 trailers had heavily promoted a bearded new villain, the Master, accompanied by hypnotic Radiophonic music, which lured us into Terror of the Autons.
Actually, during this time, individual story titles didn’t register with me. Some adventures were distinct from what had gone before but, with the regular Earth setting and the Unit military base, the boundaries blurred. I was spooked by the policeman unmasked as a blank-faced Auton and a few weeks later believed Captain Chin Lee, an unsmiling Chinese woman in The Mind of Evil, to be another Auton about to have her face yanked off. That story merged seamlessly into The Claws of Axos, with its golden beings that turned into tentacled beasts, and they again blurred with the Primitives in Colony in Space.
Nevertheless, this was the time when I was developing as a fan. Exposed to Who for four years, I was finally obsessed. I loved the Unit set-up; I wanted to emulate Pertwee’s Doctor – any large towel or tablecloth served as a cloak; the Master was a suave bad guy; and I simply adored Jo Grant. She was plucky, stylish, gorgeous, self-sacrificing, with that slightly croaky voice and effervescent personality. No contest, Jo will always be my No 1 Doctor Who companion. Thus I became aware of “Katy Manning”. And if you had told five-year-old me that 40 years later my childhood heroine would become a close friend, I’d have dematerialised on the spot.
The TARDIS… Yes, the TARDIS was fascinating. I hadn’t really noticed it before because it barely featured in the episodes I’d seen. Then suddenly this old dark cupboard in the corner of the Doctor’s Unit laboratory became an object of wonder, a police box (whatever that was), the portal to a magically larger dimension. Along with Jo, I was transported to another world in Colony in Space. The mention of “Time Lords”, which Pampa did his best to explain (“very old men from another planet who live for hundreds of years”), made me realise for the first time that the Doctor and the Master were ALIENS.
From that moment I was captivated and couldn’t bear to miss an episode. One Saturday, I rowed bitterly with Dad to drive us back after his football match on Chesham Moor in time for episode five of Colony (we missed the start). And then that story was followed by The Daemons, still the era-defining classic. The Master in a red cape in his cavern conjuring up black magic, a stone gargoyle Bok and a giant horned devil, Azal. Crikey, it was a great time to be a burgeoning fan.
Imagine – or, if you were there, remember – the excitement of the 1971 Christmas holidays. Not only were we treated to a “complete adventure” repeat of The Daemons (the first of its kind, and one that helped imprint that story in the mind), but the BBC also kept blasting us with a trailer for Day of the Daleks. It was a specially shot film (now lost, sadly) of the Daleks making a spectacular return after four years, gliding along the Thames Embankment, squawking “EXTERMINATE!” That ensured that our whole family gathered for episode one on New Year’s Day.
1972
Doctor Who had remained solely a TV programme for me, a weekly appointment to view. I was only vaguely aware of it existing in paper form – a cousin being treated to Countdown (later TV Action), a weekly comic that sometimes had vivid cartoons of Pertwee on the cover. My mum, juggling the Mulkerns’ limited resources to feed and clothe a family of five, flatly refused to waste 5p on that. One day in January 1972, a box arrived at Waterside Infants’ School full of discarded magazines, and for the first time I became aware of the importance of Radio Times.
On the Saturday Television page I came across a billing for Day of the Daleks, adorned with a postage-stamp-sized cartoon of an Ogron. Rifling through the box, I found an earlier issue with a cartoon of a Dalek blasting out the word “ANNIHILATE”. Thrilling! The next day at Waterside post office, I grabbed that week’s Radio Times and insisted, INSISTED, that my mum shell out 5p for it. She agreed. I gawped at the simple but lovely cartoon of Alpha Centauri (from The Curse of Peladon), one of the most comical but endearing creatures ever to grace Doctor Who. That was it. Thereafter I made a fuss if we didn’t buy Radio Times, and before long it was added to our delivery from the newsagent. Each week, the brief write-up and cartoon gave devotees a taster of what was to come the following Saturday. Here we glimpsed for the first time a Sea Devil, in profile. Presaging The Mutants, the Radio Times cartoon suggested to me a new robot to rival the Daleks, so I was dismayed when it turned out to be a space station, Skybase.
