Who goes there (2003)

Publication: The Western Australian
Date: 2003-11-17
Author: Rebecca Tyrrel
Page: 12
Language: English

Forty years after he first arrived on BBC television, Doctor Who is coming back to earth with a new series. REBECCA TYRREL, long-suffering mother of one of his biggest fans, braces herself for his landing.

AROUND teatime on Saturday, November 23, 1963, thousands of British viewers, mired in the age of chenille tablecloths, flying ducks, carpet slippers and flecked black-and-white television screens, settled down in their front rooms to watch the first-ever episode of Doctor Who.

"It was the day after JFK was assassinated," says Andrew Beech, who was BBC Worldwide's project manager for the program's 40th anniversary celebrations this year.

The celebrations, held at the start of the month at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel, attracted loyal Who fans as well as an impressive array of former Doctors.

Beech was one of thousands of child addicts who have apparently evolved into perfectly well-adjusted Doctor Who fans. He started out in front of the television at the age of five, watching William Hartnell (the first Doctor), and he was hooked.

He hid behind the sofa, peeked through the keyhole and strutted around the playground at school with his arms outstretched, repeating, "I am a Dalek" in a robotic voice.

When he went to university he kept in touch with other Doctor Who fans through newsletters and meetings. "Fan-dom was becoming more organised through clubs and societies so it was easy to communicate if you wanted to," he says.

After graduating as a lawyer, he moved from Warwickshire to London, where he attended Doctor Who Fan Club meetings. held on the first Thursday of every month in the Fitzroy Tavern just off Tottenham Court Road. "They still are," he says.

Beech soon moved from being just a fan who enjoyed discussing, for example, the Earth Colony on Axista 4 as featured in The Colony of Lies (Patrick Troughton, second Doctor), to helping out with the club's tax affairs.

At the same time he set up a company called Dominitemporal (Lords of Time) Services Limited. "I am rather embarrassed about that name now, it makes me sound a bit of an anorak," he says.

He left London during the 1980s and now, as well as organising science-fiction events, he is the BBC's official Doctor Who expert. These are busy times: 14 years after being sent off into orbit for what we thought was eternity, the Tardis (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) is coming back.

There is to be a new series on BBC1 with a new Doctor, new wannabe supreme rulers of the universe and a whole new set of abandoned gravel pits in Surrey masquerading as other planets.

I have a six-year-old version of Andrew Beech at home — my son, Louis, who first saw an episode of Doctor Who on the UK Gold channel at the age of three-and-a-half.

Since then he has amassed an impressive collection of Doctor Who merchandise, both official — a Cyberman bottle stopper — and unofficial — a handmade Peter Davison (the fifth Doctor) outfit, and the 1.8m-high Tardis on our landing, which I commissioned in the hope that his obsession would soon wear off and I could convert what is actually a big blue box with a door and light on the top into a roomy linen cupboard.

As the mother of a young Doctor Who fan, I have often found myself with a glazed and fixed expression, talking to people about a subject which interests me very little, though Louis is more than capable of holding his own with the best of them.

Recently he spent 20 minutes in the company of Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor), and a few days later a good hour rattling on to Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who, who went on to produce an array of successful films and television programs from The Naked Civil Servant to Jonathan Creek.

Other people we have engaged in conversation over the years include the man we chatted to at the Doctor Who shop in the foyer of the Doctor Who exhibition at Longleat, Wiltshire, which we have visited four times.

This man and I had a long discussion how much a 15cm-high Super Weapons Dalek that can speak five different phrases from, "Exterminate the Doctor" to "Locate and destroy" would be worth one year after purchase, if it was still in its box and had never been tampered with.

UNFORTUNATELY, Louis had tampered with his a few minutes after purchase but if he hadn't we could have sold it for $210; a 400 per cent profit on the recommended retail price.

And then there was David Howe who, according to Beech, is the biggest collector of Doctor Who merchandise "on the planet" (which doesn't discount there being bigger collectors on other planets, like Gallifrey, which is the home planet of all Time Lords and therefore bound to house some knockout memorabilia).

The other day I had a long telephone conversation with Mr Howe, who said modestly there are "probably bigger collectors on earth but he couldn't be sure.

