The Fall of the Eleventh

So it seems that the Doctor's greatest secret was not his name ( revealed, in any case in 1972's The Making of Doctor Who) but that, in fact, he has had ( or will have) a dark incarnation whose actions are so terrible, he has disgraced The Name of the Doctor.

Whetther this is retcon or a massive bait and switch, this revelation will drive the narrative in the Fiftieth Anniversary special in November. Coming as it did after Nightmare in Silver, a derivative and  child-centric Cybermen story by Neil Gaiman, the season finale was a giddy, Gothic rush which reminded me of Crisis on Infinite Earths: Clara's splintered selves echoed Lyla/ Harbinger, making John Hurt the Anti-Monitor, I suppose. The episode also appeared to write finis to the exploits of Professor River Song in a poignant, downbeat way.

But my voyage through my own personal timeline takes us back, today, to the tenth anniversary of the programme...

When TV Action finally folded, the Doctor Who comic strip returned to TV Comic with the evocatively-titled Children of the Evil Eye.

The next serial, entitled Nova, introduced this arachnoid species, the Spidrons. They seem curiously reminscent of the Treens of Venus from Dan Dare and the Eagle:

But the most breath-taking publication during the tenth anniversary year was the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special. I now own a facsimile edition, printed to commemorate the fortieth anniversary, replacing the torn, crumpled original I read until the covers and first pages literally fell off.

Lavishly illustrated, the most fantasttic thing about this magazine was that it printed all of the Doctor's travels in transmission order- for the first time, I could read about the William Hartnell era. All those amazing adventures: The Sea of Death! The Executioners! The Nightmare Begins! Of course, I didn't know in 1973 that these were the titles of the first episode of each storyline in a virtually continuous serial.

I had glimpsed some of the First Doctor's enemies- the Zarbi, the Menoptra, the Sensorites and the Voord-  in the enigmatic pages of the unguessed-of  first Doctor Who Annual: a copy of which was revealed to me by James Snow, our meighbour's son, in the early 70s. But here was proof that those bizarre aliens were, as we would say, decades later, canon!

The other fucntion of this chronology was to give names ( and as last Saturday's episode demonstrated, names have power) to all my vague pre-school memories of Troughton's stories: Fury from the Deep; The Mind Robber; The Krotons.

Thirdly, it taught me about companions I never knew existed, like astronaut Steven Taylor ( Peter Purves in this quintessentially Seventies Britain image). I also learned a little about more obscure travellers like Vicki and Dodo.

Finally, there was We are the Daleks, a Terry Nation prose fiction piece illustrated in the sexy, psychedelic  style of a sci-fi paperback. It is a chilling tale that posits an alternate origin from Genesis of the Daleks. here, like the Inhumans, the Daleks are evolved from human specimens by alien experimenters.

Such was the impact of this ur-text that a series of covers homaged the special for the Fortieth anniversary ( at the very time when I first started working in Easterhouse). Strangely, Peter Davison gets a stylish reworking of his striped pyjamas while Colin Baker maintains his bad taste wardrobe. Baker, T. is draped in rich, autumnal colours like a Soho painter going to a toga party.

Of course, there were still World Distributors annuals during the Pertwee era: glossy, modish-looking things. But the stories were a little more pedestrian and garish than the chilly horrors of 1971.

My next transformative encounter with the Time Lord in print has to be the Target Books novelizations. The crisp and direct prose of Terrance Dicks and the characterful writing of Malcolm Hulke were both hugely influential and these books were justly reprinted in recent years. They represented the only opportunity in those days -before video- to experience adventures of the Doctor that you might have been too young to have seen on tv. Here are some of my favourites:

The Crusaders was a frighteningly realistic novel of intrigue and cruelty and Snowmen was a reconstruction of fragmentary images from my monochrome memories as a four-year-old. I can still picture myself sitiing in the Kardomah Restaurant in Buchanan Street, scrutinising the illustrations of Peladon.

Next time, we'll look at the dawning of the Tom Baker era as the Fourth Doctor establishes himself as perhaps the most popular regeneration of all...

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