Saturn Returns

In the space of six years, Doctor Who had gone from a phenomenon that had brought Wiltshire to a standstill at Easter to a series on trial... to cancellation. I had spent most of the Eighties as a university student but at the beginning of the new decade and the end of my twenties, I had reimagined myself as a hard-drinking actor laddie. I finally achieved my Equity status ( my sponsor had been Robert Carlyle) and by the middle of the Nineties, I had toured Scotland in Romeo and Juliet (alongside Tony Curran) and The Slab Boys.

Glasgow was City of Culture in 1990 and I caught a retrospective of the surviving episodes of The Ice Warriors at the Glasgow Film Theatre. Doctor Who also featured that year as an exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh. However, in my new life in the East End of Glasgow, travelling overnight by bus to audition in London and buying designer lighters and Arena magazine in Covent Garden, it was very much part of my past.

The series had a new lease of life however in the form of a quartet of novels from Virgin Publishing: stories "too broad and deep for the tv screen". The first of these, Timewyrm Genesys was a ham-fisted attempt at adult sophistication in a retelling of the Gilgamesh saga. The second, however, by Target stalwart Terrance Dicks revisited situations and characters from his War Games scripts from 1969. It was more familiar territory and I picked up the next few releases.

For the first time since the mid-80s, the BBC started repeating classic Who serials beginning with The Time Meddler and The Mind Robber in Jan-Feb 1992, with The Sea Devils folowing in March-April. These episodes, especially the Hartnell four-parter, were something of a comfort the first festive season after my dad died.

By the late autumn of that year, Virgin had introduced the first and most significant new Companion in spin-off fiction. Bibulous archaeologist Professor Bernice Summerfield has gone on to have a vivid "Life of Suprises" in audio and prose. The Daemons was also repeated on tv between November and December, but I found the literary aspirations of Virgin's "hurt/comfort" novels more appealing.

 For the Thirtieth Anniversary of Doctor Who, the BBC broadcast yet more repeats from January to May: Genesis of the Daleks; Caves of Androzani; Revelation of the Daleks and Battlefield. I missed most of these because of touring.  I did see a little of Planet of the Daleks while performing at Brentford's Waterman Arts Centre- my sole London gig- but missed the broadcast of the anniversary special Thirty Years in the Tardis, on the last night of R&J.

 A further innovation from Virgin was The Missing Adventures imprint in July 1994. Yet again, in the early months of the year, BBC2 had repeated The Green Death and Pyramids of Mars. At that time, I actually preferred the variety and nostalgia of the Past Doctors adventures-

- however, the first exception was Gary Russell's batty melange of anthropomorphic cats, Aboriginal culture and Tarot card flummery:

                                              "You have not been given permission to mew"

My faith in the line was renewed by the late Craig Hinton's high camp rip-off of Chris Claremont's X-Men/Hyborian Age storyline, in which characters from The Web of Fear and Trial of a Time Lord exist in a techno-sorcery version of London. The following month, November 1995,  I had another dazzling metropolitan experience as I visited New York City.

In January 1996, I tuned into the radio broadcast of Jon Pertwee's final adventure as the Doctor, The Ghosts of N-Space. The combination of a twee, nonsensical script and the tremulous voice of the elderly actor sent me back to the Virgin books. By now, I had taken a job in the call centre industry and by the spring of the year, I would get my first mortgage. I was putting unemployment and West End bedsit poverty behind me. Ironically, I would now get far more tv work as an extra.

                         Another book from Wolverine and Captain Britain's Cornell

In May 1996, Virgin published the Fiftieth New Adventure: a frothy, camp anniversary celebration that invited characters from every novel to the wedding of Bernice Summerfield. It was like a Who version of the marriage of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl. A ludicrous plot by the Master was thwarted and an elderly Brigadier was regenerated, amid in-jokes about the BBC's Round the Horne. The giddy, celebratory tone was timely, given the developments on television that month:

Next time, we'll revisit the second half  of the Nineties: the Dying Days of the New Adventures and the rise of BBC Books.
For those of you who aren't fans of Who, in the weeks to come, here and on the 'optikon, we'll also look at Man of Steel; Marvel's Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness and more Batman Super-Spectaculars.

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