This piece was originally written in 2016 and revised in 2017 for a project called 'You And Who's Company' which studied the your relationship / love of Doctor Who and how it linked to another person...
It was published in an a 2019 volume "One More Lifetime: A You and Who Miscellany"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1097944735/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=PA67W368VXQ5M30N7R1P&pldnSite=1
My Mum, Who and I
My earliest memories are beige tinted, backed with floral wallpaper and extensively feature the Wombles and my mother searching for candles under the kitchen sink as the electric had gone off again (that’s condensing most of the early 1970’s into a couple of lines… I’m sure many people of a certain age can relate though!)
My first memories of Doctor Who come from the brief trailers shown after Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon. If I was lucky, the single black and white TV in the house hadn’t been switched over to ITV for ‘World of Wrestling’ or just off as no one was watching it (whilst BBC2 did exist I can’t remember it ever being watched)
Occasionally, I’d get to hear the first strains of the famous theme starting of the programme; however this was often a cue for my parents or an older sibling to come into the room to switch the TV off or over…
I vaguely remember Jon Pertwee being the Doctor. Not from the TV Show though, I remember him being on the back cover of my Mum’s ‘Baking Your Cake and Eating It’ book which she’d got from the Co-op (probably by collecting coupons)
My proper, earliest, bona fide, nailed on memory of Doctor Who on the TV though was the trail for ‘The Android Invasion’ where it’s revealed Styggron’s androids have weapons in their fingers. I remember this clearly as I immediately ran to the kitchen to tell my Mum who was cooking tea and asked if I could watch it, ‘No, it’s too scary for you, you’re only 5… maybe when you’re 6’ was the response
That Christmas my Mum must have felt sorry for me missing out on being allowed to watch the show as one of my presents was the ‘War of the Daleks’ board game. It was brilliant, small plastic Daleks, little cardboard Doctor’s in plastic stands… It was the best present ever (until I got a Palitoy ‘Millennium Falcon’ in 1982) but tragedy soon struck. I have long blamed my sister Cathy for what happened next but maybe it was actually a manufacturing fault… during the first play of the game the plastic middle section of the board was twisted (as in the rules of the game) and snapped off. I was inconsolable. My Mum took the game back to the shop to get it replaced only to find that this had been a common issue. They never got any more stock. Until the dawn of the Internet my only visual memory of the game was a photo taken that Christmas Day of me, my Mum and sisters settling down to play it in our beige floral living room.
Moving on a few months to August 1976, a holiday in Bournemouth (although I think it was only my parents and I there). Following an exhaustingly long train journey from Manchester for whatever reason our first stop before the guesthouse was WH Smiths… and there it was, being sold off … ‘The Amazing World of Doctor Who’. I pleaded with my Mum to buy it with the rationale I’d been behaved for the previous six hours or so and it was raining (I always found that if I wanted something it was better to ask Mum so she could persuade my Dad if there was a chance he’d say no!)… She agreed and sent my Dad off to pay 50p or whatever for it.
That week I spent every opportunity to study the art (‘The Sinister Sponge’ still looks scary for what was essentially a kid’s publication) and learning what I could about the Doctor, Cybermen, Draconians etc
I was hooked… but it would be another year, when I was 7 before I was deemed old enough to watch an episode… although it was more by chance than design. That day was 11 August 1977… episode 2 of the repeat showing of ‘The Deadly Assassin’… Mum and Dad were outside chatting to my Uncle Ken who’d taken me out somewhere for the day and had left me in the living room to my own devices, the precedent was set, and from ‘The Horror of Fang Rock’ through until the last episode of ‘Trial of A Timelord’ I watched every episode on original broadcast. I remember that it was this day clearly, not only as the Internet tells me that the programme was repeated on this day but because I was bought a small ceramic hedgehog from wherever I’d been on the day out… I still have this and the date it was bought remains written on the underside for posterity
Actually, go back a bit; I tell a lie, I also missed Episode 2 of ‘Keeper of Traken’ in 1981 as I went to see Manchester United lose away at Leicester City. This in itself was memorable for the wrong reasons, not only was it the first ‘away trip’ I’d ever been on, not only did we lose but it was the first time I’d seen heavy handed police tactics in force as they boarded our Supporters Coach on arrival at the designated parking area, literally turned out everyone bags, resulting in carefully packed lunches, knitting and my copy of ‘The Monster Of Peladon’, which I’d bought with money saved up from Christmas, being kicked around the floor before being frogmarched into the ground. If I remember correctly United were 1-0 down by the time we got into the ground. As a result I’ve never liked the city of Leicester, and have always tried to avoid going there since.
