The Tom Baker years, the early days of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, and meeting Tom – twice.
“Viewers are increasingly sophisticated, and that’s an excellent thing. Part of the fun lies in keeping up with them” – Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe (Radio Times, 1976)
1975
A deep sense of unease had fallen across Christmas 1974 with the advent of an unknown man as our hero, the Doctor. Who was Tom Baker? The BBC didn’t make it any easier by screening a “complete adventure” repeat of Jon Pertwee’s Planet of the Spiders on 27th December, the very day before Baker’s Doctor was due to launch in Robot – also heralded by a weird and (for Baker) unflattering transformation montage in Radio Times.
The newcomer went down like cold turkey at our multi-generational festive gathering. My cousins disliked him on sight. The verdict of my dad and both my grandads was that, with his wild curls and bulging eyes, Baker was like “Harpo ruddy Marx”. They liked the Marx Brothers but didn’t want one in Doctor Who. This complaint would be frequently levelled by my elders in the coming years whenever I had the programme on in their company.
The new incarnation certainly didn’t lead to a dip in ratings (far from it) and, after a shaky start with the giant Robot, I was becoming used to Baker’s zany take on the Time Lord. During 1975, we watched him fend off the ant-like Wirrn in the excellent The Ark in Space, a Sontaran on Dartmoor and shonky Cybermen in caves. Genesis of the Daleks was a grim classic giving us our first exposure to their wizened creator, Davros. My mum banned me from watching during this period because I was having night terrors, but that had nothing to do with Who and was the fault of the ITV series Thriller I was following with my grandparents. We’d call it “post-watershed” now. A weekly appointment with the psychologically disturbed, which left me in a similar state of mind. Thus, all potentially spooky television was off the cards and I had to “listen only” to episode five of Genesis from our staircase.
That spring in Waterside, Chesham, our gang of local kids created our own version of Genesis on the wasteland of the half-demolished Royal Bucks Laundry. I bagged Davros, of course. I sat on a chair in the ruins doing the full shrieking maniac, just as my grandad Pampa was walking by. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted over. “Practising to be Davros,” I replied. “Ruddy lunatic. You want locking up,” he scoffed, hastening away.
All in all, Season 12 hadn’t been a bad run. And in the summer hols of 1975, Tom Baker went on the road to meet his fans. Now aged ten, I was such a Doctor Who nut that I badgered Ken Crabbe, owner of Chapter One bookshop, to find out when the next Target novelisations were coming out. At my behest, he frequently phoned the publishers for updates. Thus, Chesham appeared on their radar as a hotbed of fandom and when Baker was up for a promotional tour in a catchment area not far from London, Chapter One was one of a few bookshops he visited.
Picture the scene. Thursday 28th August 1975. Small Bucks town. Tiny shop. Hot afternoon. Hordes of excited kids piling in to meet the newish Doctor. And in a blaze of sunshine Tom Baker arrived – a towering, beaming figure. A fictional hero suddenly made flesh… 3D and tangible. He was ebullient and charismatic. He looked wonderful in his costume, the red jacket with elbow patches, like a fogey geography teacher, and gamely sporting The Scarf, even though it was summer. His dark curls were resplendent, and several admirers had the nerve to ask if his hair was real. He let a little girl tug his locks to prove they were indeed emanating from his scalp. My abiding memory is Tom’s toothy grin, warming voice and obvious delight at being there.
Poor Tom, some kids were still muttering sotto voce that Pertwee was their favourite. Though there were piles of the Target book Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (Baker’s debut story), far more units of Pertwee’s newly minted Doctor Who and the Green Death were being sold and shoved under Baker’s nose for his sweeping autograph.
Because I was “the Doctor Who Fan” in the shopkeeper’s eyes and a prime reason for his ringing tills, I was given pride of place with the Time Lord and allowed to go up several times and stand gormlessly by his side. And all these years later I remember shaking Tom’s huge hand and stroking his iconic scarf. After a couple of hours, as the show was leaving town, my mum asked Tom to pose for some snaps on our Kodak Instamatic camera. She stepped off the kerb into the traffic in Market Square to get the giant Doctor in the frame with her ten-year-old son. She almost succeeded but – to our lasting amusement – the money shot that eventually came back from Boots was cropped at Tom’s eye level.
