Proud Whovian
Posted By Kathleen David on July 8, 2008
Or whatever we are calling ourselves these days.
I have been a Doctor Who fan since I was a teenager so close to 30 years now if I am calculating correctly.
And after the end of this season, I am still glad to be a fan.
I am also glad that we have spin-offs of the original show to sustain us between seasons.
Recently many pockets of Doctor Who fandom have been down on RTD for various reasons most of which conflict with each other. (like More Rose vs. No More Rose factions).
Remember without RTD, we would still be telling our friends and children about this TV series that we grew up with and forcing them to watch Classic Who (which is not a bad thing in itself but still).
We have a whole new set of fans of the series and I welcome them to the fandom.
This year I have added another achievement to my list of things I have done in the realm of Who by having a short story published in a Big Finish anthology which makes me now a published Doctor Who author. Feels kind of funny to say still but I’m enjoying it.
I am grateful for all the wonderful things that have happened because I am a Whovian
Congratulations on your story sale!
Personally, I probably qualify as a quasi-Whovian. Or maybe a pseudo-Whovian.
Doctor Who aired for the first time in the UK on 23rd November 1963, the day after Kennedy was assassinated. Memories of those two events are the earliest memories to which I can tie definite dates, as I was about six and a half years old at the time. Doctor Who was just amazing to me, and was doubtless one of the things that set me on that rocky road that led to Heinlein and Norton et al, and I carried on watching it pretty much every week it was on for the next 13 or 14 years… (The Saturday tea time slot was brilliant for it, you’d be getting in, or getting ready to go out, and there was Doctor Who…)
Life moved on and I moved out, and while I’d still watch it occasionally, the episodic nature meant that I missed a lot of it. I’d also discovered comics fandom and had swapped my SF allegiance to Star Trek by now, so never really connected at all with Doctor Who fandom as such… By the time I did come back for another look we were into Colin Baker and the first season of Sylvester McCoy, and – let’s be honest – not a lot there to captivate a thirty year old…
It was only in 1990, after the show went off air that a friend lent me tapes of seasons 25 and 26 that I realised, “Hey, this show was getting it’s act back together again”, and even then I didn’t feel a huge urge to go chase after the videos that were becoming available.
What did eventually get me back to loving the alien were the Virgin novels, especially the third one were Peter Cornell just kicked the ball into orbit and said ‘let’s do real science fiction here’. For me, it’s the Cornell, Cartmel, Aaronovitch and Orman books that got me back to loving the alien, and there’s still a part of me that misses the more adult approach they brought to it all. (I also love the Faction Paradox and Benny Summerfield series that spun off from those stories).
So it wasn’t until the early 90’s that I went on a kick of tracking down videos of the years I’d missed, and not until ’96/’97 that I started watching them with my daughter, whose first fan-fiction at age 7 then involved rescuing a planet of pussy cat people by letting them all move into the Tardis with him…
She was 13 (going on 30!) when the 2005 series started airing, and refused to watch them until her friends at school had told her how cool they were. These days, she’s the one setting the VCR and shouting people down to watch as a family…
Comics and Trek fandom have done more for me that Who fandom – like letting memeet my wife – but I am grateful that Rusty Dave got to make his series, and that it didn’t suck anywhere near as much as we feared it might!
Cheers.
“Remember without RTD, we would still be telling our friends and children about this TV series that we grew up with and forcing them to watch Classic Who (which is not a bad thing in itself but still).”
Yeah, but that still doesn’t mean that RTD’s stories aren’t total crap sometimes. 🙂
Basically, I’ve been a Whovian since birth. I remember every year I’d stay up with my uncle to watch Doctor Who marathons, only to fall asleep halfway through some story or other. 🙂
I don’t know what the first episode was that I watched, although I know that watched “Silver Nemesis” , the 25th Anniversary episode, when it aired on PBS, which was around the same time when it aired in the UK.
Remember without RTD, we would still be telling our friends and children about this TV series that we grew up with and forcing them to watch Classic Who (which is not a bad thing in itself but still).
