In the 1980s, organised Doctor Who fandom became notorious for its involvement in affecting the direction and content of the TV series. Collective, organised fan action has, at different times in its history, both benefited and harmed the show. The twenty-first-century revival of Doctor Who may be a popular ratings hit, but it is creatively driven by writers, directors and even actors who grew up as active fans of the original TV series. Writer-producer Russell T Davies was just such an active fan, who went on to write a professional spin-off novel (Damaged Goods) while forging a TV scriptwriting career from the early 1990s that led to him reviving the series he loved. Steven Moffat, his replacement after five years, had been just as active in fandom and a regular attendee at London fan pub get-togethers, as well as writer of the affectionate 1999 Red Nose Day Doctor Who spoof The Curse of Fatal Death. Writers for the new show, like Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts, cut their creative teeth in Doctor Who fandom, while the Tenth Doctor himself, David Tennant, was also a self-proclaimed, knowledgeable fan of the original series whose reason for becoming an actor was to play that role.
These people are the most visible members of a very active and creative group that gathered around Doctor Who. More than most media-driven fandoms, the Doctor Who fan community has proved to be a creative hotbed that not only provided an outlet for the passions of fans, but kept the series alive when it was off air and created positive new directions for it to move in. While many fans were content to express their own creativity through producing fanzines, fan-made videos or stage productions, and many others were happy simply to participate in the consumption of this material (perhaps contributing through the letter columns), some were driven to pursue professional creative careers, having honed their craft in the worlds of Doctor Who fandom. It was a natural conclusion to all this activity that the lunatics should one day take over the asylum, and fans would be in the professional position of producing (and starring in) the show itself.
Doctor Who fandom had its origins in the 1960s. Two years after the series’ debut the BBC officially sanctioned the William (Doctor Who) Hartnell Fan Club, run by an enthusiastic fan from Stoke-on-Trent. Members would receive signed photos of the cast and an occasional duplicated newsletter. With the change of lead actor to Patrick Troughton in 1966, the organisation became the Official Doctor Who Fan Club, but the material it produced continued along the same lines, if slightly more in depth (as would be expected from a growing, more experienced organisation). By 1969, the club was being run by Graham Tattersall, who continued to forge good connections with the Doctor Who production office secretaries and developed the club magazine further, expanding it to include coverage of the new show occupying Doctor Who’s Saturday time slot, Star Trek. As the 1970s dawned, Tattersall found he could no longer afford to devote the time, energy and expense needed to run the club single-handed.
In 1971, an Edinburgh-based fan, Keith Miller, took over the running of the club, producing a revamped newsletter using equipment at his school. When this became impractical, Miller arranged for the Doctor Who production office itself (now under Barry Letts) to duplicate and mail out the newsletter to his members. The content of the magazine (called DWFC Mag by 1973) developed in sophistication and began to include interviews with the series’ cast arranged through the production office. Miller (accompanied by his mother) even visited Television Centre to see the series in production. As the popularity of the show grew, so too did the membership of the club, entering the thousands and spreading worldwide in the wake of the show’s overseas sales. Miller found the growing club difficult to manage, and wound it up by mid-1976, moving on to produce his own paid-for ‘fanzine’ (a ‘fan magazine’ produced by amateurs, usually on a single topic like a TV show, a football club or a pop band) called Doctor Who Digest.
Just as Miller was opting out of his Doctor Who activities, the seeds of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) were sown in the mid-1970s. The growth of independently produced fanzines (thanks to developments in copying technology) brought together several people who’d previously been part of Miller’s growing network, among them TARDIS magazine editor Gordon Blows and Jan Vincent Rudzki. The core of the DWAS effectively grew out of a group of Doctor Who fans who attended the University of London’s Westfield College, combined with some of Miller’s most active members. The organisation, officially recognised by the BBC, was founded in October 1975, and was rolled out nationally in May 1976.
Membership grew slowly, with members regularly receiving Society newsletter Celestial Toyroom, but the DWAS served as a group around which greater Doctor Who fandom could orbit. Independent fanzines flourished in the 1980s (as photocopying and cheap printing made their production even easier, even if circulation only reached a few hundred) and local groups (whether formerly affiliated with the DWAS or not) appeared across the country, holding regular meetings. Being a Doctor Who fan moved from being a solitary pursuit to a communal activity, with a growing shared language and set of references.
In 1977, the first Doctor Who convention was held in Battersea, London in a church hall, and gave rise to a regular series of events, each growing in size in terms of venue and attendance. Through the years to come, those running the Society (the self-named ‘Executive’) would change when their personal lives or jobs changed, giving opportunities to others (usually involved fans who’d managed to make connections with the people already running things). Thus a ready-made chain of succession within organised fandom meant that the DWAS continues to exist today, although it has a far less pivotal role in a much more diffuse, Internet-based fandom.
With the widespread sale of batches of Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes to the United States in the early 1980s, fandom took root there as well. Fanzines and conventions flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Australia where Doctor Who was regularly screened and gathered a similar active cult following. Stars of the show were encouraged to attend events worldwide by 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner, and the production office was more helpful than ever in facilitating fan access to the show.