But anyway, after 1977 I absorbed as much Doctor Who as I could, the day after my 8th Birthday my Mum took me on the bus to Wilmslow to Argos to get my ‘real’ birthday present’, a Denys Fisher ‘Talking Dalek’ (I got the Doctor and TARDIS that Christmas) and played with it all day until the batteries started to run out (much to peoples relief)… as a special treat I was able to have my ‘birthday tea’ whilst watching the final episode of ‘Image of the Fendahl’ (which is still one of my favourite stories)
To be honest Season 15 as a whole is still one of my favourites, even Giant Prawns and poor CSO could not spoil it for me. I wasn’t aware of the previous Seasons’ highs, wasn’t aware of the changes in Production Team from Hinchcliffe to Williams… it was just Doctor Who, and to my 8 year old self it was magical
In early 1979 we moved to the West Midlands. We lived a few miles from a main ‘town’ (Tardebigge being in between Redditch and Bromsgrove) so we had a mobile library van visit our ‘estate’ once a month. Not having a clue that ‘Target Books’ existed, let alone about release schedules, I was thrilled when I happened to find a battered copy of ‘Genesis of The Daleks’ to loan… I immediately asked for ‘any more Doctor Who’… the next month I was presented with well-thumbed hardback editions of ‘Web of Fear’; The Loch Ness Monster’; and ‘The Tenth Planet’… As much as reading the books I’d spend hours staring at the covers, admiring every aspect
The biggest revelation was to come a couple of months later… and it seems incredible now that I wouldn’t have been aware of or thought of this though after borrowing them from the mobile library… YOU COULD BUY THE DOCTOR WHO BOOKS!!!
Not only that… DOCTOR WHO WAS COMING TO BROMSGROVE!!!!
Little did I know either of these things though until Mum picked me up one day from school and announced we had to get a bus to the aforementioned town… It was like all my Christmas’s and Birthdays had come at once… there, upstairs in Preedy’s, a small, newsagents, come book / record shop, in full costume was Tom Baker surrounded by novelisation’s of stories I’d not yet heard of!
Unfortunately all this was happening ‘just before pay day’ … which I now know to be a genuine time of the month which tends to last for a couple of weeks, generally starting around the 14th if you’re paid on the 1st., I know this to be true as I now use it often myself in adult life. Being ‘just before pay day’ meant I was able to choose only one book to buy and be signed by the man himself… so, after what must have seemed like hours of deliberation and queuing to my Mum I chose the novelisation of Jon Pertwee’s ‘The Curse of Peladon’ for Tom Baker to sign…
Many years later, in 1997 I lost a number of my possessions in fire when the house I lived in was burnt down… this book, with Tom’s autograph, was one of the only Doctor Who related items I’d kept with me as I’d moved around with college and work, and was genuinely sorry to lose it. That Christmas though my brother presented me with a copy of Tom’s autobiography “Who on Earth Is Tom Baker”… opening it, I found it signed…
“To Iain, Sorry to hear about the fire, Love Tom Baker”
After the revelation that these books existed I then spend much of the following 4 years visiting scouring bookshops, now helped in part by Doctor Who Weekly / Monthly with news of what was ‘coming soon’ and having my appetite whetted by Jean-Marc Lofficier’s 1981 ‘Programme Guide’ to the stories not yet published. Actually it wasn’t’ just me… I’d give lists of books I was missing from my collection to my Mum, which she’d keep in her purse and she’d ‘look’ for these when she went shopping or was out for the day with my Dad.
Even now, every now and again I do go and read an ‘episode’ as put into words by the legend that is Terrence Dicks or browse thought an old issue of Doctor Who Weekly / Monthly, reading ‘The Iron Legion’ or ‘The Time Witch’ for an hour to relive my youth (it’s strangely more satisfying than watching an episode)
My Mum indulged my love of Doctor Who in the early 1980’s, always making sure I had the latest issue of Doctor Who Weekly or Monthly (to the point of calling the newsagents in nearby Aston Fields if it hadn’t arrived when expected), and making sure I had the Doctor Who Annual at Christmas.