We talked about the cost of a vinyl Dalek suit, like the one that I found at the end of my bed on Christmas morning in 1965. It was then worth about $2 but would now fetch $650 (this really quite hard to believe nugget of information is available to anyone in the universe who buys David Howe's complete guide to all the Doctor Who merchandise ever made anywhere in the world).

Talking in depth about their subject is something that Doctor Who fans love to do. And while most of them are perfectly nice people, there are some fans out there whose obsession is bordering on the worrying: 40-year-olds dressed up as Doctors, for example.

Beech himself has in the past been persuaded by photographers to pose in costume and has always regretted it because it makes him look like someone who needs to get out more. And he admits that, since there are 8000 hardcore fans out there, you are bound to get some oddballs. How does he know there are 8000 fans? "The figure is based on the amount of CDs and DVDs sold every time there is a new release."

Meanwhile, the press are enjoying some speculation about who will play the new Doctor Who. Will it be Bill Nighy, or Alan Davies, or Richard E. Grant, or Paul McGann again? Or will it be Eddie Izzard?

"I went on the radio last week and told someone it would be Eddie lzzard," says Baker, when Louis and I meet him. "I have been putting the word around that it's him, with Sue MacGregor (formerly of Radio 4's Today program) as his assistant. Sue MacGregor is a joke but Eddie Izzard would be politically interesting and he does have a very benevolent quality about him."

Baker had a benevolent quality when he played the Doctor from 1974 to 1982. He still has. "Come in, Louis," he says, "Sit yourself down, make yourself comfortable and tell me about your favourite episode."

"The Deadly Assassin," says Louis.

"Ah," says Mr Baker. "And which bit of The Deadly Assassin did you enjoy the most?"

"The bit where you nearly drowned," says Louis.

"You know," says Baker, "I did live Doctor Who, it wasn't just an acting performance ... I was out there with the children promoting Doctor Who all the time. I did it for the program but also for me. It was to put off reality."

He tells us the story about the time he was in a town and wanted to watch himself in an opening episode but could not get to a television set. "1 saw a house with two bicycles outside so I guessed there would be children inside, and I knocked on the door. A young man opened it and I was just standing there and he said, 'Christ!' and as he said it the Doctor Who music started inside the house. He said, 'Come in'.

"So I went in to his little sitting room with a telly in the corner and two boys sitting on the sofa and I glided in next to them and we watched it and the boys turned round and did this stupefied double take."

Baker is about to star in a new series of Fort Boyard on the Challenge digital television channel, playing a "salty old sea-dog". He lives in France these days where, he says, his wife has a house "and she lets me in occasionally". He was, of course, once married to Lalla Ward (now married to zoologist Richard Dawkins, the proselytising Darwinian atheist), who was one of the Doctor's assistants.

In the beginning the Doctor didn't have an assistant; he had a granddaughter, Susan, who according to Lambert was good at screaming (a prerequisite for any Doctor's companion, who will then be known in Doctor Who circles as "The Screamer").

Lambert's favourite adversary was the Dalek. "We did the first four episodes with prehistoric monsters and grunting people," she says. "To be honest, it wasn't a great start but we had commissioned Terry Nation to write some stories and he created the Daleks. My head of department at the BBC thought the Daleks were terrible but we didn't have anything else to put on so we went ahead."

Nation had described them as being like metal chess players, and a designer called Raymond Cusick produced them. "He got £50 from the BBC," says Verity Lambert. "In fact, he got £25 and I said, 'This is ludicrous, put it up to £50'."

But surely the Daleks were no more than up-ended rubbish bins with attached sink-plungers and whisks? "They were great," says Lambert. "The first day we saw them in the studio we all wanted to get inside and try them out."

I tell her what a 15cm-high talking plastic one that hasn't been tampered with is fetching within a year of purchase and she says she is not surprised. And then she goes on to discuss a newly released Doctor Who DVD with Louis. As they talk on into the evening, it occurs to me that it could be quite a while before I get my linen cupboard.

Captions: Sylvestor McCoy: Dr Who number seven.

Who's who: Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and Richard Hurndall, a stand-in for the late William Hartnell, at a Dr Who reunion.

Colin Baker, with co-star Bonnie Langford.

The Tardis: Dr Who's flying police box.

Spelling correction: Sylvester McCoy

Who goes there (2003)

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