Throughout the 1980s, fandom grew, and became more involved in affecting the production of the series itself. One prominent fan, music producer and songwriter Ian Levine, became attached to John Nathan-Turner’s production office as an unofficial, unpaid ‘continuity advisor’. As previous producers Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams had found, Doctor Who had told so many stories over its almost 20 years in production that it was impossible to know everything about them and thus avoid contradicting events in the series’ past. Levine had first come to the notice of the production office in the late 1970s when he’d managed to prevent the destruction of key 1960s episodes by the BBC (as part of their ongoing process of videotape recycling). Nathan-Turner came to regard Levine’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the show as an asset, so enlisted him to review scripts and make other suggestions regarding continuity issues. As Levine claimed in an online debate in 2008: ‘Between 1979 and 1986, I had access to every script and was privy to every decision.’
It is arguable that Levine’s influence spilled over from correcting continuity mistakes and making suggestions to actually influencing the approach Nathan-Turner took to producing the show. With Levine working on the inside of the production and vocal fans welcoming the evident ‘returning monsters’ policy developing through Nathan-Turner’s first few seasons, the producer apparently began to tailor the show to appeal to the vocal fan network, while also trying to make a show that would appeal to general BBC1 viewers. More than any previous producer, Nathan-Turner regarded his duties as including attending fan conventions (only Williams had previously attended fan events, being the producer when conventions began to take off). The fan acclaim he received could do no other than colour his production of the series.
However, the insular nature of the later material being created to appeal to fans did not cross over to the larger audience, beyond an initial nostalgia value. The show now often featured obscure continuity, and showcased returning characters and monsters, many forgotten by the more casual mass audience. By the time the show reached Attack of the Cybermen (supposedly co-written, or at the very least developed, by Levine) in 1985, the stories being told had become so continuity laden that even actively involved fans had trouble fitting together all the elements.
Fans were not always positive about the programme, even in the early days of organised fandom. One of the earliest reviews published by the DWAS was a scathing assessment of The Deadly Assassin (by DWAS organiser Jan Vincent Rudzki) ending with the plea: ‘What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?’ In later years, Robert Holmes’ reinvention of Time Lord society has come to be regarded as a classic, often featuring in the upper reaches of fan-favourite polls. The voices of 1980s fandom quickly turned on Nathan-Turner, even as they continued to enjoy privileged access to the show thanks to his largesse.
Nathan-Turner’s ‘open-door’ policy to fans contributed towards the development of a ‘fan hierarchy’. Those who had contacts in the Doctor Who production office were privy to advance knowledge that the greater body of fandom was not, and some would use this access to increase their stature within the small pond of fandom.
Small groups of active London fans even secured jobs within the BBC, including in the costume department at Television Centre or even working on the BBC listings magazine Radio Times. This afforded them access to information and even to the studio filming of episodes. Small groups of fans – those with BBC passes, their invited friends, and those allowed access by Nathan-Turner or other production-office contacts – were regular attendees at Television Centre studio recordings throughout the 1980s. They were able to watch episodes being recorded in the studio, pick up on behind-the-scenes relationships and politics and even fraternise with cast and crew in the BBC bar afterwards. Part of the reason for Doctor Who’s downfall at the end of the 1980s came from this free flow between fans and production personnel, unlike that on any other British TV show – cult, SF, soap or otherwise.
As well as the DWAS newsletter Celestial Toyroom, several other prominent fanzines had started up offering a platform for a plethora of critical voices (long before the existence of Internet forums). These magazines offered an outlet for experimentation and created a venue in which aspiring fiction writers and critics could learn their craft. Within this small universe, certain fan names would become well known and their work anticipated, by an actively engaged audience.
Two magazines in particular contributed to the development of Doctor Who’s fan culture in the 1980s: the professional Doctor Who magazine and the independent and critical Doctor Who Bulletin. Doctor Who magazine developed from the launch in 1979 by Marvel of Doctor Who Weekly comic. The title would prove to be important to the consolidation of fan identity and community in the UK. Modelled after Star Wars Weekly, the comic-strip-led publication was run by Doctor Who fans who used the publication’s resources and ‘official’ status to codify the Doctor Who canon. This wasn’t a deliberate project, but the result of unbridled enthusiasm meeting a welcoming audience. Soon the publication had developed beyond its beginnings as a children’s comic and was re-launched as Doctor Who Monthly (later just Doctor Who Magazine), appealing to an older, teen-and-upwards audience.
The establishment of key agreed facts about the show began in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly. Previously, fans had little published material beyond occasional features in the Radio Times (including the collectible Tenth Anniversary Special) and other newspapers and magazines, old TV21 comic-strip adventures and one book, The Making of Doctor Who (by scriptwriters Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke), which offered story synopses for the series up to the Tom Baker serial The Hand of Fear and some limited behind-the-scenes information. Now, the editors and writers of Doctor Who Monthly were able to establish a consensus as to which TV stories of the past were good (dubbed ‘classics’) and which were poor. Many readers gained an education on how television shows were constructed, with special attention paid to those elements that made Doctor Who unique, like special effects or model making. Stories told by cast and crew (often untrue or misremembered) became legends through repetition in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly. The publication matured with its audience, becoming Doctor Who Magazine and enduring through the years the show was off air (1989–2005), thriving on coverage of fan-produced novels and audio productions, as well as re-exploring Doctor Who’s past, often using video or DVD releases as a hook for re-appraising a particular story or era of the show. That Doctor Who fandom has a shared language and set of cultural assumptions is largely due to the pervasive influence of Doctor Who Magazine.