That ninth season cemented the magnetism of the series for me. The Daleks and their simian minions the Ogrons hadn’t disappointed. The Curse of Peladon presented a freak show of fascinating aliens; the ursine Aggedor giving me nightmares, while I tried to construct my own Delegate Arcturus from a revolving stool, a mop and a Hoover hose. Not a success. And then The Sea Devils… Wow! What a great six weeks that was. One Saturday, my mum and my auntie took a group of cousins to Wembley Arena to see Billy Dainty in Mother Goose on Ice. I was seething. The show was abysmal, not entertaining on any level, and I was desperate to get the Tube home to Chesham in time to see my favourite programme. We made it with seconds to spare. My parents were starting to worry about my obsession.
The concept of kids hiding “behind the sofa” has always seemed daft to me. A middle-class concept anyway, supposing that your living room is spacious enough for your settee not to be flat against the wall. Every Saturday, my sisters and I settled right in front of the TV, perched on cushions. Karen, who’d have been four, Debra nearly three, and me almost seven. The girls had an extra cushion to lift quickly in front of their eyes if things were too scary. That’s how we prepared to watch The Mutants.
Doctor Who was always the talk of the playground on Monday morning. My school mates were either forbidden from watching it and wetting the bed, or as enthralled as I was, second-guessing how the cliffhanger might resolve the following Saturday. At the end of The Sea Devils episode four, what had Jo seen inside that diving bell? The Doctor half-drowned… a Sea Devil… both…? Episode four of The Mutants ended with the Skybase hull ruptured and Jo, her friends and the wicked Marshal all being sucked into space. Who would survive…? I can see the weaknesses of that story now, and The Time Monster that followed, but we were less sophisticated souls in 1972. And committed. Although it was a hot June, my family watched two episodes of The Time Monster in a snowstorm. We were on holiday in a caravan in the New Forest and the portable telly was terrible, relying on an aerial that was more like a bent coat-hanger. I stood alongside the TV, twiddling the tuning dial, twisting the aerial and boosting the reception with my own body, squinting to follow the Doctor and Jo’s antics in Atlantis.
That summer there was a second mini-wave of Dalekmania when BBC1 premiered the two Dalek feature films. Made in the 1960s, they starred Peter Cushing in an approximation of the grandfatherly first Doctor we’d never seen. A crowd of schoolfriends and I re-enacted the scenarios in the playground, taking turns as Thals, Robomen, and holding our arms out like Daleks, quacking “EXTERMINATE”, or playing human victims only too happy to be fried in the death rays.
Leafing through the Radio Times double issue for Christmas 1972, I spotted the most exciting news ever. A small panel at the back announced, quite out of the blue, “a unique occasion in time and space – we bring together all three Doctor Whos”. A grainy monochrome image showed Pertwee alongside Troughton, as sinister as I remembered, and Hartnell, the real first Doctor (not Cushing) who was always talked about in hushed tones. He was akin to an Old Testament figure, though he’d only left the series six years earlier. When? WHEN would The Three Doctors be on the telly? Delicious torture.
1973
This first multi-Doctor story was pure magic with Pertwee and Troughton sparking off each other, and as for Hartnell… Well, it was disappointing he didn’t appear in the flesh alongside his successors, but his contribution (restricted to pre-filmed footage shown on a screen) was something of a miracle. The production team were fortunate to catch Hartnell while he was still lucid. His faculties deteriorated fast over the following months, and Radio Times writer David Gillard told me many years later that when he went to interview him in autumn 1973, Hartnell was incoherent and the noises he uttered had to be interpreted by his wife Heather.
Pertwee’s fourth season was another triumph, a string of varied stories as the Doctor’s exile ended and he travelled more in time and space. Highlights for younger viewers were the Drashigs and the clever concept of the Miniscope in Carnival of Monsters; Frontier in Space with all its intergalactic hardware and the clifftop reveal of the Daleks in the final episode; and The Green Death… Imagine what it was like watching that with no foreknowledge that the Doctor and Jo would get trapped in a mine and that out of the rubble would emerge giant maggots.
