A man is the sum of his memories, you know--a Time Lord even moreso.
The
Doctor, THE FIVE DOCTORS
Doctor Who is a British Science Fiction show that ran from 1963 to 1989. The point of this page isn't to tell you much about the series or about the episodes. My thoughts on various books are elsewhere as well. Instead, this page is more my own experiences with The Show, and a little bit of self-indulgent history.
My first memory of Doctor Who was watching Pyramids of
Mars sometime in the late 1970s or early 80's, but I really got hooked on
the show when the Minneapolis public television station picked it up when I was
in fifth grade. I started watching in January, right when they when they were
starting up with the first Tom Baker episode, Robot.
I was hooked. I watched every episode, right before dinner, five days a week. I started to collect the novelizations, I went to a Halloween party as The Doctor, I would try to hunt down issues of Doctor Who Monthly. I remember seeing The Five Doctors on the twentieth anniversary of the show, November 23rd, 1983, only having seen Tom Baker and the first season of Peter Davison in the role. A total fanboy, more or less.
Coincidently, I got my first computer (an Apple ][+) at the same time. A couple years passed, and eventually I got a modem and started to call computer BBS systems. Knowing I was a Doctor Who fan, A friend of mine told me to call The Matrix so in the fall of 1985, I did, and as they say in the comics, my life really wasn't ever the same again.
Over the next few months we had endless conversations about that week's episode of Doctor Who, our favorite stories, which of the Doctors we had seen were better, and so on. Eventually, one of us decided we really wanted to go the next step, and start a fan club. And So We Did.
The first meeting of the Whoniversity, as we decided to call the club, was a get together of a number of people from the Matrix in January, 1986. We met a software store in a local mall, most of us not knowing each other except by electronic mail and perhaps by phone. We hit it off well.
We had a meeting of the "High Council", people who originally were the co-sysops of the Matrix, that February at John Hage's house. He was the sysop of the Matrix, and at his place we chartered a course for our club, with The Edge of Destruction ominously playing in the background.
It took us a few months to get
there, but in May, the first issue of our newsletter, originally
called the Logopolian Times was ready. Of course, we
were one week too late for one of the major events -- our first
convention. The Doctor Who Fan Club of America, the
largest club in the country at the time, was bringing Peter Davison
into town. Fortunately, we were organized enough at the time that we
were able to help with the convention, and we got to meet our first
(but not our last) member of the show.
We then had a goal for the next issue of the newsletter: we wanted it released for August, when were going to St. Louis for TARDISCon '86; our first major, real convention. We couldn't spell (or pronounce) The Logopolian Times consistently, so we tried to think of a new name. Eventually, John delivered a logo his cousin did, and we had a title : <=?=>. It was a brilliant newsletter title for a Doctor Who newsletter, really, and our first issue was out in time to be brought to TardisCon.
The TARDISCON experience was quite important and significant, in retrospect. It was very clear that some of the fans there had been burned out and naively we [or at least I] felt it couldn't happen to us.
We really enjoyed the conventions; and the one that fall in Minneapolis was the largest yet; with both Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton. It was an honor to get a chance to meet Patrick Troughton before he passed away the following year, and Colin hadn't yet been sacked. The club grew in size; with a fortunate location and brand new club t-shirts, we signed up literally hundreds of new members. After the Two Doctors con we were the largest Doctor Who fan club in Minnesota, and had far greater success than we had hoped for.
When John stepped into the background after the Two Doctors convention, I took over editorial (and presidential) duties for a few months. We became involved with the aborted 87 Time Festival, and by the summer of 87, when John had returned, our ambitions had risen to the point we decided to bid for the Time Festival in 1988. We were certainly not sane.
The period we got the announcement was July 1987. In three weeks
there were three different Doctor Who events in the Twin Cities, two
conventions and one party hosted by our club. The first convention
was unique because Sylvester McCoy, who had only recently been cast as
the Doctor, was introduced to us all. I was lucky enought to sit and
talk with him for a while when he was signing autographs...big fun.
Very scary picture, however.
The next week, we had our party. Because of all of the activity, it was fairly sparsely attended, but at the same time, it was a memorable experience for a few reasons. First of all, that weekend we discovered we had been chosen for the 1988 Time Festival, and we had a whole lot of fun.
The third week was another convention, this time with Louise Jameson, and by this point we started advertising the Time Festival. Unfortunately, the political environment with the other clubs made it difficult to get support from them for the convention at first, but we had a good location at the time, and it was quite entertaining.
Of course, by now it was hardly about the show anymore, was it? While fan-run conventions, unlike the professional ones, are a labor of love, they can also be a lot of work. Also, by this point, the local television station in Minneapolis had shown all of the available episodes, and while Doctor Who would still be in production for two more years, four weeks (remember, the US had it in movie form) of new episodes a year just couldn't cut it. We were even cracking jokes when they would repeat the Tom Baker episodes again (we didn't know how good we had it).
Well, despite the hassle and the stress, we had our top three
choices for guests, Jon
Pertwee, Janet Fielding, and Frazer Hines. By the convention, I and
the two other main
co-conspirators of the whole thing, John Hage and Anupam
Kharbanda, were of course terribly burned out. The politics had
driven us mad, and we were realizing that we would likely be leaving
the city soon to go to college. So we dropped out of
the Whoniversity, leaving it in the hands of people like Michael
Fanslow, Greg Bakun, Roger Stockman, Roger Nikunen, and a number of other capable people who
kept the club going for a few more years until the general decrease in
the number of fans in the Twin Cities (I had left for Madison by this
point) caused the club to slowly fade away.
So I thought I was done with Doctor Who. I was wrong.
It started back again harmlessly enough; I had a VCR again during my years as a graduate student at Madison; and I started to rent and buy Doctor Who video tapes and spend my time when I visited my parents going through old ones. I was following some of the Star Trek groups and I ended up trading a few e-mail messages with Kate Orman; so I purchased "The Left Handed Hummingbird". I started to frequent radw more and more, and I purchased more of the books. "Love & War" blew my mind; followed up with "Human Nature". I discovered it all again; why I liked "Doctor Who" and why I liked talking [and e-mailing] fans of the show....
I've taken the <=?=> name of the fanzine and brought it forward into the late 1990s as a web site -- fitting, since the original newsletter was developed when desktop publishing first started to be a big deal. And we've recently ressurrected The Whoniversity name as the parent organization for the Minnesota Doctor Who Viewing Society and the Minnesota British Television Viewing Society. So, as they say, "We've come full circle"
Thanks to Marc Gerken for the photo of Sylvester McCoy & me from July, 1986.
One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine. Goodbye, my dear. Goodbye, Susan.
The Doctor, DALEK INVASION OF
EARTH