The other photo opportunity in the summer of 75 was our first visit to the Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House. We always holidayed in the New Forest so a pootle across to Wiltshire – a family of five crammed into a Mini Clubman – was manageable. My parents were principally indulging me, but the stately home, its rhododendron drive, lakeside lawns and safari park enhanced the excursion for everyone.
As we turned a corner into a yard at Longleat, we clocked the outsized police box entrance to the exhibition. Queuing to pay, we could hear the theme tune, the TARDIS take-off sound and Daleks quacking away inside. It was a small warren, built into a stable block, with a central chamber with the TARDIS control column at its heart, and alcoves displaying all manner of monsters: Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Daleks, Ogrons… I’m pretty sure Alpha Centauri and Aggedor from the Peladon stories were there too. I took loads of photos. Sadly, my scrapbook dematerialised from the Mulkern archive long ago, but Longleat became an annual pilgrimage for the rest of the decade.
Girded by the exhibition and meeting Tom Baker, I was more than primed for his second season. Which came upon us suddenly. We didn’t have to wait until winter as had been tradition; the BBC1 schedulers brought the episodes forward to the autumn. Their decision made 1975 the most bountiful year of the decade with brand-new Doctor Whos on 35 Saturday nights.
Radio Times had disappointingly ceased its thumbnail cartoons for each billing in 1974 but now heralded Terror of the Zygons with a lustrous piece of artwork by Frank Bellamy. I feasted on Season 13 – a string of gripping adventures for the Doctor and Sarah, many of which still stand up extremely well today. Horror pastiches with the shape-shifting Zygons, the Loch Ness monster, the Jekyll and Hyde anti-men in Planet of Evil, the mummies and Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars…
1976
The dark nights of January 1976 exposed us to the teatime horrors of The Brain of Morbius. I loved its array of gruesome images – a headless monster, a brain splatting on a floor – and my eyes nearly popped out during the Doctor’s mind battle with Morbius when a line of earlier unknown Doctors flashed up on screen. I’ll take no arguments on this; they were earlier Doctors. Enthralling. Of course, almost nobody watching in 1976 realised the faces belonged to BBC personnel (Doctor Who luminaries like director Douglas Camfield and script editor Robert Holmes) only too happy to drag up and pose as mystery incarnations.
I was keenly aware of the phasing out of Unit and the Brigadier, and lamented that the Doctor no longer regarded his laboratory at Unit HQ as “home”. Sarah provided the one constant. And she will always be “Sarah” to me, not the twee “Sarah Jane” that only became prevalent in later years. In her heyday, the Doctor used both names rarely, only for emphasis. Sarah’s sudden departure in The Hand of Fear provided a farewell almost as sorrowful as Jo Grant’s, and I was disappointed by the Doctor’s companion-less mission in The Deadly Assassin with its decaying vision of the Master and all-male Gallifrey. By the end of 1976, I was beginning to sense that Doctor Who might no longer be for me.
Solace came in the form of The Making of Doctor Who, published by Target Books that December. For fact-thirsty fans, it immediately became a second bible (to follow the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special of 1973). It was a vast revision of a 1972 book I’d never heard of and packed with information on the evolution of the series. There was an up-to-date story guide, running from An Unearthly Child in 1963 right through to The Hand of Fear. Most of the earlier synopses were directly copied from the RT Special, albeit with striking title changes for many William Hartnell stories. What I’d known for three years as “World’s End” was retitled “Dalek Invasion of Earth”, “The Executioners” was now “The Chase” and so on.
As many fans now realise, most of the Hartnell multi-part serials had never been given proper overall titles, not publicised ones anyway. Instead, each individual episode had its own name and, in 1973, RT had taken the title of each first episode to refer to a story as a whole. To this day I still prefer The Dead Planet over The Daleks, and The War of God to The Massacre. Though clearly The Nightmare Begins, while appetising for a first episode, was inadequate to describe the entire run of the 12-part epic that The Making of Doctor Who was now calling The Dalek Master Plan.
