Dr. Who destroyed my life

andy.eNovember 16, 20234 Mins read216 Views

K-1 robot with Sergeant John Benton and Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart in the background

K-1 Robot from Dr. Who (c. 1974)

When I was ten, I saw something that changed my life forever. I didn’t know it then, but I had been marked. My little eyeballs and the imagination behind them had grasped a mighty and mysterious social artifact—one that would push me through the ringer—forever changing my life.

I saw and instantly fell in love with Doctor Who.

My parents were big fans of PBS. If the TV was on, it was probably tuned to PBS. For those of you too young to have experienced broadcast television, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service. This private/public partnership brought commercial-free television to stations across the US in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. PBS stations didn’t have much money to produce original programming, so they licensed many programs from the BBC in the United Kingdom, primarily reruns. That’s how I was introduced to two of my life’s most influential pieces of media: Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Doctor Who.

I was inspired to write this article when I came across the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials trailer online and started to weep as it played. I never know when a wave of raw emotion will hit me, but the trailers for upcoming seasons of Doctor Who always get me. It’s a sensation so intense all my mind can do is break down a little. It results from a time-compression—a distillation—of my complicated 40 plus year relationship with the Doctor. It’s a little time traveling of my own.

First, I want to say that I am not ignorant of the many flaws of the program. It suffered from the usual ailments of low-budget, episodic television science fiction: bad writing, poor acting, awful makeup, terrible set design, lousy special effects, crummy sound design, amateurish cinematography, laughable stunts, dreadful direction, and subpar prop design. Did I miss anything?

Here’s the thing, though: it also had incredible writing, fantastic acting, spectacular makeup, astounding set design, remarkable special effects, iconic sound design, extraordinary cinematography, marvelous stunts (well… they tried), superb direction, and stunning prop design. As primates, the ability to spot flaws and weaknesses is a beneficial evolutionary adaptation. It’s the reason our species is still around. Another evolutionary adaptation that has had an aggregate positive effect on the species is our ability to imagine things we can’t see. The flaws weren’t the important part for me; the potential was. A guy in the robot suit in front of the green screen is boring compared to a giant robot walking around an army base, causing havoc. One is a list of facts, but the other is a banquet for my imagination.

So, at the age of ten, I found a thing so different from the other science fiction I had been exposed to. This was closer to Star Trek than Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. But it was weird and magical. It didn’t hurt that Tom Baker was my first Doctor. He had a magnetic personality and a compelling voice—authoritative and playful. I didn’t understand what I was watching, but it tickled the creative part of my brain.

My family lived in Kansas City then, and the public television station we watched aired the episodes one at a time in the late afternoon. I got to know the Sontarans, the Daleks (including Davros), and the Cybermen in that first season. Then, we moved to the suburbs of Chicago, and everything got more intense. At that time, WTTW, the primary Chicago PBS station, aired Doctor Who at 11pm on Sunday nights, and they didn’t show one episode. They showed an entire serial—two to three hours long. This meant I only got to watch it during the summer and on holiday weekends. I went from a measured dosage to a cycle of bingeing. I was driven to disobey my parents and try to watch it in secret, depriving myself of much-needed sleep. Being a fan required sacrifice and a willingness to dissent.

To satisfy my addiction, I turned to the novelizations that were available at a local comic book shop. That’s when I discovered and fell in love with Patrick Troughton‘s Doctor. Every book report I wrote in sixth grade was one of those novelizations.

Then, I attended my first convention during the summer between seventh and eighth grade. It was magical. I got to try (extremely expensive) Jelly Babies, saw Peter Davidson episodes that hadn’t been shown in America yet, attended a panel featuring John Nathan-Turner, and—best of all—got Peter Davidson’s autograph. I also did something that would cost me dearly – I bought a T-shirt.

Eighth grade is the worst. If you aren’t like everyone else, it’s even worse. I didn’t realize I was painting a bullseye on myself for every frightened bully and sycophant—and there were a lot of other reasons I stood out—but my Doctor Who shirt was apparently an unbearable provocation. I’d already defied authority in service of this cult to which I belonged, so the scorn of my peers just hardened my resolve.

In time, though, I matured, and my focus shifted to punk rock and girls. Doctor Who lost a lot of its power. Colin Baker‘s tenure was enjoyable but not the same. Then, like most of the world, I fell off entirely during the Sylvester McCoy era. That is until 2005 when it all came rushing back.

Don’t get me wrong though, I love both the 6th and 7th Doctors and I have been a loyal viewer since. The special effects are better (the writing, acting, etc.), it doesn’t require the same asceticism, and it doesn’t carry the same stigma. I get a lot of enjoyment from it, but not like I used to—though I occasionally break into tears for no reason in the middle of episodes. What really brings it all back and compresses my complicated 40-plus year relationship into a two-and-half minutes wave of emotion are those amazing trailers.