Within the pages of the magazine, John Nathan-Turner established himself as a larger-than-life personality, one to rival Fourth Doctor Tom Baker. He even had a ‘costume’ of sorts, often wearing loud Hawaiian shirts in photographs and personal appearances. His was the voice of wisdom; he was the man who held the secrets of Doctor Who adventures yet to come and who could explain how fans were mistaken in their view that the 1980s version of the show was not as good as it used to be, due to the fact that ‘the memory cheats’. Nathan-Turner developed a series of catchphrases, readily repeated (and eventually mocked), such as ‘stay tuned’, when promising new developments, and ‘I have been persuaded to stay’, when fans were desperate for a new producer to take over from 1985 onwards. Nathan-Turner was regularly photographed in the pages of the magazine alongside the series’ stars, often wearing those ‘trademark’ Hawaiian shirts, or a sheepskin coat. His ‘cult of the personality’ was one that fandom initially fed, before they turned on the monster they’d been instrumental in creating.
A key tool in fan dissent was the maverick Doctor Who Bulletin (DWB). DWB took issue with the official picture of the series being painted in the 1980s through the pages of Celestial Toyroom and Doctor Who Magazine. Begun in 1983 as a back-bedroom-produced fanzine, DWB would become increasingly professional in its approach and production values as well as function as an outlet for the kind of fan debate not tolerated in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. Pre-Internet, letters-pages debates would rage among fans for months at a time, while editor Gary Levy (later Leigh) built solid contacts within the Doctor Who production office. The publication was tolerated by producer John Nathan-Turner until the magazine turned on the show and began to heavily criticise the production and those making it, with much of the criticism seemingly driven by growing personal animosity. With the help of continuity advisor Ian Levine (also an outcast as far as the production office was concerned by 1986), DWB chronicled the 1985 cancellation crisis and the reception of the flawed The Trial of a Time Lord season in 1986. It gave a voice to increasingly negative fan reaction.
Throughout the 1980s, many of the fans who began as writers for fanzines, or worked on Celestial Toyroom, Doctor Who Magazine or DWB, would become professionals in their fields, shaped by their experiences in Doctor Who fandom. Many became writers, whether for magazines or television, while others pursued more technical interests in video production and restoration. Some fans, born in the 1960s, were the right age to find work on the programme itself in its dying days, such as model maker Mike Tucker (who would go on to write official spin-off novels) and mask makers Stephen Mansfield and Susan Moore.
Other events had linked and brought Doctor Who fans together, showing isolated, individual fans that they in fact belonged to a large and active subculture. In 1983, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who in advance of that autumn’s broadcast of The Five Doctors, BBC Enterprises (the publicly funded BBC’s commercial arm) arranged an official convention to take place in the grounds of Longleat House in Wiltshire. There had been occasional Doctor Who exhibitions and public appearances by the stars before, most notably the ongoing (and constantly changing) exhibition on the sea front at Blackpool and that at Longleat itself. The Longleat event would be different, however. The organisers expected around 50,000 people to attend over the Easter-weekend holiday, drawn by appearances by many of the actors from the show’s 20-year history. However, the BBC had underestimated the appeal of Doctor Who and the effect of nostalgia. Traffic jams and endless lines became a hallmark of the event, as crowds swarmed to see prop displays, watch old episodes screened in tents and queue for hours to secure autographs from their favourite actors. The enforced waiting in line had a curious side effect: many friendships, some lasting to this day, began in the lines at Longleat. Fan writer Paul Cornell even went on to describe the event as the Doctor Who fan equivalent of Woodstock (the 1969 music festival in New York State that many see as marking the end of the ‘innocence’ of that tumultuous decade).
The unforeseen success of the Longleat event proved at least one thing to the BBC: Doctor Who was still as merchandisable a property as it had been during the 1960s at the height of ‘Dalekmania’. As a result, the quantity and availability of Doctor Who merchandise would rocket, as would products aimed exclusively at fan purchasers. Far from being seen as the creative group they would later be recognised as, the vast majority of fans (those without any privileged access) in the 1980s were largely perceived as an economic construct waiting to be exploited, little more than consumers of merchandise and memorabilia. A plethora of books appeared chronicling the history of the series (not always accurately, as several tomes by Peter Haining showed: it took later writers, who combined their fandom with solid research, to really get the facts on how the show had been created and made from the 1960s to the 1980s). Others had more tenuous links to the programme, such as The Doctor Who Cook Book and The Doctor Who Knitting Pattern Book.
Fans had been canvassed at the Longleat event to see what story from the past they would like to see released on home video, which was just taking off as a new entertainment format in the early 1980s. The eventual choice would be Revenge of the Cybermen (the first choice, the then-lost Troughton serial Tomb of the Cybermen, not being available), released in a one-hour, cut-down version for £40. However, throughout the early-to-mid-1980s there was a large fan underground trade in VHS videotapes of many Doctor Who stories. Some were sourced from ongoing transmissions of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee stories in the United States and Australia. Fans with international pen friends would receive copies of off-air VHS video recordings of episodes. These would then be copied further on connected home-videotape machines and redistributed around the UK’s fan networks. It was the only way fans gained access to the actual episodes that made up Doctor Who’s long history. That lack of access to older episodes of the show was also why the tents at Longleat screening The Dalek Invasion of Earth or The Dominators proved almost more popular than those boasting appearances by real-life Doctor Who actors. Often, small groups of fans would meet in each other’s houses (or in rented halls or community-centre rooms if the groups were larger) to watch these fourth-or fifth-generation videotape copies of long-unseen Doctor Who stories. It was hardly the ideal way to discover the history of their favourite TV show, but as very little was officially available and repeat screenings on television (limited to just four channels) were almost non-existent, unofficially sourced videotapes were the only way to see vintage Doctor Who. Occasionally, fans would gain access to older, black-and-white episodes of the show, clearly not transferred to tape from off-air broadcasts (these were clean copies lacking continuity announcers, onscreen logos or ad breaks). These mysteriously sourced tapes appeared to have come directly from within the BBC archives themselves, and were often copied from film or video versions of the episodes officially on loan from the BBC for screenings at Doctor Who conventions. Other material (such as annual gag reels compiled by the BBC’s own videotape engineers featuring programme outtakes and often ‘adult’ humour) found its way into fandom through more nefarious means.