I turned eight in the middle of The Green Death and for my birthday party my darling Mum toiled to make a Dalek cake, standing upright, with chocolate finger arms and Smarties for its skirt balls. We had sunny weather so my friends and I had to devour it quickly because the icing was melting and the Dalek was starting to look like one of the programme’s less-than-special effects. A happy day. But this was also a time of sorrow for Doctor Who.
In the week between episodes five and six of The Green Death, I went to see Pampa in his office during my lunchbreak and he told me, “Did you hear the news? The Master has died.” I couldn’t quite grasp the information, but he showed me the Daily Mirror report that Roger Delgado had been killed in a car crash. Then, at the weekend, it was the final episode of the season. Jo Grant leaving for good, and the Doctor drove away alone across the horizon in Bessie. Doctor Who without the Master or my childhood heroine…? I was inconsolable. I blubbed. Mortifying.
My gran brought Doctor Who literature into my life. She’d popped into Chesham’s new library and somehow stumbled upon Doctor Who and the Crusaders. As she handed the book over (“I just thought you’d like it”), I studied it with bemusement. It was the hardback version with a knight in an exaggerated pose on the cover, and it had been published in 1965. This all seemed far removed from the Doctor Who I was used to. After struggling with a few pages, I put it aside, and Gran returned it to the library two weeks later. Now, of course, I acknowledge The Crusaders as one the finest Who adaptations, written by David Whitaker, the original script editor who’d shaped the programme in its earliest days.
Weeks later, we went into Martin’s the newsagent in Chesham High Street and blazing on the shelves were the three very first adaptations in the new Target Book range: Doctor Who and the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Zarbi and (repackaged) Doctor Who and the Crusaders. All adorned with appealing covers and the serious, grandfatherly face of the “old” Doctor. I had to have them. Gran bought me one, Mum bought another, and the third I had to wait for, but within a few weeks all three were on my bookshelf and, though they felt a little above my reading age, I devoured them. It didn’t occur to me then that more titles might be in the pipeline.
The very best was to materialise later that year. Mum and I walked into another paper shop in Chesham and there was a stack – yes, a stack, nearly as tall as I was – of a gorgeous glossy magazine with Jon Pertwee on the cover. It had something to do with Radio Times and ten years of Doctor Who. I grabbed one, flicked through its stunning pages, and nearly passed out. My Mum purchased it without a quibble and, back in our Mini, I gorged on it.
The magazine revealed a brand-new space/time tunnel for the title sequence of the upcoming series. It had write-ups of every adventure going right back to the beginning. I read the words “An Unearthly Child” for the first time. The Doctor had a granddaughter!? It was stuffed with so much information from before I could remember Doctor Who, it was gold dust. Aztecs, Sensorites, Romans, Mechonoids, Smugglers, Chameleons… It covered a 12-episode Dalek story called The Nightmare Begins with a minuscule write-up and a picture of “the Brigadier” as another person altogether – space agent Bret Vyon. It put into order all the vague memories I had of the Troughton era and gave titles and shape to all the Pertwee adventures I had loved so much.
Colourful articles reminded me of Jamie, Victoria and Zoe, but Peter Purves from Blue Peter had been in Doctor Who too… really? And who were this good-looking pair Ben and Polly? I was very taken with Anneke Wills with her colourful dress and blonde hair being chased by Cybermen. Lovely Jo/Katy reacting to a giant maggot. But then a whole column “spoiling” the five adventures coming up in the next series, alongside a picture of a dark-haired woman, the new “girl” Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), in a castle with a helmeted warrior looming above her. It’s no wonder that the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special became a fan bible, a bestseller, and a treasure that has never been surpassed.
1974
In January 1974, the Target book range unexpectedly blossomed, not with further tales from antiquity but with adaptations of the current Doctor’s TV adventures. In fact, they were Pertwee’s first two broadcast stories from 1970, now retitled Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters. Adorned with striking covers by Chris Achilleos, they were beautifully written by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke (names I recognised from Radio Times), and I rattled through them. More books followed, the most exciting being the double whammy of Doctor Who and the Daemons and Doctor Who and the Sea Devils published together in October 74. Two favourite serials now in paperback. I agonised over which to start first. I plumped for The Daemons. By the end of 74, I had ten Doctor Who Target books on my shelf and yearned for more. This was the only way to relive past classics – and in riveting detail.