My Mum also invented cosplay in 1980. Well, maybe not quite; from somewhere, I don’t know where, Mum got me a full size Tom Baker scarf… so when the local Church had a Summer Fete with a ‘fancy dress’ competition I was entered… wearing an old long coat borrowed from someone, my Dad’s trilby and my newly obtained scarf I was Doctor Who… I won the boys section easily (being the only entrant) and was ‘joint’ winner of the competition over all… I was thrilled, but miffed as thought I should have been outright winner.
Now I am older I can see why I had to share the prize… the only other participant in the competition was a 5 year old girl in a fairy outfit… (I say she was 5, she may have been older… but she was younger than I was). I’m fairly sure that I didn’t get the prize as either as whatever it was would have been ‘un-shareable’ so probably would be just been promised another Doctor Who novelisation the next time Mum went shopping
This wasn’t the only time my Mum got creative on my behalf. To earn what was probably a ‘making’ badge at Cubs… (It could possibly be ‘recycling’ now) we had to create something out of household rubbish. Most of my peers chose to make shields and swords and the like… I chose to make (or rather I got my Mum to make) K9… How hard could it be? A kitchen roll tube for a tail, a square box for the body with ‘K9’ drawn on with black marker pen, and egg box for a head… Peter Purvis would have been proud of me / my Mum… Sadly K9 didn’t last the evening that it was presented as one of my fellow Cubs managed to knock his head off with a well-aimed tennis ball… cue me walking home like a Marshman from ‘Full Circle’ carrying K9’s egg box head in my hand, dragging the box/body behind me… I did get the badge though!
At some point in 1984 my parents ‘rented’ a video recorder. (It seems strange now that people used to rent TV and video recorders rather than buying them outright). The first video my parents rented was ‘Police Academy’ at the cost of £8 for the weekend. We must have watched it 3 times to get our money’s worth…
I made sure I got our money’s worth out of the next video that got rented… during the first weeks of the summer holidays… ‘Revenge of The Cybermen’, I’m not sure if I’m correct but I am fairly sure I am, my Mum rented this for £10 for a whole week from ‘Owen Owen’ in Redditch, which if I remember correctly was a mainly a furniture and housewares store. Strange how they’d be renting VHS tapes, especially ones that may have had a ‘niche’ appeal… I must have watched it daily for that week, praying for the day when other stories would be released. (I think my family were praying also as I knew the edited compilation word for word)
Later that summer I travelled to Blackpool with my parents for a week, from what I can work out my last ‘family’ holiday with my parents. Other than record shops and bookshops the only thing of interest to me was the ‘Doctor Who Exhibition on Blackpool’s Golden Mile… After visiting the exhibition on probably the first day of our trip, somehow, my Mum managed to persuade the people that ran it to agree to me going back to dress up as a Cyberman and ‘promote’ the exhibition the following day.. And the day after, and the day after that… By the 3rd day I was wearing David Bank’s Cyberleader costume that he’d worn in ‘Earthshock’ and ‘The Five Doctors’
I did spend a couple of hours in the ‘Dalek’ but found that most passers-by thought it was amusing to kick it or try to push it into the wall… being a Cyberman was much more fun as you could scare the shit out of the parents who has seconds earlier been telling their kids that there was nothing to be scared of and it ‘wasn’t real’ as they walked passed you into long dark corridor at the start of the journey through the exhibition. I vividly remember grown men jumping out of their skin as a gloved Cyber-hand was placed on their shoulder…
The only other thing I remember about that holiday was using the same persuasion I’d used back in 1976 to get my ‘Amazing World Of Doctor Who’ book… even though Blackpool wasn’t as far as Bournemouth I persuaded my Mum to let me have my ‘pocket money’ to buy the Sex Pistols ‘Flogging A Dead Horse’ compilation … My Dad wasn’t too impressed when he saw the plastic turd on the back sleeve… I don’t think he appreciated the music much either. Buying that record would signal something else to come… something possibly bigger than my love of Doctor Who
I don’t want to give the impression that my Dad didn’t welcome or support my fixation with the TV Series, or ‘Doctor Bloody Who’ as he called it, or ‘this rubbish’ on the off chance he was in the same room as it was being broadcast. Years later, in the early 1990’s after he mentioned over tea that one of his colleagues had got BskyB Satellite TV in order to watch football, I enthusiastically explained that they were repeating early Doctor Who for the first time on UK Gold. For a couple of years, until I persuaded Dad to get it ourselves he would regularly buy packs of blank VHS video tapes so that his colleague ‘Nan’ could / would get up early every Sunday morning to record my favourite show. (Years later I asked why she hadn’t just set the timer, she explained they my Dad had told her how much being able to see these old shows meant to me and she feared missing even a few mins)
After leaving school and starting work in 1986 I met a few likeminded souls, some of whom had obtained 3rd or 4th generation VHS tapes of old episodes. As we only had one video recorder in the house I had to wait for my parents to be out at a Legion Meeting for the evening, or Saturday / Sunday afternoon when nothing else was on ‘main’ TV before I could watch. My parents were respective Presidents of the Men’s and Ladies Sections of Handforth Royal British Legion so thankfully their ‘official duties’ meant there were often occasions to do this. I remember watching copy of ‘The Ark’ with my Mum… I’m sure she was more taken with my enjoyment and enthusiasm watching a blurry 1960’s TV Show with a knackered horizontal hold and muffled sound than she was than with the actual show itself!