The point is that for many of us growing up in the 1970s the “ancient history” of Doctor Who remained a mystery, a puzzle with many aspects (even story titles) that didn’t match. Hard to imagine in today’s world where every minuscule detail is covered in print and instantly discoverable online. Back then, unless you’d watched religiously and kept scholarly notes since 1963, much of the history was untraceable, unknowable. Even the regularly changing BBC production team and the reliable Radio Times couldn’t keep track of it.
1977
As Doctor Who shifted gear into 1977, my devotion nosedived. I missed Sarah and the Brigadier and found The Face of Evil insipid – apart from one aspect. One person, rather. Louise Jameson as Leela, a warrior of the Sevateem and the Doctor’s unlikely new companion. A phenomenal actress as an eye-popping character – wielding a knife and deadly thorns – who simply would not be sanctioned today. Even The Robots of Death, which I now consider brilliant, left me cold, and my sisters and I guffawed at the hamster and “wobbing sleeping bag” that were supposed to convey giant rats in The Talons of Weng Chiang.
My “fan light” switched on again brightly in April 1977 when BBC2 screened the documentary Whose Doctor Who. Melvyn Bragg assessed the appeal of a series that had been running for 14 years (only 14? Extraordinary!) and the psychological effect it could be having on children. Best of all the doc was stuffed with clips. I loved catching glimpses of Pertwee’s Doctor for the first time in three years, and squinted to make sense of the snippets featuring his predecessors.
It confirmed that, though I might not much care for current Doctor Who, I had a burning interest in past glories. It also made me realise that I was not alone. There were other fans out there, who shared memories and enthusiasm – not the casual, dwindling interest of my mates in the playground. The Making of Doctor Who and Whose Doctor Who spurred my desire to know as much about the programme’s past as possible. But how?
Louise Jameson made a guest appearance on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, the live BBC1 show on Saturday mornings, and took calls from viewers. She was giving away some of Leela’s accoutrements to a lucky fan who could answer one question: “How many Doctor Who companions have there been?” Simple! I duly sent off my postcard to the BBC – not expecting to win but sure I had the correct answer. The following Saturday I was aghast when the number read out by Swap Shop host Noel Edmonds did not tally with mine. It was higher. How could this be? Someone had got it right, so what did they know that I did not?
In the summer, on my family’s third pilgrimage to the Longleat Exhibition, I came across a pile of leaflets by the exit about the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. The name sounded pompous for a fan club but I kept one and my mum urged me to get in touch with the like-minded. I was hesitant but it proved to be a rabbit-hole moment.
There were details for the DWAS’s Reference Department run by its historian, J Jeremy Bentham. This must be the man with all the answers! Aged 12, I wrote to Jeremy asking about the Swap Shop roll call of companions that had left me in a quandary. He wrote back in October 1977 with a full list. Some surprises there, including Sara Kingdom, whom I’d only read briefly mentioned in one story (The Dalek Master Plan). But who the hell was Katarina? Turns out they were both short-lived companions who’d travelled with Hartnell and come to sticky ends. I was agog.
It was the start of a long correspondence with Jeremy as, on a weekly basis over the next few years, I bombarded him with arcane queries. He was patient and forbearing. I ordered all his Reference Department synopses and STINFOs (story information sheets) that went into extraordinary detail on every televised adventure. Suddenly, instead of the ridiculously cursory summary of the 12-part Master Plan in the RT Special and The Making of Doctor Who, I was reading an incredibly thorough account of all 12 episodes that flipped my wig.
That 1965/66 storyline put 1977 Who to shame. The Invisible Enemy was dreadful on almost every level, with a ludicrous giant prawn emerging as the baddie. K•9 was an embarrassing addition – far too childish for me, even at the age of 12. I had a party at my house on the night of the final episode and couldn’t be bothered to watch the end of the story, so I didn’t see how the robot dog joined the Doctor and Leela until years later. I missed chunks of Image of the Fendahl altogether. Truly drifting now.
