It's just possible I may have told this story before, so if I have bear with me.
It was many years ago now, over 25 at least, and I was spending a Friday night at a friend’s house. Around about 10pm or so, he flipped on the TV to the PBS channel, to a show he wanted me to watch with him. “I think you’ll like it,” he said, or words to that effect. The show was a British import, as so many of the local presentations were (and are), a science fiction series called Doctor Who. I’d seen the show listed in the TV Guide before, but hadn’t paid any attention to it. As the episode unfolded ("The Face of Evil," my episode guide informs me), my friend briefed me on the basics: the show’s hero was an alien with the ability to travel in both time and space. His space ship was a blue box, normally used by British police to phone the station, which was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. His personality was outsized, a man who met challenges with an impervious humor, and something of an Enlightenment attitude toward religion. He often traveled with attractive women, but there was no hanky-panky involved. And there was one other thing, though it wasn’t germane to this particular episode, but he thought I should know about it because Doctor Who was on twice a week—Friday and Saturday—and a different actor was playing the role on each night. That was because whenever the hero was seriously injured, on the point of death, he had the ability to regenerate into a new person, or rather the same person, but with a new body, appearance, and personality. Right.
Watching Doctor Who was an agreeable-enough experience, although I’ve always struggled when it came to watching programs that weren’t my idea to watch, especially when I’ve been assured that it was a show I would like, so I tolerated the show for the 90 minutes that it ran, assured my friend that I’d have to keep an eye on it, and then promptly forgot about it.
Fast-forward a few weeks, to another Friday night. In these pre-cable days (for us, at least), there weren’t many viewing choices, perhaps six or seven channels in all, so when all three versions of the 10pm news led with the same story (the Jordan child-abuse scandal, which was a staggeringly big deal in the Twin Cities), a story I was sick to death of, I stretched out my arm, desperately flipping the dial in search of the first channel to have something on besides the news, at least until they were done with the Jordan story. I landed on Channel 2, which was airing Doctor Who.
It stayed there, every Friday (and Saturday) night, for the next five years.
At first I watched it because it was fresh and new. Later, after I’d fully enveloped myself in the Doctor Who universe, I watched it because I couldn’t not watch it. It was maybe the second show that had ever had that effect on me, where I became so fully a part of the world of the show and its inhabitants. I even became a member of the local PBS station, since they were offering a Doctor Who picture-disc as the pledge-break premium. I don’t mean to say that I ventured into the territory of the Trekkers and role players, although Doctor Who has its fair share of those.
No, it was the desire to learn as much about the program as I could, its history and continuing storyline, the actors who’d played The Doctor, the rules governing Time Lords and time travel, the whole thing. As the BBC released more episodes from the early days of Doctor Who, dating back to the first episode in 1963, I was enthralled. To find that there were others aware of this TV show with the cult following, not typical sci-fi nerds but people such as the man who maintained the plants in the office in which I worked, was thrilling. I attended the conventions at which actors who'd played The Doctor appeared (Peter Davison, Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker, to be precise; but not, alas, my favorite, Tom Baker). I celebrated the show's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1988. I even took up eating jelly babies. And when the newest episodes came over, with only a few months’ delay, my dedication to the show was complete.
*Don't pay any attention to the 12-foot scarf I have hanging in the library at home.
I came to know and appreciate each Doctor for his own personality quirks: William Hartnell's overarching imperiousness, Patrick Troughton's innocent playfulness, Jon Pertwee's suave swashbuckling, Tom Baker's bohemian unpredictability, Peter Davison's reluctant heroism, Colin Baker's anti-hero rudeness, and Sylvester McCoy's mysterious omniscience. And for the cheesiness of of some of the monsters and special effects, there were stories with a remarkably deep insight into the human condition; in "Planet of the Spiders," the Third Doctor risks his life against overpowering odds because it was more important to him to confront his fears than to simply "go on living"; in "The Sunmakers," the Fourth Doctor reminds a group of slaves that "you're human beings, and humans always have to fight for their freedom," and in "Genesis of the Daleks," he asks if he has the right to destroy another life form—even if it happens to be the most evil of adversaries, the Daleks. For what was putatively a children's show, it dealt with some heavy ideas.
