My first website was dedicated to the American science-fiction series Babylon 5. The site used such cutting-edge technologies as framed navigation, blinking text and animated GIFs. However, what it lacked in aesthetics it more than made up for in content. Because I couldn’t be bothered to review every single episode of the space opera myself, I recruited like-minded fans from the internet to write them for me. This collaborative approach not only saved me time and effort, it also resulted in the formation of a close community of virtual friends – virtual friends being the best kind, i.e. ones you never have to meet.
My old school pal Jonathan Grove and I were running our very own online social network long before Facebook came along and ‘stole’ our idea. Jon, who was as obsessed with the internet as I was, had invested some money in his own private server and he wanted to experiment with some virtual community software that he’d bought. However, while Jon had the technical know-how, he didn’t have a ready-made community to test it on, and that’s where I came in. I convinced my Babylon 5 friends to join the new network, which they then used to swap intimate details about their private lives. Sadly, unlike Facebook, the Eclipse Café peaked at nineteen members, the intimate details of a group of Babylon 5 fans proving to be not merely a hermetically closed circle but one with nothing very interesting in the middle of it.
Tachyon TV was supposed to be like The Onion for science-fiction fans. It was basically a monthly website with a single page of topical spoof news stories but with a telefantasy twist. DOCTOR WHO LOGO DESIGNERS FOUND HIDING IN FALLUJAH was one hilarious headline; IS SADDAM HUSSEIN SECRETLY BUILDING IMPERIAL AT-AT WALKERS? was another. It hasn’t aged very well, mostly because it was pretty old to begin with.
Despite Tachyon TV’s shameless derivativeness, the site built up a small but loyal audience, until one day it caught the attention of a TV production company. They invited me to a meeting in their offices to discuss a Top Secret project with them, so I bought a new suit and caught the first train to London. The brief they gave me was, well, brief: watch the news on television for a whole week and then write some funny jokes about it. The week I was assigned to watch the news was the week of the Soham murders. On the Friday night, I submitted five pages of gags to the production company. I never heard from them again.
It was a valuable learning experience. Nowadays, I could easily sell that material to Frankie Boyle.
I took up blogging because I figured if I wrote something new every day, I’d eventually get better at it. I didn’t really care if anyone read what I had to say or not, and not a lot of people did, but the routine I set myself – to write at least five hundred words about a TV programme I’d seen the night before – felt like it might lead somewhere eventually. Occasionally I would post something other than a review – usually a rant about living in a caravan, building a house or my never-ending battles with BT’s Customer Complaints Department – but most of the time I just published withering commentaries about the latest series of Big Brother or that week’s EastEnders. And then one day, I posted a review of a documentary about the art of parkouring, or as I put it:
If you ever find yourself facing an obstacle when you are running down the street, don’t go around it – jump over it! But only if said obstacle is really, really small and it makes you look like a right prat.
I was lucky if any of my blog posts attracted a couple of comments at most, but this particular review ended up with ninety-one responses. The parkouring community was furious with me. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have described them as ‘demented baboons in hoodies’. I tried to shrug off their virtual vitriol, but there was one comment that really got under my skin:
YOU SPEND EVERY WAKING SECOND NO DOUBT ON YOUR FAT ARSE!
The commentator then imagined what would happen if I ever attempted to parkour myself:
I believe that you would bounce … roll to a halt and fucking cry like a fat motherfucking tard while he sucks his fat motherfucking thumb then gets hungry and fucking eats his thumb.
Something in me snapped. I persuaded Sue to photograph me jumping through our building site. I leapt from beams, hurdled over tractors and rolled through dried-up cow dung. This would show those parkouring baboons! I ended up on the roof of our caravan where, as I was waiting for Sue to bring me a stepladder so I could get back down again, I tripped over some loose felt and plummeted to the ground, breaking both ankles. I cried like a motherfucking tard and was crippled for months but I still posted the photos. And no one has ever called me Fat Boy again.
I was still blogging when Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, so it felt natural to combine my two interests. Once again, I recruited like-minded souls from across the internet to help share the workload, and this allowed me to stagger reviews of a single episode over a whole week, which meant that people kept coming back for more. In fact Behind the Sofa became so popular it made numerous recommended lists on TV websites, and when one of the new series writers, Steven Moffat, left a very nice comment on a review, I remember thinking that blogging couldn’t get any better than this.
One of Behind the Sofa’s most prolific contributors was a man named Damon Querry, and because he lived just a few miles away from me, and because he didn’t sound like he was a total nutter, I suggested that we meet each other face-to-face. We chose a local Doctor Who convention in Stockton-on-Tees as neutral territory and Damon brought a friend along with him for moral support. This man’s name was John Williams. Not only was John an expert on soap operas set in the north of England – he still insists on calling Emmerdale, Emmerdale Farm – he was, and remains, the funniest man I have ever met. The three of us decided to join forces and re-launch Tachyon TV as a weekly series of irreverent Doctor Who-themed podcasts, the hot new medium. If we could make each other laugh, maybe we could make other fans laugh too.
When we ran out of amusing things to say about classic episodes of Doctor Who, we branched out into interviewing celebrities instead – though this might be pushing the term ‘celebrities’ past its breaking point. One Thursday at the Tavern in Fitzrovia, we plied Bentham the Younger with lemonade until he admitted – on the record, no less – that Torchwood was ‘a mistake’. Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein! And we chatted to actors and producers and writers from the classic era and the new series and no one called anyone a motherfucking tard, at least not when the mic was on.
I loved working on Tachyon TV but, as with all my previous online projects, I started getting restless after a while. There are only so many times someone who knows everything about Doctor Who can ask someone else who knows everything about Doctor Who a question fans who know everything about Doctor Who already know the answer to.
I needed a new challenge, a new domain to conquer and legally register. It was time for the Adventure to begin …