I was thrilled in Christmas 1977 when my parents finally surrendered to my pleading and bought me a tape recorder. A basic Philips device with five buttons, taking audio cassette tapes: C60, C90 or C120, which indicated the minutes they could record. Heaven! Thus I was able to tape the BBC1 repeat of The Robots of Death over New Year 1978 and play it back to my heart’s content. A fine story to start with. I enjoyed it far more than on first transmission and drank in the terse dialogue and fabulous incidental music by Dudley Simpson.
1978
Underworld followed. A terrible production but not bad to listen to on tape; again impressive music. And The Invasion of Time rounded off a patchy season with a diabolical brick-walled TARDIS, but also one of the most startling cliffhangers at the end of episode four, when a quartet of Sontarans unexpectedly invaded Gallifrey. It ended with Tom Baker breaking the fourth wall (not for the first time) and grinning straight down the camera as he unveiled K•9 Mark II. His flippancy could be sublime, very funny, but it also negated dramatic tension. Baker was treading a fine line between displaying star ego and valiantly keeping the audience on their toes. No mean feat with four years under his floppy hat.
In the summer of 1978, Pampa spotted a Doctor Who competition in the Buckinghamshire Advertiser. The lucky winners would meet Tom Baker. All you had to do was cut out and collect photos of monsters in the next few issues, identify the creatures (ridiculously easy) and send them in. Now 13, I huffed that I couldn’t be bothered. Besides, I’d already met “the Doctor” three years earlier. Pampa and my Nan saved the photos and made me post my entry.
The news soon came that I was one of the winners. I was to report around midday on Saturday 2nd September at the Bull, a large inn outside Gerrards Cross. It was Dad’s 39th birthday so we made it a family outing: my parents, my little sisters and me. We were ushered into a function room where lots of other families stood around – each brood including one immediately obvious, socially awkward, crushingly embarrassed Doctor Who nerd. I was one of those. Manky sandwiches and bottles of nasty 1970s pop drinks were set out on trestle tables.
Then word came. The Lord of Time had been delayed… but he shouldn’t be too long. Half an hour later Tom Baker breezed into the room, loud and effusive, with an entourage of lackeys. We nerds twitched, our siblings stifled yawns and our star-struck parents shuffled us forward.
This was a different man from the one I’d met three summers earlier. No longer fresh-faced. Hair lighter and straggly. Wearing the Doctor’s long tweedy coat. When my moment came to be near him, it hit me that – like the old geezers who patrolled Saturday Morning Pictures at the Chesham Embassy cinema – Tom Baker reeked of booze and fags. My mum observed afterwards that he was “deeply unsavoury”.
And yet Tom was attentive to the child winners of the competition. He fielded all our banal questions. The only one I remember now is the timeworn “What’s your favourite story?” Mainly because I helped to answer it. “What was that one set in the big mansion?” muttered Tom, vaguely. “Pyramids of Mars,” suggested one acolyte. “Seeds of Doom,” ventured another. “Eh? No, no, no,” he puffed, dismissing these treasured classics. “That one last year. At Mick Jagger’s house.” “Image of the Fendahl?” I piped up. The Doctor beamed at my 13-year-old self. “Yes! That’s it! That was a good one.” In that instant, I warmed to him again. He may not have been clued up on the titles of even his most recent adventures but he was, in person, so like the benevolent alien he portrayed on screen. Inventive, disreputable, unpredictable, charming.
When my family were leaving, we spotted Tom in the car park and my parents asked him to pose with me. Another classic photo. Me wearing my Doctor Who badge and clutching my lever-arch file of Doctor Who bumph. After her botched attempt in 1975, Mum carefully framed his eyes, forehead and hair. I remember glancing sideways and thinking, “The Doctor has just put his big hand on my shoulder.” I was chuffed.
Then a few hours later, there he was on telly in the start of his fifth season with The Ribos Operation Part One. I squatted in my grandparents’ lounge a few feet from the screen, primed to tape the Doctor’s meetings with the White Guardian and new Time Lady companion Romana (Mary Tamm), and the beginning of their quest for the Key to Time. I lapped it up. My faith had been restored. Nan bustled in and asked, “Is that how he looked this afternoon, Patrick?” I shushed her and she retreated, trilling, “Oooh, sorry!” For years, Nan’s interruption was preserved on my Ribos cassette tape. I wish I still had it.