This privileged access to the show’s own past was one of the main benefits of being part of Doctor Who fandom: beyond the interminably slow official release of the series to home video by the BBC there was just no way to legitimately see episodes. These same fans would later form the core audience for the home-video and (much later) DVD releases of the series, as well as (in many cases) contributing towards the creation of the value-added ‘extras’ material featured on the DVDs. Fan audio recordings from the 1960s are often the only remaining material from key stories whose videotape recordings had been wiped. These same unauthorised audio recordings of stories like The Myth Makers or Marco Polo have been audio restored and polished and officially released on CD by the BBC. Efforts by fans of the show, in cases like this, have resulted in the preservation of material that the BBC would otherwise have wilfully destroyed long ago. As of 2008, however, there were still 106 missing episodes of Doctor Who (all from the show’s earlier black-and-white era), while many of those that have been recovered from foreign broadcasters (to whom they’d been sold for transmission in the 1960s and 1970s) have been found in international searches carried out by dedicated fans.
The problem with this increasing influence of a vocal minority of fans over Doctor Who during the 1980s was that it lost its grip on the mass audience. In appealing to vocal fans the programme became more insular (offering more returning monsters and more explorations of the series’ fundamental concepts). The irony was that, by the time of the 1985 hiatus, Doctor Who was a television show that most fans no longer seemed to like either, at least as far as the current version went. While Nathan-Turner claimed that ‘the memory cheats’, committed fans actually had contemporary access (through their unofficially circulated VHS videos) to the show’s own past episodes and were thus able to make direct comparisons.
Ian Levine was pictured in the press smashing his TV with a hammer in a publicity stunt to protest against the 1985 hiatus. During The Trial of a Time Lord season in 1986, he appeared on TV review show Did You See…? in a segment entitled ‘Doctor Who in Decline’. Levine voiced the complaints of many fans when he noted that recent years had seen ‘a very steep decline in the quality of the show’ and that it was now a ‘mockery pantomime version of its former self’. Other professional fans (like Doctor Who Magazine writer J Jeremy Bentham and later Doctor Who novelist Peter Anghelides) appeared to join in the criticism of the in-danger-of-cancellation programme. Doctor Who didn’t need executive enemies within the BBC – it had ‘fans’.
This tension between loving Doctor Who but not liking the currently on-air version was unique to the series at the time, but with a rash of ‘reinventions’ of old formats in recent years, fans of 1970s television series like Bionic Woman or Battlestar Galactica have found themselves locked into love-hate relationships with the new versions of their old favourites. Production decisions are debated, casting choices bemoaned and alternatives endlessly suggested in Internet forums and chat rooms. This all happened in Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s, too, but the media available were the letter columns of fanzines and, eventually, television itself through comment shows like Did You See…? or Open Air (which saw a group of fans tackle writers Pip and Jane Baker over the faults in the conclusion of the Trial of a Time Lord season, including teenager Chris Chibnall, later to become key writer on Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood).
Through their knowledge of the series, gathered from fanzines and publications like Doctor Who Magazine and their viewing of older, generally unavailable episodes, as well as (for the select few who were well connected) their actual involvement with the Doctor Who production-office personnel, Doctor Who fandom collectively developed a sense of ownership of the show. This perceived ownership reached its height during the aftermath of the 1985 hiatus crisis, and would lead to fan fiction writers ‘taking over’ the production of Doctor Who when the show was off air.
There were benefits to be had from this obsessive attention to a single TV show. As a result of the attention paid to it, Doctor Who is the most studied and chronicled television show of all time, and fandom has produced some meticulous and detail-oriented media researchers, key among them being Andrew Pixley. A whole set of professionals all found their initial inspirations and first experiences within the diverse worlds of Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s. In this shared vocabulary and set of references, Doctor Who fans found a form of discourse that connected them, educated them and equipped them to take over the production of the continuing unfolding text of Doctor Who after the BBC had abandoned it, through novels, audio dramas and in-depth research into the making of the programme. Fans became the custodians of the Doctor Who legacy, safeguarding it and expanding it until the time was right for the TV show to reemerge and take its rightful place at the top of the TV ratings.
With the cancellation of the Doctor Who TV series in 1989, the range of spin-off novels expanded dramatically beyond the original Target novelisations of television stories. These new Doctor Who adventures were largely created by fans who’d cut their fiction-writing teeth on various fanzines, among them new series’ scriptwriter Paul Cornell, script editor Gary Russell and showrunner Russell T Davies.