If it wasn’t for my Mum’s encouragement I don’t know if my ‘obsession’ with Doctor Who would have lasted so long. I’m sure some people would think that it’s an unhealthy thing also, especially as until the relaunch of the show in 2005 being a ‘Doctor Who fan’ was derided by many, but I’ve formed many friendships and had opportunities arise due to it.
Within ‘fandom’ there is often the opinion that Doctor Who fans can’t also appreciate or wouldn’t be interested in things. For me that isn’t true, as I have just as many friends through a mutual love of legendary DJ John Peel, and the music he played and introduced to the masses and football, specifically Manchester United, where I have been a regular for over 30 years
Actually depending on how well people really know me they would say that outside of family my main obsessions are music and football. The first of these probably being the biggest as I spent many enjoyable years working in that area… which brings me to another reason for not liking Leicester! During 1996 a band I was managing were playing at the ‘Princess Charlotte’ a good little venue on the indie circuit. For some reason the locals decided we were from Liverpool rather than Manchester and taken a dislike to us. Our battered ‘Dodge’ tour bus was showered with bricks and bottles as we tried to load the gear back into it and Britz, our driver had to driver around the ring road which the venue sat on to pick up the various members of the band as they stumbled out of the venue or broke for cover.
Anyway, I digress… other than a couple of years in the late 1980’s when alcohol, the Madchester scene and going out became more of a thing I never have really lost my love of Doctor Who (the Sylvester McCoy era initially passed me by but I caught up via VHS). In my early 20’s my love for the show was fully reignited when a friend bought me ‘The War Games’ VHS for my 21st birthday in late 1991. With me being a completest the collecting bug bit again, whether it be an official BBC release or a compilation recorded off UK Gold (and has only just recently finished over 27 years later with the release of ‘Shada’ BluRay)
It does seem a shame that since the birth of the Internet the art of searching things out and the joy of finding them has pretty much been taken away (unless you’re collecting them for the sake of owning the physical article… although a search on eBay is pretty much guaranteed for most things!)
It would have been unimaginable back in my youth when I started first collecting Target Books that I would one day have copies of all of them; plus issues of Doctor Who Weekly on my iPad and existing episodes on DVD and on a hard drive.
In more recent years my fandom has often been indulged by my friends… Nikki, who knowing I was in London whilst Russell T Davies was signing ‘The Writers Tale’ in Manchester, drove from near Birmingham to get me a copy for my birthday (and ended up spending a few minutes discussing shoes with the aforementioned showrunner) and Phil who bought me a gold talking Dalek for Christmas in 2005 (both of which I still own).
Nikki also bought me a piece of Doctor Who autographed memorabilia… a page of the script from Tom Baker’s ‘Warriors’ Gate’ signed by Sylvester McCoy… that’s still on the wall.
My Mum passed away on 30th April 2007. As anyone losing someone will know ‘normality’ goes out of the window for a period of time. It was mid-June before I got around to catching up on TV and getting back to ‘normal’. I sat down to watch the Doctor Who episodes I’d recorded (‘Evolution of The Daleks’ to ‘The Family of Blood’) in a marathon session on Sunday 3rd June.
I’d never read any of the ‘New Adventures’, the programmes ‘wilderness years’ being a time when I was going out and doing other things, so wasn’t aware of the epilogue to the ‘Human Nature’ story…
Whilst apparently some of the sentiment was changed for the televised version, I found the ‘Remembrance Day’ scene completely heart-breaking but completely fitting, whist it was tying up the Paul Cornell’s story, for me personally it felt like my favourite show was also paying its own respects to my Mum too
Iain Key 2016/17
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