Trust Me, I'm The Doctor...

Forget any other news reports you may have seen this week. As we approach Saturday, 23 November, there's one news item that's slowly, insidiously taking over the public consciousness. Sure, it's the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy... but it's also the anniversary of the very first episode of Doctor Who. You can't say you hadn't noticed.

Fifty years deserves to be a milestone of epic proportions for a TV show. Not only has Doctor Who been running for longer than most of its viewers have been alive, but it's gradually worked its way into British culture. Even those who don't know their 4th Doctor from their 8th can tell you what a Dalek looks like, or the Tardis. At some point Doctor Who stopped just being a TV show - it became an institution.

My essay Lost in Time and Space: Growing Old with Doctor Who (readable online at The Weeklings) looks at the programme's phenomenal history, and also revisits one of its classic episodes, 'Earthshock' - after which nothing was quite the same for me and my fellow Whovians. I still remember it thirty years later, so you know it's a classic.

I also wanted to keep something back for my blog readers, however. So, in true DVD Extra tradition, I present an outtake from the essay. This passage was excised in the interests of flow, and pacing, and focus - and lots of other writerly reasons. But I felt that it still needed a home somewhere. Enjoy.

‘Earthshock’ may have been my first encounter with the Cybermen, but there was already a deep well of stories to draw from. I had always been an avid reader, and as my obsession with Doctor Who grew, so the tie-in novelizations became my fix. They formed their own lo-fi form of time travel. It was between the pages of these books that I first encountered the Hartnell incarnation of The Doctor (grouchy, like an elderly relative spoiling your vacation), and the Troughton years (impish by contrast). In Doctor Who and the Cybermen I learned about their home planet MONDAS, and their millennia-long grudge against the human race as they drifted among the stars. I also plundered the Jon Pertwee novelizations, more Earthbound than his predecessors but no less enthralling for it. The original cover of Doctor Who and the Daemons still makes me shiver, with its imagery borrowed from horror classic Night of the Demon, and its unidentifiable air of menace.

When the show returned for each new season I was armed with new elements of Doctor Who lore, from his relationship with the Timelords of Gallifrey to the origins of the Dalek race. I may have come late to the party, but I was making up for lost time.

Read the full essay Lost in Time and Space here.