So, still here then?
There used to be people walking around who had lived through World War I and then, a generation or so later, went through it all again with World War II. When it comes to Doctor Who, I feel like that. I remember vividly the way Doctor Who – and, almost more than Doctor Who, the Daleks! – was a Beatlemania-type phenomenon in the early 1960s. I saw The Curse of the Daleks at the theatre, I owned a plastic Mechonoid, I had a battered paperback (it fell to pieces and was re placed) of The Dalek Pocketbook and Space Travellers Guide, I saw the two Peter Cushing films the week they opened, and I was watching television when – with no advance notice! – William Hartnell fell down and got up again as Patrick Troughton.
At some point, soon after, it became just another television programme: part of the schedule and important to watch – like, say, Dad’s Army or Monty Python – but not quite as huge as it had been. Thunderbirds and Batman came and went too, with much more merchandising, and even The Avengers didn’t stay on the schedules quite as long as Doctor Who, which, as a children’s programme, was less liable to summary cancellation. Besides, the genius stroke of incorporating a change-over of leading actor into the premise meant it could theoretically go on forever. But it didn’t. I stopped regularly watching the series just about the time K-9 showed up, but came back to it intermittently for the rest of its original run – most of Peter Davison’s first two seasons – and, when the old stuff started being recycled on video or cable, I filled in the gaps I’d missed, though without much enthusiasm. Seriously, John Nathan-Turner, what were you thinking …?
When the axe fell in 1989, it was long past due. Doctor Who began, and caught on, as a show which appealed to a wide audience – it died when it appealed only to Doctor Who fans and even they scorned most of it. When it came back in 2005, it was like the 1960s all over again. It became the favourite programme of children of the new millennium, just as it had been my favourite programme when I was a child. The merchandising began, in a regimented way that made all those Dalek toys of the ’60s seem half-hearted. This Who has had spin-off shows! We await the ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek’ remix, though. The new Doctor Who has had highs and lows and troughs the way the old show did, and at the time of writing – with Matt Smith in the offing and a year’s worth of dodgy ‘specials’ – it may just about be reaching its K-9 point. Or it may regenerate, again.
Whatever, as the Time Lords know, this is unlikely to be the final end … and this is equally unlikely to be the last edition of this useful little book.
Kim Newman is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. His fiction includes the novels Anno Dracula and Life’s Lottery and the novella Doctor Who: Time and Relative.