For much of the run of the original show, starting in the mid-1970s and running beyond the 1989 cancellation, Target (initially a subsidiary of Universal-Tandem, then WH Allen) produced an ongoing series of novelisations of the Doctor Who television adventures. Many of these slim volumes were written by Terrance Dicks and aimed at younger readers. In a pre-video age, the Target novels were the only way to relive Doctor Who adventures (they allowed repeatability through re-reading), with the books and the cover images becoming the defining aspects of certain serials for many fans. It could even be argued that the Target books helped in increasing the literacy of an entire generation. By 1993, when the series of novels adapted from TV episodes finally concluded (four years after the TV series itself had ended, and now published by Virgin), all but a few TV adventures had been novelised (the missing stories were scripts by Douglas Adams and Eric Saward). Spin-offs, like radio serial Slipback, TV one-shot K-9 and Company and unmade stories (such as stories from the originally planned version of season 23), were also novelised, bringing the Target total to 157 books.
Once the TV adventures had been exhausted, Virgin extended its official licence for Doctor Who novels, splitting the range into two series: New Adventures and Missing Adventures. The New Adventures range (from 1991 to 1997, 61 books) continued, and greatly expanded, the adventures of the Seventh Doctor (as portrayed on TV by Sylvester McCoy), while the Missing Adventures (which ran from 1994 to 1997, 33 books) featured stories for ‘past’ Doctors, the First to the Sixth.
The first of these fan-authored books consisted of two trilogies: the Timewyrm trilogy and the Cat’s Cradle series. Edited by Peter Darvill-Evans (later replaced by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone), the writers included Marc Platt (TV’s Ghost Light) and Andrew Cartmel (the McCoy years’ script editor), in addition to Cornell. The series continued with standalone adventures by writers including Mark Gatiss (later a writer for, and actor in, the revived version of Doctor Who), Ben Aaronovitch (writer of Remembrance of the Daleks), Gareth Roberts (The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp), Gary Russell (former Doctor Who Magazine editor and later a script editor on Doctor Who and spin-off Torchwood) and even 1980s Cyber Leader actor David Banks, whose Iceberg naturally featured the Cybermen.
Heavily influenced by the ‘cyberpunk’ movement in SF literature, often attributed to William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy of the early 1980s, the New Adventures series was described by Virgin as featuring ‘adventures too broad and deep for the small screen’. They were more adult in content than the earlier Target range of novels, reflecting the core audience for Doctor Who in the 1990s: men in their 20s and 30s who’d grown up with the programme, but had outgrown the work of Terrance Dicks that they’d devoured in childhood. Sex, violence and strong language all featured – elements that would never have appeared on screen (although the debate about violence in Doctor Who had run for as long as the show was on air). The fan authors took their opportunity to develop the character of Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s streetwise 1980s companion, far beyond her origins. Separated from the Doctor for a period of years, she returned to him a somewhat harder and more cynical character than had appeared on TV. This was evidence, along with the harder SF space-opera stories, that the fan writers were using the novel range to produce the kind of Doctor Who (heavily influenced by Star Wars and the new wave of British space-opera SF authors, including Iain M Banks) they wished they’d seen on TV in the 1980s.
Many elements featured in the spin-offs novels would heavily influence the series when it returned to TV. Throughout the New Adventures novels there is a ‘lonely Doctor’ motif, a portrayal of the Doctor as alien to human emotions and condemned to remain alone in the universe, despite a series of temporary companions. Pop-culture references abounded within the novels, and would feature heavily in the revived TV show, with the Doctor seemingly very aware of elements of British pop culture (like EastEnders, referred to in The Satan Pit). Russell T Davies drew on several elements of the New Adventures when formulating the new series, not least of which was his own Damaged Goods, set on a grim housing estate. Paul Cornell’s Human Nature was adapted directly for TV, changing the Seventh Doctor to the Tenth (in Human Nature/The Family of Blood in 2007). The novels had an obsession with continuity, inherited from the John Nathan-Turner years, although the novel authors had more justification for this approach as the books were aimed squarely at committed fans, rather than a larger, more mainstream casual audience. A deepening of continuity led to a desire to wrap up loose ends left over from the TV show or blend together previously disparate elements of the series. This process became known as ‘fanwank’ (a term coined by one-time DWAS co-ordinator and Doctor Who novelist Craig Hinton) and was especially visible in the work of Hinton and Gary Russell. New series showrunner Russell T Davies would be accused of ‘fanwank’ himself, first when he faced off the Cybermen and the Daleks (a long-held fan dream) in Doomsday in 2006 and then when he reunited many elements of his own Tenth Doctor continuity in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End in 2008 (see chapter seven).
During his time on the show, script editor Andrew Cartmel had developed a vague notion of making the Doctor ‘more than a Time Lord’ – as revealed in dialogue from a cut scene that didn’t see transmission. Fandom developed this into a full-blown ‘masterplan’ after the series’ conclusion. Building on this, the New Adventures continued the Seventh Doctor’s manipulative nature, dubbing him ‘Time’s Champion’. With Cartmel, Platt and Aaronovitch all writing New Adventures novels, there was an obvious temptation to continue to develop the ideas they had envisaged for the TV series in its final days, including making the Doctor more mysterious (and throwing doubt on the few ‘facts’ the TV series had established about him). The ongoing book series also removed the Time Lords. Russell T Davies built upon these two elements in his version of the revived TV series. As well as exploring the Doctor’s character and motivations in the novels, the TARDIS was also expanded with elements such as an alternate console room made of stone. New companions were invented solely for the novels, resulting in characters the like of which would never have been seen in the TV series, as were new monsters and villains, including the Gallifreyan ‘gods’. The New Adventures series climaxed with Marc Platt’s novel Lungbarrow, which explored the Doctor’s mysterious origins (linking him to the founding of Time Lord society). The novel explained the Time Lords’ non-sexual reproductive system using genetic ‘looms’. The final novel, The Dying Days, acted as a coda to the range and featured Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor.