Then the BBC, after twenty-seven seasons, pulled the plug. It wasn’t cancelled, they insisted —only on hiatus—but as the years went on, the show became less and less of a presence, both on television and in my life. I still had the books and that scarf, and as the show began to come out on video I enjoyed the episodes, but somehow it wasn’t the same, knowing that what we had was all we had and that there wouldn’t be anything more.
Until there was. Doctor Who reappeared, first in a Fox movie that briefly rekindled the hope of a regular series; and then, following years of rumors and false starts, in a revival that picked up where the old series had left off, one that, for the first few years at least, did a remarkably good job of integrating itself with the original, so that was easy to believe that each of the actors who'd played The Doctor had all inhabited the same universe, even though the special effects were fancier and the monsters weren't as cheesy and the show itself is less campy and more dramatic.
And then the show went off the rails, getting too much into gender identity and woke politics, and it forced me to reassess my thoughts abou the new version. One could make the case that there was still a line of continuity, at least up through Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, but there the show ended for me. And when it came to my love for the series, I was forced to concede that there were, after all, two versions of Doctor Who: the original, and the new. Which meant that, for me, the last Doctor was really the Eighth, Paul McGann, who had played the Doctor in the TV movie. But since he'd only played the role once (not including the many audio adventures he'd done since), the last "classic" Doctor was Sylvester McCoy, who'd also appeared in the movie, and who, during his time on the show, had really grown on me.
*Don't pay any attention to the 12-foot scarf I have hanging in the library at home.
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Sylvester McCoy: the last real Doctor? |
Then the BBC, after twenty-seven seasons, pulled the plug. It wasn’t cancelled, they insisted —only on hiatus—but as the years went on, the show became less and less of a presence, both on television and in my life. I still had the books and that scarf, and as the show began to come out on video I enjoyed the episodes, but somehow it wasn’t the same, knowing that what we had was all we had and that there wouldn’t be anything more.
Until there was. Doctor Who reappeared, first in a Fox movie that briefly rekindled the hope of a regular series; and then, following years of rumors and false starts, in a revival that picked up where the old series had left off, one that, for the first few years at least, did a remarkably good job of integrating itself with the original, so that was easy to believe that each of the actors who'd played The Doctor had all inhabited the same universe, even though the special effects were fancier and the monsters weren't as cheesy and the show itself is less campy and more dramatic.
And then the show went off the rails, getting too much into gender identity and woke politics, and it forced me to reassess my thoughts abou the new version. One could make the case that there was still a line of continuity, at least up through Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, but there the show ended for me. And when it came to my love for the series, I was forced to concede that there were, after all, two versions of Doctor Who: the original, and the new. Which meant that, for me, the last Doctor was really the Eighth, Paul McGann, who had played the Doctor in the TV movie. But since he'd only played the role once (not including the many audio adventures he'd done since), the last "classic" Doctor was Sylvester McCoy, who'd also appeared in the movie, and who, during his time on the show, had really grown on me.
So when it comes to considering the Top Ten, I have to make a distinction: Doctor Who 1.0 belongs, Doctor Who 2.0 does not. It isn't, when all is said and done, much of a concession to make. Those initial 27 seasons provided more than enough pleasure to guarantee a place on the list. Perhaps I don’t have the same passion for Doctor Who that I once did; after all, the blaze from the spark that ignites any love affair eventually lessens, and the thrill of discovery can’t last once everything’s discovered. But, in rewatching the series from the start, from that very first presentation of William Hartnell's the crotchety old man living in a battered police box sitting in a junkyard, I find that my enjoyment of the series continues—not as something new and different, but something familiar and comfortable.
It’s a show that I can look back on with a deep and abiding affection, and I'm not embarrassed to display my fandom. No list of my favorite television shows can exist without it. TV
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Thanks for writing! Drive safely!