Pull to Open: Doctor Who and Me

Having heard of it, and having caught about four disembodied repeat episodes of it – part 5 here, part 2 there – as a young child, I got into Doctor Who in 1999, when I was old enough to know better. I really came to it after a trip to Llangollen in North Wales where, bizarrely enough, ‘the world’s largest permanent display of original costumes and props from the cult British TV series’ used to be. The Doctor Who Experience: outside of that rambling building in Llangollen, Doctor Who was gone, very gone. It was a programme with the same cultural presence as Dixon of Dock Green or Blake's 7 …or any of the other shows I know nothing about, other than that the media namechecks them a couple of times a decade. Doctor Who was never shown. It was not on people’s lips. It was not in toyshops – not in any shops, much. Perhaps geeky VHS tapes in the nerd sections of MVC, ditto for the handful of books.

But inside of that building in Llangollen… Doctor Who was presented in the same light that a lot of people see it in now. The shop there had nothing but Doctor Who merchandise. Everyone in the building had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the series, in-universe and out. Buying a ticket, you walked round three large galleries of costumes. Corridors and stairwells were lined with Doctor Who promotional material. The lowest level of the building was a factory making Doctor Who toys – all part of the tour. In pretty much every part of the building (18,000 sq ft) you were able to hear a constant loop of some ten variations of the Doctor Who theme tune. And Jesus, that got old quick. Everywhere smelled of plastic injection moulding, too.

Immediately on entering the exhibition proper you were standing in front of a police box. The Doctor Who theme throbbed away with insane exhibition hall echo and sound system bass. Standing there, pressed up against the Tardis in gloomy lighting and getting the fear from the dissonant electronic music, you suddenly understood the very essence of the series and its appeal. The Tardis. It’s that line from Se7en: “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!” – that’s basically the plot of Doctor Who’s first episode. Further exhibit: a knackered Dalek could be seen in a cage just around the corner. The experience was an onslaught of vague mental connections and memories of the terror of watching it when I was young enough for the programme to grab me at that level.

Before all of that, though.

The first Doctor Who I ever saw: ‘The Mind Robber’ episode one. A repeat broadcast on, googling here, 31^st January 1992. It scared seven colours of fuck out of me. Admittedly, showing 1968’s black and white television to a 6-year-old child of the 90s was always going to give him quite a shock, and then it was a particularly self-indulgent and trippy episode from the series, but seriously. Four mute white robots, given nicely horrific machine sentience through the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s sounds, robots not even built for Doctor Who but nicked from a dramatization of an Isaac Asimov short story with a presumably healthier budget, stalk two young Doctor Who companions, who waltz about on a white floor in front of a white backdrop and occasionally scream. That first episode is like a visual equivalent of The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9.’

Doctor Who was gone back then. Vanished from television and children’s bedrooms. But it did exist as a handful of very potent symbols. All through the 1990s newspapers, TV shows and presenters would jump on any chance they got to include Daleks. They could be relied on to offer the same kind of nostalgia as the Martians from the Smash adverts – where you can ‘remember’ something that predates you. Elsewhere in the media, a small space with surprising storage potential was always a Tardis. ‘What’s a Tardis, mummy?’

‘It’s bigger on the inside.’ A geek fact from a dead series resounded through popular culture. Of course, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ and ‘phasers on stun’ also have a familiar ring to them, whether erroneous quotes or not. But funnily enough, in the 144 classic Doctor Who serials I’ve experienced (yes, serials – the number of episodes would be more like… 635), it’s fairly rare that someone actually gets to say that the Tardis is bigger on the inside. I mean, it’s bloody obvious, but it’s not really commented on all that much. The first ever reaction line to the Tardis interior is actually: “Where are we? Is this really where you live, Susan?” But the Tardis’s hidden depths really caught on with the public, whether they saw the programme or not. For all the quotes and namechecks, the nature or operation of the Starship Enterprise or Millennium Falcon aren’t popular ideas. Warp speed: what’s that… fast? There’s a beautiful silly simplicity of the Tardis that seems to catch on.

Having known and loved Star Trek from casual to obsessive back to casual again, I could really see the genius of Doctor Who. Star Trek was all: ‘Salute you, sir.’ A crew of uniforms, ranks and procedural drama – with huge, liveried spaceships. Doctor Who had a box, a spaceship that tried not to be noticed. Here was a man running his fingers through his hair distractedly and disappearing before he got too much exposure or acknowledgement.

Of course the Tardis (TARDIS, T.A.R.D.I.S.) appealed. I don’t drive. Any kind of parental taxi service ended when I was prepubescent. Asides from occasional lifts, my world is the one that can be accessed by public transport. Holidays, days out, just buying provisions: you only look at, only think about, towns and places with stations, maybe bus routes. The travel arrangements a non-driver needs to make to go somewhere at a spontaneous time of day would take up the rest of the afternoon, not the 20 minutes of someone with a car on their drive. And someone calling you round to their rural house might as well live on the moon. So a box that can plonk itself down anywhere any time, on the grass verge of a country lane or in the London Palladium or Churchill Square shopping centre in 1987’s Brighton or the Highlands or Fiji in 1641… that gives a whole lot of imaginative liberation.

I used to worry that I liked Doctor Who for the Doctor’s ability to move on, to leave a whole lifetime of people behind – that stepping into the Tardis and taking off, taking leave of a whole planet, was a kind of suicide without the suicide. But then the most compelling thing about the Doctor was not his freedom to just shut the door and fly off but that he always had somewhere to fly to.

The grass really was always greener. Though I don’t believe that’s about having a craving to shed your responsibilities.

I do like to pootle and potter from time to time, and Doctor Who did that in places throughout its transmission history. For the moment I’m thinking Peter Davison’s Doctor, with his class of schoolchildren in the Tardis in the first 2-3 years of the 1980s. Some of their stories could be set in a National Trust garden (some of them probably were, actually). Imagine stepping out of a police box and into a deserted park on a wet day, armed with a book and an umbrella and settling on a bench for a good read. However dull that might seem, just remember: what makes it pleasurable is that you know you’re sitting within a few feet of a box that can take you anywhere and to any situation as soon as you’ve finished that chapter. Off you go: clubbing in the 1980s or watching Radiohead demo 'Bones' or bloody-kneed skateboarding in '70s LA or visiting Harry Styles in a retirement home. Or maybe even having your emotions and morals roller-coaster because you've got involved in the politics, fights and struggles of alien worlds and time periods.

The point is, in 1963 the suits, the TV execs, planned and vetoed and houndstooth jacket-ed and approved and whisky-ed and outlined and cigar-ed a programme with central traits so potent that, once the upcoming generation's dogged determination had got it on screen, the show continued, never dropped out of public consciousness, was reborn and everything else over the next 50 years.

And did I mention that my childhood home had quite an evocative front door? A double door with eight square windows set in it, four on each half-door reaching from top to bottom. The whole assembly was secured with a Yale lock. I mean, who does that to a kid?