The parallel Missing Adventures, written by many of the same professional and fan writers, were freer to draw on the Doctor Who canon, providing sequels to several TV stories. Among these were fan favourites Pyramids of Mars (which resulted in The Sands of Time), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (The Shadow of Weng-Chiang) and The Web Planet (Twilight of the Gods). Various characters and monsters were explored in more depth by the Missing Adventures novels, including the Master (The Dark Path), the Cybermen (Killing Ground), Silurians (The Scales of Injustice) and Sontarans (Lords of the Storm), among others. Notably absent were the Daleks, due to difficulties in negotiating with the Nation estate. The Missing Adventures could not make the sweeping changes to characters and continuity offered by the New Adventures as they were intended (in theory) to fit into narrative gaps between TV adventures.
In 1997, following the Paul McGann-starring TV movie (see below), the novel ranges were brought in-house by BBC Books and re-branded as the Past Doctor Adventures (76 books) and the Eighth Doctor Adventures (continuing the exploits of McGann’s TV movie character, and producing a further 73 books). The Eighth Doctor novels further developed the McGann portrayal and introduced several new companions and new complications for continuity. The arrival of the new TV series in 2005 saw the range of books reformatted to focus on stories featuring the new TV Doctors and characters (and dropping any complicated continuity). Once again, they were aimed at a younger audence, just as the original Target novels had been. The series of novels featuring adventures of past TV Doctors was dropped. The BBC range and those published after the arrival of the new TV series often used many of the same authors who had risen to prominence through the Virgin novels.
The post-Target Doctor Who novels showed that the series’ concept could thrive in a new medium. They allowed fans – who’d grown up watching the TV series, reviewing, lampooning and criticising it in fanzines and writing their own versions of it in fan fiction – to control the production of official, new Doctor Who adventures. Much more so than any other media fandom (even Star Trek), Doctor Who fans have been heavily involved in prolonging the life of the object of their obsession, ultimately becoming involved in its return to TV. Their work would interrogate and deconstruct the show, in non-fiction and fiction, taking it apart and rebuilding it in their own preferred format. It was an opportunity to (re) create the show they’d watched and the series they wished they’d seen (or hoped to see, with several writers attempting to explore what Doctor Who would be like on the big screen or with no budgetary limitations). Some would attempt to reproduce ‘traditional’ Doctor Who stories (‘trad’ stories, like The Visitation), while others explored the more outré opportunities the series offered (‘oddball’ stories, like The Happiness Patrol). This ownership and control of the ongoing narrative by fans would lay the foundation for the triumphant return of Doctor Who to television.
Answering a letter in the Radio Times in November 1989, The BBC’s Head of Series and Serials Peter Cregeen had promised that the Corporation would ‘take Doctor Who through the 1990s’, while warning that ‘there may be a little longer between this series and the next than usual’. The series was simply resting, a bit like Monty Python’s famous parrot. This uncertainty about the show’s future, and the BBC’s commitment to it, prevented any effective organised fan outcry. It seems clear that, while they expected the show to take a break, the BBC honestly didn’t anticipate the series being off air for 16 years (apart from the one-off McGann TV movie).
In the dying days of the BBC series there had been interest from various parties interested in taking on Doctor Who as an independent production, the direction that much television drama was moving in during the early 1990s. Among those either contacting the BBC or simply expressing interest in Doctor Who were former scriptwriter Victor Pemberton, one-time series script editor Gerry Davis, Dalek creator Terry Nation (Nation and Davis were presented as a team who between them co-owned the rights to Doctor Who’s biggest monsters, the Daleks and the Cybermen), and even CBS Television in the US (thought an attractive option by Cregeen and fronted by Doctor Who fan and US TV producer Philip Segal). Also in development at this time (and regular fodder for increasingly speculative tabloid newspaper reports throughout the decade) was a big-screen Doctor Who feature film to be produced by Daltenreys (an organisation alternatively known as Coast to Coast and Green Light at various times). Speculation on the casting of a new Doctor for the proposed big-budget movie became a favourite game played by the tabloid newspapers throughout much of the 1990s, and one they found difficult to give up even when David Tennant had played the role for several years.
With no solid developments announced by the BBC during 1990, the eventual fan campaigns against cancellation (including letter writing, phone-ins and even threatened legal action) proved ineffective in securing the early return of the series. At the end of that year, the head of BBC Enterprises (then charged with looking after the show), James Arnold Baker, announced: ‘The property is an old one, it’s had its day and is no longer commercially viable.’ Enterprises rapidly repudiated this view, keen as they were to continue to exploit Doctor Who as a licensing property, even if there were no new episodes made. Terrance Dicks, script editor in the 1970s, explained the internal BBC confusion thus: ‘Never put down to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.’ Later, BBC Drama Publicity spokesperson Alan Ayres stated that a decision had been taken to ‘rest the programme for an extended period so that when it returns it will be seen as a fresh, inventive and vibrant addition to the schedule, rather than a battle-weary Time Lord languishing in the backwaters of audience popularity. Doctor Who is too valuable a property for us to re-launch until we are absolutely confident of it as a major success once again.’ Fans saw these announcements, and the stories of on-again, off-again movies and proposed independent productions, as a series of delaying tactics by the BBC, who hoped that Doctor Who could be quietly forgotten. However, it turned out that Alan Ayres’ comments on the series’ potential were uncannily prescient.