I was captivated by the Key to Time season, enjoyed the Doctor’s antipathy/rapport with Romana, and the breadth of storytelling and ripe characterisation, even as the production line ran out of steam and money across those 26 weeks. The Stones of Blood remains to this day my favourite Tom Baker adventure, among stiff opposition, largely for its Sapphic undercurrent and the charm of Beatrix Lehmann’s bumbling character, Professor Amelia Rumford.
1979
As the 70s drew to a close, Doctor Who shifted in tone, veering between witty and silly under the stewardship of the great Douglas Adams, who’d signed up for a one-year stint as script editor. In the summer of 79 I had the temerity to submit a storyline to the BBC. I remember writing an adventure where the Doctor and Romana arrive on a world, initially unaware it’s the Dalek planet Skaro, and she falls into a subterranean abyss and regenerates. Maybe this was the codswallop that landed on Adams’s desk. In any case, he responded with courtesy and advice. The eternal Hitch-Hiker’s status wasn’t as legendary as it deservedly is today, so I’m delighted I kept his letter from August 79, which pre-dates by a few weeks the start of Destiny of the Daleks.
For Season 17, Baker’s sixth, he was teamed with Lalla Ward as a hoity-sour, regenerated Romana, and frivolity and shoddy production values trampled over any chance of spookiness. Just not my cup of tea, not even perennial fan favourite City of Death, where the BBC pushed the boat out for location filming in Paris.
A happy day fell between parts three and four of that story. On 17th October 1979 the first Doctor Who Weekly hit the news-stands. Published by Marvel Comics, it offered what many fans had longed for – a regular magazine entirely devoted to Doctor Who, with a cartoon strip, features and a wealth of photographs. There had never been anything like it in the programme’s 16-year history and, of course, it evolved into today’s Doctor Who Magazine. The articles were written by names familiar from DWAS: my “pen pal” of sorts Jeremy Bentham, and Gordon Blows, who edited various Society publications.
This was the heyday of the fanzine and, through ads in DWAS’s monthly newsletter Celestial Toyroom, I accumulated them from all quarters. Usually A4 or A5 photocopied booklets, knocked up in adolescents’ bedrooms, they were stuffed with thoughtful analysis of old stories, and even ran interviews with such luminaries as Doctor Who’s first story editor David Whitaker and ace director Douglas Camfield. (Both died young; Whitaker aged 51 in 1980 and Camfield aged 52 in 1984. They would now top my wish-list of interviewees.) As well as DWAS’s own erratic fanzine TARDIS, I recall terrific examples such as Gallifrey, 23.11.63, The Doctor Who Review, Oracle… zines published or written by Gary Hopkins, Paul Mount, David Howe, Chris Dunk, Tim Dollin, Geraint Jones… Gosh, alongside Jeremy’s prodigious output, these guys knew their Who.
On BBC1, meanwhile, at the fag end of the 70s, The Creature from the Pit was offering the spectacle of Tom Baker blowing down what looked like the giant green willy of a giant green blob; but The Horns of Nimon was the absolute nadir. Made on a shoestring, it had a range of lettuce-limp or wildly fruity acting styles and showed the Doctor giving K•9 the kiss of life. Baker had been the Doctor far longer than Pertwee and, frankly, I couldn’t wait for him to hang up his scarf. In spare moments I devised wildly ambitious scenarios that led the fourth Doctor to the throes of extermination. And I kept picturing who might come next.
1980
In Chesham Library, I stumbled upon four volumes of Spotlight, the directory of actors with their agents’ details, and started writing to all and sundry, soon receiving letters and signed photographs from performers I admired, including Doctor Who alumni. Many are now dead – Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Jacqueline Hill, Nicholas Courtney, Caroline John, Elisabeth Sladen, Mary Tamm… I had a three-page response from my childhood heroine Katy Manning, signed off with a squiggle by her tiny daughter Georgina. This autograph-hunting phase was short-lived but I will always treasure these artefacts. One of my favourites is a breezy letter from Kenneth Williams. Why did he never appear in Doctor Who?
