I haven't kept a television set for nearly five years, but television fascinates me. I can trace this fascination to a single program, starting one evening at my grandparent's house.
One evening just after dinner I was watching the little black and white portable television in the spare room and, on a whim and for the first time ever, watched a whole episode of Doctor Who. I was hooked.
To this day, I don't know why it happened at that moment, and not earlier or later. Perhaps I was just the right age. Perhaps it was the small black and white screen hiding a multitude of sins, not least the sets and special effects, cheap even by Doctor Who standards. It was the late-period Tom Baker story the Power of Kroll, by one of the program's most prolific and gifted writers, Robert Holmes. However, it was not one of his better efforts. One of his worst, in fact. It was produced in 1978, and Holmes would not write for the series again until 1984. He was still only a year away from a three and a half year stint as script editor. In theory, a BBC script editor commissions and, as the name implies, edits scripts. For Holmes the role often involved frantically rewriting inadequate scripts to such as degree that the finished version bore little resemblance to what was submitted. It would hardly be surprising if he were a little burned out.
I know all this because of that remarkable thing known as fandom, which these days as often as not just means playing dress-up and collecting signatures at a lavish convention, but at the time meant an obsessive desire to know everything about how the show was made and the people who made it.
Due to fandom I soon learned, at least in broad strokes, why 1978 was not a particularly fine vintage of Doctor Who. However first came the discovery that by the 1980s there were something like 70 novelisations of broadcast stories, and that pretty much all of them were available through my local municipal library.
This came just in time, since I was of an age when the works of Enid Blyton were no longer quite as compelling as they once were, and I had reason enough to prefer a rich and limitless fantasy world over drab and fenced-in suburbia.
The more recent novelisations included as an appendix a helpful list of available titles in the range. In an exercise book, I kept a log of which I had read and, once I had finished the lot, how many times I had read them.
There was also, published back in 1972, a book titled the Making of Doctor Who which, unusually for the time, named names of those behind the camera, described their jobs, and chronicled the show's then almost ten-year history. It was aimed at a young readership, and written by people currently deeply involved with the show and on the BBC payroll, so sadly it included no scurrilous gossip. Later, as the program approached it's twentieth anniversary, it acquired further officially-sanctioned behind-the-scenes titles, bewildering postmodern academic deconstructions, and a profusion of amateur (if often astonishingly professional in quality) fanzines, the latter of which filled the scandal vacuum.
I'm glad that my introduction to Doctor Who was a rather naff story. It would be awfully dreary to be a fan of a uniformly excellent series. I'd have gone off it by now. Inconsistency is marvelous for honing the critical faculties.
Why is this four episodes of running around corridors so tedious, when the last four episodes of running around corridors had me on the edge of my seat? Why does three minutes of notionally tear-jerking monologue leave me feeling totally cold towards that character, while a few seconds of beating up a Dalek with a baseball bat makes me instantly adore this character with an intense and lifelong devotion? Why does this director's work feel like I'm watching a slide presentation in a drafty church hall, while that director has me in the middle of the action, shoulder-to-shoulder with the performers?
I still think I could make a relatively decent fist of any job on that program, should a time machine be available to take me back forty or fifty years. Every fan my age does. I was horrified when David Tennant got the part. Not that I don't love David Tennant; he read all the same fanzines I did, after all. It's just that he was, and remains, three months to the day younger than me. It was my turn first, at least for three months.