By now I was making up my own stories. It was usually up to me to invent the scenarios during playtime at Blackhorse Middle School and, to the exasperation of my teachers, I was always scribbling tales and sketching Axons, maggots, Yeti et al in exercise books. On my Sunday dog walks with Pampa I drove him to expletives with my increasingly ambitious yarns about alien invasion. He had encouraged me to watch the series since the 1960s so he only had himself to blame. To this day, my sisters Karen and Debra complain about the antics I devised where one of them was always cast as the Ogron.
Our Springfield Road gang became Unit soldiers fighting off attacks by Autons, Sea Devils, Daleks… Doctor Who’s largely Earthbound setting readily lent itself to re-enactments. All around us in Chesham we had moorland, woodland, warehouses, bomb sites, derelict prefabs, gasometers, industrial estates… Minutes from our street were the ruins of the Royal Bucks Laundry, a vast multilevel site with a crumbling office block and outhouses, abandoned 1950s vans, huge hand-cranked tumble driers we could climb into, and a dangerous rusty 100ft water tower. It still astounds me that four decades later, on the same industrial estate where we’d played as kids, the prosthetics company Millennium FX set up its workshop, and I went along to watch monsters for Peter Capaldi’s Doctor being made.
On TV in 1974 we were absorbing Sarah’s adventures in what would be Pertwee’s final season. The Time Warrior was great stuff (a rare jaunt to the past for the third Doctor) but it was also one of the last times Doctor Who genuinely freaked me. At the end of episode one when Linx the Sontaran removed his helmet… I couldn’t bear to look. Pure horror at teatime! I’d have been aged eight then, embarrassed to be scared, and in the coming weeks I perched on Pampa’s lap, covering my face whenever Linx revealed his. Pampa guffawed at the “time warrior”, saying he looked like a jacket potato, but I didn’t summon the willpower to peep until episode four.
Next, Invasion of the Dinosaurs. That sounded massively exciting, so I was massively cheesed off to be going to a friend’s birthday party where Doctor Who was verboten. His mother was emphatic. There would be no Time Lord with the trifle because my pal’s little brother was a bedwetter. I made my mum promise to study the episode forensically and take notes. She’d never followed Doctor Who closely in her life but agreed to do so and, on the drive home, she regaled me with details of deserted London streets, crushed cars, looters (what were they?) and… a dinosaur. But which dinosaur? Mum had no idea, but my school mates confirmed on Monday it had been a T rex. And rubbish! Oh dear. Invasion of the Dinosaurs had plus points but its eponymous monsters were not among them.
Planet of the Spiders was to be Pertwee’s six-part swansong. It’s a story I’d rarely revisit now; deterred by the turgid plotting, those mouldy drop-outs at the meditation centre and the poorly realised, screeching giant spiders; but it was entertaining in 1974. Most fascinating were the revelation that the monks Cho-Je and K’Anpo were Time Lords (indeed the same Time Lord) and the concept of “regeneration”, which was expressed for the first time.
After 60 years, fans accept change as a vital ingredient in the longevity of Doctor Who, but for young viewers in the 1970s very little had altered in living memory. Sure, change had been in the air since the loss of the Master and Jo, but nothing prepared us for the unsettling news that Jon Pertwee was leaving. He had been our hero for nearly five years.
The Doctor’s final collapse, back “home” in his laboratory in front of the Brigadier and Sarah, was immensely poignant. A beloved hero of 1970s TV was dying – or rather “regenerating” before our eyes into a complete stranger. Unfamiliar profile, eyes closed, no words spoken. Tom Baker. He was Who, but who was he? There had been no on-screen transformation from Troughton to Pertwee in 1969, and I was too young to have seen the Hartnell/Troughton one in 1966, so this was a first. Doctor Who would never be the same. Rather innocently, that summer I longed for the process to be reversed. When would my Doctor come back?
Next: meeting Tom Baker – twice…
My Life as a Doctor Who Fan in full:
- Part 2 – 1974 to 1981
- Part 3 – 1982 to 1984
- Part 4 – 1985 to 1989
- Part 5 – 1990 to 2012
- Part 6 – 2013 to now
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