It was the start of the 1980s with the prospect of exciting new Doctor Who on the horizon but, me being me, aged 15 I was obsessed with The Aztecs, a gorgeous-seeming four-part serial made way back in 1964. The prospect of ever watching it seemed impossible, but perhaps buying a script from the BBC might not be. First, I needed permission from its original writer, John Lucarotti. I wrote to the only person of that name in the telephone directory and, months later, my letter reached him in Corsica. He consented but aired doubt that any scripts survived.
Nevertheless, I sent the BBC a cheque for an astronomical sum, and eventually received a photocopy of this ancient artefact – the 41-page camera script to episode one, The Temple of Evil. Fascinating to study in minute detail. I never dreamt that within a few years I might have a pristine audiotape of all four episodes of this beautifully written story (with its sublime, evocative score by composer Richard Rodney Bennett) – nor that I’d actually see it on videotape at a friend’s house. The idea that one day The Aztecs and many other Hartnell stories would be readily available on VHS on the shelves of HMV was unimaginable.
Those far off days of the late 1970s and early 1980s were the heyday of pen pals and “swapping” stuff. Hence BBC1’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Through DWAS and its well-named Celestial Toyroom, fans were contacting each other and I plunged into a joyful arena in which we were swapping bootleg cassettes. It’s a cosmos away from the modern age with email, texting and internet forums. Back then “pen pals” were all we knew of. You’d post your letter, then wait days or weeks for a reply. But by this means I steadily accumulated audiotapes going right back to the 1960s. Of extremely variable quality. I obtained a crystal-clear recording of Hartnell’s swansong The Tenth Planet alongside a version of Troughton’s debut The Power of the Daleks, sounding like it was taped in that story’s mercury swamp. I gleaned spotless soundtracks of the first two Dalek stories and eventually the much-prized The Aztecs. Classics all.
By post, I befriended John Morley (a youngster who was equally obsessed with Punch and Judy), Stuart Glazebrook (a talented artist who died recently in 2023), Stephen James Walker (who went on to become a respected Who historian) and Derek Handley (still a steadfast friend today). Even DWAS’s Jeremy Bentham bowed to my badgering and kindly sent me a reasonable recording of The Web of Fear on the proviso that it was a one-off. That was when I fell in love with that story, its sheer daftness of robotic Yeti on the London Underground, and its magnificently eerie sound world. Almost no need for visuals.
Of course, I longed to see some old Doctor Who and read they were sometimes shown at DWAS conventions, so I was eager to go to my first on 9th August 1980 – “Inter-face 1” held at the Central London Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). How clearly I remember that day. Dad taking me up to town on the Metropolitan Line from its furthest outpost Chesham to Great Portland Street, then walking down to an impressive building on New Cavendish Street with a throng of fans in the lobby. Daunted but undeterred, I waved goodbye and, clutching my ticket, went inside. I didn’t know a soul; everyone seemed older and at 15 I was shy; but excitement was in the air as we filed into a lecture hall.
The event was hosted by David Howe and Keith Barnfather, now well-known names in fandom. David was in his late teens and Keith his early 20s, but they were more than capable of fronting the day and welcoming guest-of-honour Carole Ann Ford, who’d played the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan and was apprehensively attending her first convention. The major thrill was that we were seeing episodes that hadn’t been shown in the UK since the 1960s. Now if you want to watch Doctor Who from 16 years ago, you can go on BBC iPlayer and enjoy early David Tennant episodes and they still look in keeping with TV drama being made today. In 1980, seeing The Edge of Destruction from 1964 and The Rescue from 1965… well, it was like peering into antiquity.
These black-and-white two-parters were projected from film prints onto a huge screen, so it felt just like Saturday Morning Pictures at your local cinema. Also, television had advanced significantly since these productions were made. They were outstanding, though, in terms of atmosphere and the conviction and richness of the performances. The cast were top-notch but Hartnell was a revelation. Yes, he fluffed the odd line but he was mesmerising as the Doctor, bumbling/focused, wicked/genial, almost like a magician. We’d been warned under the strictest terms that no recordings must be made, but I flouted that and pressed record on my concealed device, so for years had tapes of those episodes with all the audience applause and laughter on the soundtracks too.