The view of Doctor Who as ‘battle weary’ changed with the approach of the show’s thirtieth anniversary in 1993, when the BBC was suddenly keen to mark the occasion. BBC Radio 2 had already committed to a series of Doctor Who radio dramas starring Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, alongside Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Within BBC Home Video (part of Enterprises), there were Doctor Who supporters keen to explore the possibility of a straight-to-video newly made drama for the thirtieth anniversary. This led to the early stages of work on a show entitled The Dark Dimension, co-scripted by fan writer Adrian Rigelsford with Graeme Harper lined up to direct. The plan was to reunite several past Doctor Who leading actors, but with the main role reserved for Tom Baker. The project was reportedly cancelled when the other Doctor actors realised they would be playing supporting roles to Baker, although, later, Philip Segal, producer of the eventual 1996 TV movie, claimed he’d been instrumental in the abandonment of The Dark Dimension as he felt it would conflict with his in-preparation comeback for Doctor Who as a brand-new, US-focused production.
British-born Segal had been in touch with the BBC since 1989, and had carried his hopes of reviving Doctor Who through several jobs in the US, including periods working for CBS/Columbia, ABC and, finally, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions. He’d overseen the launch of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks at ABC and helped develop SF TV shows seaQuest DSV and Earth 2 at Amblin, which involved a co-production deal with Universal. His ability to drop Spielberg’s name into conversations with new Controller of BBC1 Alan Yentob (a Doctor Who supporter) led to new interest within the BBC about a US-led co-production (so much so that Yentob pulled a Nathan-Turner-style publicity stunt by popping up at the end of a thirtieth-anniversary documentary, 30 Years in the TARDIS, and dropping tantalising hints that Doctor Who may have a definite future after all).
After years of on-and-off negotiations with the BBC, and alongside their own sporadic attempts at reviving the show, Philip Segal was the one who finally secured the rights to Doctor Who. Development work started in 1994. A co-production deal was set up between the BBC, Amblin and Universal while a script was written. The initial TV movie was being regarded as a showcase (‘back-door’ pilot) for any future TV series, while an outline of the proposed series (the ‘bible’) outlined characters and locations, as well as proposing key stories from the past that could be remade. By 1995, Amblin had dropped out (and Spielberg with it), but Segal had secured Fox as the US broadcaster for a proposed made-for-TV movie. Segal had also dropped earlier draft scripts that set out to give the series a new beginning, deciding instead to tie the proposed new series directly back to the original by featuring Seventh Doctor actor Sylvester McCoy in an opening regeneration sequence (despite worries that this might confuse US viewers new to the show’s concept). Matthew Jacobs (whose actor father had featured in the William Hartnell adventure The Gunfighters) was hired to write the script, and actor Paul McGann signed on as the Eighth Doctor (after an audition process that had involved Liam Cunningham, Tony Slattery, Mark McGann [Paul’s brother], John Sessions and Michael Crawford, among others). The director was Geoffrey Sax, whose previous experience of Doctor Who had been directing a sketch parody of the show called ‘Dr Eyes’ for 1970s sketch series End of Part One that had featured Jim Broadbent as the Doctor (he’d reappear in the part – briefly – in The Curse of Fatal Death for Comic Relief in 1999).
The TV movie was eventually shot in Vancouver, Canada in January 1996 with the addition of Eric Roberts (brother of Julia) as a new version of the Doctor’s arch-enemy, the Master. Also in the cast were Daphne Ashbrook as surgeon Grace Holloway and Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee, the TV movie’s companion figures. Set in San Francisco, on the eve of the millennium, the Doctor battles the revived Master (following his own regeneration) for control of the Eye of Harmony (the black hole that seemingly powers the TARDIS), to save the Earth and prevent the Master absorbing the Doctor’s remaining lives.
The result was a garbled mix-and-match production that slavishly followed 1990s American television norms, while attempting (in Segal’s words) many ‘kisses to the past’ of Doctor Who that only hardcore fans would spot or care about. Opening with an info-dump voiceover from McGann, the film introduced Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor at the helm of a vastly redesigned TARDIS (the interior at least; it’s still a British police-box exterior), with no explanation offered for the dimensional contradiction between the tiny box shown flying through space and the vast, now gothic-inspired interior). An encounter with an armed gang after an emergency landing in San Francisco in 1999 sees McCoy’s Doctor mortally wounded, operated on by a confused Grace Holloway and then regenerated into McGann’s Eighth Doctor.
If nothing else, the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie proved to many TV-industry sceptics and the BBC that the show could be produced using modern production techniques and appeal to an audience (it attracted over nine million viewers for its UK debut screening, more through the novelty factor as there’d been no new Doctor Who for seven years). In the US, the movie attracted 8.3 million viewers (only nine per cent of the available audience), opposite the final episode of venerable sitcom Roseanne.
Some of the TV movie’s thunder had been stolen by the death of Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee in the week before transmission. The BBC tagged a dedication to Pertwee onto the UK transmission of the show (Russell T Davies paid similar tribute to Doctor Who’s original producer Verity Lambert on the credits of the 2007 Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, following her death that November).
As well as reclaiming the novel range from Virgin, the BBC produced a range of tie-in material to the 1996 TV movie, with Doctor Who merchandise being re-branded using the TV movie’s logo (itself a reworking of the Jon Pertwee early-1970s logo). They were clearly hopeful that the one-off film would help launch a new TV series starring McGann, but the viewing figures were simply not enough for the American partners to proceed. As a result of the deal, though, the rights to Doctor Who were caught up with Universal for many years, hampering additional attempts by the BBC (and even the BBC’s film arm) to mount a revival of the show following the McGann TV movie.
