All The Way From America

Managed to work a Joan Armatrading reference into a Dr. Who post...

Today, we're looking at the dawn of the Eighth Doctor and the texts that were important for me as a fan in my thirties. By the time the American-made TV Movie of Doctor Who was announced, I was a call centre agent: still performing in semi-professional plays by Berkoff and Scotland's Simon Donald. I was also sick of bedsit life and entered the service industry with the intention of getting a mortgage.
Howevr, it was in my bedist room that I watched the TV Movie on a b/w tv, having read the novelization a few days in advance. I wasn't entirely enthused by some elements of the scripts  ( in line with fannish alarm about a Yank co-production!) but it was still pretty amazing to see new Who.
Radio Times launched a weekly tie-in comic strip by Gary Russell and Lee Sullivan that ran for almost a year. I only glanced at a couple of issues however.

The Virgin line of New Adventures finally embraced the Eighth Doctor in the spring of 1997 with The Dying Days, which reunited the Time Lord with Bernice Summerfield. It was a Pertwee-style invasion story dressed as a conspiracy thriller and starring a thinly-disguised Dan Dare. After Days, the New Adventures continued as a Benny-centric series but I dropped out after one or two books.

The relauch with McGann led the BBC to revoke Virgin's licence and to publish their own series of past and present Who adventures from the summer of '97 onwards. The brief at first was for a more all-ages product than Virgin had marketed which led to this retro jamoboree by Uncle Terrance and the introduction of Rose Tyler-prototype Samantha Jones.

I returned to the DWM fold with a vengance around this time. I had fallen away in the late 80s and the Sylvester McCoy Era. Ironically, then, my favourite issue was the one edited by Sophie Aldred:

The best feature was a fantasy review of the unmade Seadon Twenty-Seven. Illustrated by the late Phil Bevan, it cast Richard Griffiths who passed away recently as an Eighth Doctor, accompanied by posh safecracker Kate. Many years later, those stories and a version of that companion would appear on audio. I became fascinated by the idea of "alt-doctors" as DWM also introduced an ersatz Ninth Doctor in the monthly strip:

Future BF audio supremo Nicholas Briggs IS The Doctor (for a couple of episodes)

 Scottish fan Raymond McFadyen was responsible for a very attractive touring Who exhibition in the late Nineties. I  first saw it at Kilmarnock's Dick Insitute in August 1998. It included  Daleks, K9, a police box and about 10 costumes alongside several monster heads ( a Sontaran, Ice Warrior and a Draconian); dioramas of  the Jagaroth spaceship model set, the Emperor Dalek and the tomb of the Cybermen. There were also several paintings,  drawings,  props and other memorabilia, like Web Planet badges! It was fantastic. Over the decade it appeared in smaller configurations and grew increasingly more worn, sadly.

I  had friends in Greenwich so I was able to attend the BAFTA 35 Up event in November 1998. Tie-in products launched there included the audiobook Out of the Darkness ( my first Who cd!) and The Ice Warriors Box Set. The documentary on Missing Who episodes became another staunch, nostalgic favourite, crammed with clips of sixties episodes I'd never seen. I also got autographs from Sophie Aldred and Wendy Padbury but sadly not Michael Craze, who also passed away a few weeks later.

For Comic Relief in 1999, tv writer Steven Moffat delivered The Curse of Fatal Death, a spoof episode that predicted some of the tropes that he would employ in his scripts nearly a decade later...but Spoilers, sweetie! We don't know that yet.

The next major texts in my fan world were Big Finish's audio dramas. Beginning with The Sirens of Time in July 1999, they reunited past Doctor and Companions in new full-cast plays. They would go on to enfold the New Adventures with Benny and create new audio companions like Evelyn Smythe.

"Je pense à Lewis Carroll." Variations Sur Marilou par Serge Gainsbourg

In November 1999,  BBC2  presented a Who Night, which was a valedictory sequence of retrospectives, a repeat of the TV Movie and of the ultimate episode of the first Dalek serial. It was lavish but larky, including another spoof Doctor in the form of author/actor/scripter Mark Gatiss. There was a palpable fondness for the series but the launch of a series of early Pertwee repeats- Spearhead and Silurians from Nov 1999 to Jan 2000 implied it was still an post-modern tv curio. The future lay in audio...

Although Paul McGann had read for BBC Books in the short story collection Earth and Beyond, BF's great coup was to release new Eight Doctor adventures in the early months of 2001, beginning with Storm Warning.

Fitz ...

                                                                        ...and Star(t)s


Meanwhile, BBC Books had introduced the voodoo time-travel cult Faction Paradox; Fitz Kreiner, the Eighth Doctor's longest-serving companion (in books at least)- a daydreaming romantic and layabout "scruffy 'erbert"  from the 60s, and destroyed Gallifrey. An amnesiac Eighth Doctor was stranded on Earth throughout the twentieth century and adopted a daughter, Miranda, who also appeared in her own short-lived comic series.

I had come through a bit of a financial crisis after my lodger flitted suddenly but I had gained a promotion and was now working in call centre recruitment. I was still acting -for free largely- but did some tv extra work on Taggart, High Road, Rab C. Nesbitt,  Looking After Jo- Jo and Glasgow Kiss.

 I didn't have a home computer at that time so I used the internet cafe that was formerly John Smith's bookshop to catch up on the BBC webcast of Death Comes to Time, a Star Wars-y space opera that rewrote the destiny of the Seventh Doctor and Ace.
 I also discovered charming fan fiction like Bullseye Books- and wrote some of my own for the first time in nealry twenty years.

In the summer of 2002, I visited Dunfermline, to see a reduced version of Raymond McFadyen's Who exhibition. The BBC broadcast its second webcast: Real Time, a Cybermen adventure by Gary Russell and Big Finish. For the purposes of animation, Sixie had been given a bright blue coat (blue being the colour of "mooorning" as Colin Baker would have it.) This rather gruesome tale which is basically Tomb of the Cybermen in modern dress, posited a grim fate for Evelyn but that has since been retconned.

I had been offered a secondment from Glasgow to Warrington, Cheshire by my employer, and travelled home at the weekend. After a month of that, however, I chose not to relocate permanently and took the redundancy package. By the end of the year, I was unemployed again but Who and I were both about to have a revival of our fortunes on the cusp of our forties...

All images presumed copyright of their respective owners