To round off a satisfying day, David and Keith announced there was just time to screen the very first episode, An Unearthly Child. A few hundred of us squee-ed and probably weed a little. Amazing to see that evocative opening episode on a big screen, the policeman walking through the mist, the police box humming in the junkyard, Ian, Barbara and Susan at Coal Hill School and the discovery of the TARDIS. Easy to see why it was an instant classic in 1963, directed with astonishing fluidity by Waris Hussein. Great name, rather exotic. Never imagined he’d one day become a friend.
This event was so long ago that 1980s Doctor Who as we now know it hadn’t even begun. But three Saturdays later saw the launch of season 18, a period of immense change and rapid evolution – under the aegis of incoming producer John Nathan-Turner. Out went the Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the theme music and in came a strident, also excellent version by Peter Howell. The time vortex patterns were replaced by a starfield sequence and neon titles (never appealing to me). More money was evident on screen, less levity, more jeopardy, and a toned-down Tom Baker. Just what I wanted. It’s not faultless, but I instantly loved the first story The Leisure Hive. The 80s had arrived. All praise JN-T!
It was all change in the TARDIS, too. Lalla Ward and K•9 were leaving. Unknowns such as Matthew Waterhouse (Adric) and Janet Fielding (Tegan) were doing photocalls for the papers. Then on Friday 24th October, the day before Full Circle began on BBC1, came the biggest shake-up of all. Tom Baker was leaving after seven years. Major headline news. It even made the BBC1 News. I was ecstatic.
I began my own round of feverish casting for the next Doctor with Robert Hardy coming out on top. He was a blustering character actor, famous from All Creatures Great and Small, so when it was announced less than two weeks later that his younger, prettier, somewhat drippy on-screen brother Peter Davison had landed the role… Well, was this a joke? Youthful Time Lords are the norm now, but back then it was a bold decision, typical of JN-T.
1981
The crucial graduation for any 1980s fan was from audio- to videotaping. For most people a VCR was an unaffordable luxury, costing around £500. Far beyond the means of the Mulkerns and certainly me at 15. “You’d better save up,” said Dad. “Get yourself a job after school,” said Mum. I found work as an office boy at Lance Kent and Co solicitors in Chesham Broadway – photocopying, posting, making cups of tea – every afternoon after school for a handful of shekels. It all mounted up and it was great experience for a shy teenager in an adult environment. And there was an urgency because later in 1981 the BBC was planning a repeat season of some very old Doctor Whos indeed. I simply had to get a video recorder!
Eventually, I saved up half the dosh, Pampa made a contribution and my parents coughed up £200, so one glorious day we took delivery of a Hitachi VHS recorder. It was a beautiful machine. Light silver. It gave a sigh as a hydraulic system lifted the top-loading cassette drawer. It even smelt good. The future had arrived.
On 28th February I attended my second convention, DWASocial 1. My dear old dad – staggeringly indulgent I now realise – took me all the way by Tube across London and out the far southerly side to Morden. And from there to, I think, Merton College. The day’s guest was 1960s story editor Dennis Spooner, a witty raconteur who held the crowd in his palm for a couple of hours, regaling us with anecdotes not just about his time on Hartnell’s Who but ITV’s The Avengers, too.
To close the event, TVs were switched on around the hall and the crowd fell silent, enraptured by the BBC1 transmission of episode one of Logopolis, Tom Baker’s final adventure. My dad had gone all the way back to Chesham then returned to Merton to collect me. I spotted him at the side of the hall where he was obliged to watch Doctor Who for the first time in years. He was swayed by the energy in the room and said afterwards, “She was a rather nice young lady…” He’d taken a shine to Janet Fielding in her debut as air hostess Tegan.
I set to work with Ian Collins, a chum at Chesham High, to publish our own fanzine. Ian printed it on a retro copying gizmo he had at home and I christened it Experiential Grid after an invention in The Leisure Hive. The zine was rudimentary, poorly reproduced but stuffed with enthusiasm. For the cover, Ian drew a cartoon imagining Davison’s look as the new Doctor (which had yet to be revealed). I aired my first ever review (a rave) of the aforementioned story. I even had the temerity to “novelise” An Unearthly Child in EG months before the great Terrance Dicks published his Target adaptation.