It is ironic that Paul McGann’s introduction in the 1996 TV movie is in the form of a voiceover, as his role as the Doctor would develop in the audio field rather than on TV. Starting in 1999, a company called Big Finish began producing officially licensed audio adventures (issued on CD and later available as Internet downloads) of Doctor Who starring three of the four living original TV Doctors: Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Tom Baker consistently refused to take part (although he agreed to play the Doctor for BBC audio drama releases in 2009), while, from 2001, TV movie Eighth Doctor Paul McGann brought new depth to his character by featuring in an annual series of audio dramas (many of which were later transmitted on BBC7, giving them an extra seal of authenticity).
Big Finish continues to be a fan-driven (though professional profit-making) enterprise, reflecting its origins as a series of amateur, fan-produced audio tapes from the 1980s called Audio-Visuals. These unlicensed, home-produced audio tapes were the dramatic equivalents of fanzines (there were also non-fiction audiozines available), an outlet for fiction writers who wanted to dramatise their own version of Doctor Who. Many of those involved at the time, primarily Gary Russell and Nicholas Briggs, would go on to steer the Big Finish range (and have significant involvement in the TV Doctor Who when it returned from 2005). Of the fan-produced 1980s tapes, Russell said: ‘We were fans doing some stuff for a handful of people. We never advertised in professional magazines, we kept ourselves to ourselves. In doing so, we broke every copyright rule in the book. [John] Nathan-Turner was certainly aware of us, but he didn’t care. Why should he? We were no more [harm] than any other fan product.’
Several of the original Audio-Visuals productions were rewritten and remade for the Big Finish range, including The Mutant Phase (featuring the Daleks), Sword of Orion (Cybermen), and Minuet in Hell (rewritten for Big Finish to incorporate Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier). The series also featured a variety of companion actors and actresses (with many later featuring in a semi-dramatised audio-book spin-off series dubbed The Companion Chronicles), alongside returning monsters and other characters from the TV series’ rich history. Additionally, new companion characters were created just for the audio range. These adventures, like the early spin-off novels, were initially designed to fit into narrative gaps between broadcast TV stories. The success of the core range allowed for a series of limited-run spin-offs built around the popular character of Sarah Jane Smith, the complex politics of the Doctor’s home world of Gallifrey and the back-story of Dalek creator Davros. One spin-off series even experimented with recasting the central role, allowing other actors (like Derek Jacobi, David Warner and Geoffrey Bayldon) to play alternative Doctors in Doctor Who Unbound. Other, more minor characters have appeared in additional spin-off ranges, while yet more were built around the ever-popular Daleks and Cybermen.
From 1999, when the first CD teamed up the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors in an adventure called The Sirens of Time, Big Finish has provided fans with a monthly fix of audio Doctor Who adventures. If nothing else, the fact that the range thrived on fan support (with many willing to pay up to £15 for each CD) showed that there was both a significant audience for new Doctor Who stories and that the series format itself was far from exhausted. The Big Finish range had more reason than the TV show under John Nathan-Turner to appeal directly to a dedicated fan base. Their audience were the diehard Doctor Who fans, rather than the wider casual TV audience, fans who were willing to pay regularly for further Doctor Who adventures.
Fan creative activity also extended to consensual retroactive continuity (retcon): fans would spot narrative gaps in the series and fill them (or fix them) with their own explanations. Primary among these was the concept of season 6B, the further adventures of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor after The War Games, but before he changed into Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. This fanciful notion was based on Troughton’s reappearance in The Two Doctors as an older version of the Second Doctor: he’d been co-opted by the Time Lords to carry out missions for them, or so the fan theory went. Others investigated the show’s past, as with the Myth Makers series of interview videos (and later DVDs) with the series’ cast and crew or Jeremy Bentham’s In-Vision series of in-depth ‘making of’ fanzines. Fan creativity also saw the creation of music videos (cutting images from the series to popular tracks), done by linking two video recorders together in the decades before digital editing and YouTube. Finally, the ongoing comic-strip adventures of the Doctor continued in Doctor Who Magazine and would go on to influence the returning TV series.
It wasn’t until September 2003 that the BBC realised that there was still a mass audience who’d respond to new Doctor Who on TV. Long the subject of nostalgia, jibes about cardboard sets and rubber monsters, Doctor Who had survived a decade and a half of being a nostalgic joke to become a postmodern format whose time had come again. Mal Young, the BBC’s head of continuing series, announced on 26 September that acclaimed dramatist Russell T Davies (a self-proclaimed fan of the show who’d even pitched how he would bring the series back in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine years previously) would be behind the revival: ‘It’s time to crank up the TARDIS and find out what lies in store for the Doctor, and we’re thrilled to have a writer of Russell’s calibre to take us on this journey.’
The announcement of the new live-action TV series aimed at a family audience totally overshadowed that same month’s launch of an online animated adventure called Scream of the Shalka by Paul Cornell and starring Richard E Grant as the ‘official’ Ninth Doctor (following previous Internet dramas starring Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Paul McGann). Scream of the Shalka and Richard E Grant were quickly destined to become interesting footnotes in Doctor Who history, the obscure answer to trivia questions about how many actors have played the Doctor. All eyes were now on BBC1 and the 2005 re-launch of the TV series.