Well, RTD didn’t bring Doctor Who back. The BBC would have brought Doctor Who back anyway, whether RTD agreed to come back and work for them on it or not, and I’d go so far as to say it would probably still have been a hit even if he’d declined to become involved in the project. Probably not as big a hit, certainly–I doubt there’d be a pair of spinoffs or that the BBC would have constructed a new studio complex in South Wales dedicated just to the Who franchise, but there’d almost certainly still be New Who in production today with or without RTD.
Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Torchwood series three will only be five episodes long next year; so it looks like it’s just Sarah Jane that’s remaining in full production.
“but there’d almost certainly still be New Who in production today with or without RTD.”
Politely, I would tend to disagree with that.
The Beeb had Doctor Who on hiatus for over a decade, there’s no doubt that they looked at it from time to time in terms of ‘we really should do something with this’, but – for a whole host of reasons to do with how BBC Drama functions and how BBC finances work – there was no real appetite within the organisation to get it back into production until Rusty Dave and Julie Gardner came together and decided they could get it off the ground in the drama wilderness that was BBC Wales.
That decision by the way, constituted an incredible career gamble for both of them. The kind you’ll only take for something you really love.
Cheers.
Like Peter, I watched that very first episode when it aired in 1963, the day after JFK was shot, and I followed the show faithfully until my interest started to fade in the 1980s with each Doctor after Tom Baker feeling like a step down from his immediate predecessor – the first four are still my favourites among the classic series Doctors. RTD revived my interest in the character and for that I will always be grateful to him.
RTD & Julie Gardner didn’t approach the BBC about reviving Doctor Who, and I don’t know where this myth came from that they did. Lorraine Heggessey and Jane Tranter persuaded BBC Worldwide to relinquish their plans for a feature film in favour of Doctor Who’s return to BBC television. Only after Who’s return to BBC1 had already been guaranteed did they approach RTD. And if he’d declined, within the prior 36 months, comprehensive proposals had been made for a new Who series by producer Dan Freedman and also by Mark Gatiss–proposals that had at the time got hung up on the same rights issues as the BBC’s first attempt to create an RTD-produced Who series in 1999.
There’s no denying that the fact that reviving Doctor Who was their only way to employ RTD again increased the Beeb’s enthusiasm and support for the New Who programme’s during the first series’s production and publicity. But while it’s important not to underrate RTD’s importance to DW’s revival, it’s important not to overrate it, either. And there’s an extensive historical record of Heggessey’s and Tranter’s attempts to revive Doctor Who in the years long before RTD had any link with the project, and also of the fact that there were well-respected television producers and writers eager to be involved in it if for whatever reason the BBC and RTD had been unable to come to an agreement.
I’ve been watching Dr Who since the mid 60s (I was about 7 years old). Good Grief I’m old. 🙂
I’m aware of the role Heggessey and Trantner had in getting the show back on air, and there’s no essential contradiction in what “I” and I have said.
Personally, I think there’s a world of difference between the issuing of the statement of intent and the actual putting of the lightning into the bottle and shipping it out the door…
I’m not saying the sun shines out of Rusty Dave’s nether regions, but I do continue to politely disagree with the statement “but there’d almost certainly still be New Who in production today with or without RTD.”
Cheers.
There’s some news over on Outpost Gallifrey today that should have any Classic Whovian giddy. 🙂
Regardless of any issues with who’s running the show, the fact is that it has turned out to be very popular. The season finale last weekend drew close to 50% of the viewing audience in the UK.
The final four episodes of this series are coming up the next four weeks on SciFi (with the finale getting a ninety minute slot). If you’ve been watching the new series via SciFi you definitely should make sure you catch these last new episodes for a while.
FYI, there will be a Doctor Who panel at San Diego comic Con with Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Julie Gardner on Thursday (followed by a Torchwood panel with John Barrowman, Gareth David-Lloyd, Naoko Mori and Burn Gorman) that should be something worth catching.
I see Peter is on the schedule for some panels. Kathleen, if you are joining him this year, hopefully you can make it to the Who/Torchwood panels.