I’m amazed to see that Ian and I were pumping out issues of Experiential Grid – such was our fervour aged 16. The second EG came out in May 1981, with a third in July. We were gearing up for Panopticon IV on the first weekend in August; Ian’s first convention, where he’d reserved a table to flog our fanzine. We trekked without parents on the Tube to Queen Mary College in Mile End Road, east London.
First the bad news. On arrival, attendees were disappointed to learn that the organisers hadn’t secured the rights to show the first Dalek story (The Dead Planet/The Daleks, whatever you like to call it) as billed. Instead, they would screen the corny first Dalek movie with Peter Cushing. Things were more positive on the guest front. Verity Lambert, the series’ founding producer, was attending her first convention, followed by a panel for the men from Unit (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce). Nicholas Courtney, John Levene and Richard Franklin who had played the Brigadier, Sgt Benton and Mike Yates were on sparkling form, delighted to be reunited. They were interviewed by Gary Russell. (He’d been a child actor in the 1970s, notably in The Famous Five.) Two of Doctor Who’s most illustrious writers then took the stage: Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes.
Day two of Panopticon IV (Sunday 2nd August) saw Frazer Hines (companion Jamie) representing the Patrick Troughton era. And then came an impressive barrage of the new talent in JN-T’s stable: Matthew Waterhouse (Adric), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), writer Eric Saward and director Peter Grimwade. No Doctors in the house. In TV terms, we were in the limbo before Davison’s first full story. But there was a Master in the building. Anthony Ainley strode on – to much jubilation – and was commanding and humorous. Convention firsts for all this 1980s lot, who were fresh and overwhelmed. Extraordinary to think that many are still touring the Who-con circuit four decades later and earning an unexpected “pension”.
In the early 1980s, the BBC was only just beginning to consider the market for VHS and certainly no Doctor Who had been released (the first would be Revenge of the Cybermen in 1983). Of course, like any fan, I longed for BBC1 to repeat the series from the very beginning. I didn’t appreciate the contractual problems involved. I’d also gathered that perhaps not every single episode was preserved in the BBC archive. I wrote to font-of-all-knowledge Jeremy Bentham and asked the big question: which Doctor Who stories still existed? To my astonishment, long before it was known by fans at large, he shared a list of what remained. I was appalled.
So many gaps. Marco Polo (Pampa’s favourite story) didn’t exist. Not one episode survived of The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Tenth Planet part four, Hartnell’s finale, was missing. The status of the Troughton era was even more shocking. Nothing from The Power of the Daleks or The Evil of the Daleks. The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Ice Warriors and Fury from the Deep were lost too. There was one solitary Yeti episode. Bloody hell! Also very few Jon Pertwee stories still existed at the BBC in their original format. A scandal. (Subsequently, through the hard work of dedicated fans, many gaps have been filled from archives around the world, but more than 90 1960s episodes remain missing.)
This served as a prelude to The Five Faces of Doctor Who (as the BBC2 repeat season had been called) and explained why only certain stories could be considered. Nevertheless, the winter of 1981 was one of the most exciting times for British Doctor Who fans. Repeats were a rare event in the UK and reserved for recent stories. After that, they disappeared for ever, relivable only in the pages of Target novels.
JN-T thrilled fans with this five-week season, bridging Tom Baker and Peter Davison’s Doctors. He could only choose from existing four-parters. So Hartnell was represented by his first serial, An Unearthly Child. The Krotons, a feeble story, was the only available option for Troughton. Carnival of Monsters represented Pertwee. The Three Doctors (then the only multi-Doctor story) was a vital inclusion. And Logopolis had the changeover from Baker to Davison. And I had my VCR ready.
Next: the 20th anniversary, going on set and meeting the Doctors…
My Life as a Doctor Who Fan in full:
- Part 1 – the 1960s to 1974
- Part 3 – 1982 to 1984
- Part 4 – 1985 to 1989
- Part 5 – 1990 to 2012
- Part 6 – 2013 to now
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