Personal Note: On Being a Whovian
Sep. 4th, 2007 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweA friend lent me the first two seasons of the new series of Doctor Who, which I'd been wanting to see for some while, but since I don't have cable ... I'll get around to an actual review eventually, but just at the moment I find myself taking a trip down Memory Lane to visit a certain blue police box, as I remember it.
I was a fan of classic Who when it was broadcasting on PBS stations back in the early eighties (yes, I date myself -- what of it?). I first saw the odd episode of the late-late version on one channel which a particular babysitting assignment pulled in fuzzily with its VHF aerial. I caught parts of The Three Doctors and The Green Death and was intrigued. SF! Humor! Buckled swash! Right up my alley. Then, alas, the babysitting job dried up for a while, but for some reason I mentioned the show to an acquaintance who rode the same bus home from high school as I. God bless you, Kevin Cronin, wherever you may be: he began telling me the stories I hadn't seen, serially, another installment each afternoon. He was a good narrator and I soaked it all up, eager every day to learn more.
And then we heard the news: the statewide PBS network had scored a coup, licensing all of the Fourth Doctor's episodes for broadcast as whole stories on Saturday evening, plus The Five Doctors to kick the extravaganza off. I counted the days until the premiere, and was in the event completely enthralled, to the point of writing a long plot synopsis in my journal so that I could keep the story straight in my head. It was easy to become a fan: sure, the production values were on the quick-and-dirty side, but the storytelling was, in general, top notch (and my PBS affiliate always preceded Doctor Who with a broadcast of an episode of one of the old Flash Gordon serials. After you've seen a spaceship commander order, "Up, periscope!" you don't mind yet another quarry-style planetary landscape). When my parents finally broke down and purchased a VCR, I began videotaping my favorite serials -- I have a fairly substantial collection spanning the first six Doctors. Kevin and I and some of our friends formed a fan club, the Theta Sigma Society, had meetings and attended conventions now and again -- we became an affiliate of the Doctor Who Fan Club of America and I still have, tucked away somewhere, all the paraphernalia to which that entitled us (newsletters, mostly). We leaped about in geekly joy when, again, the local PBS network came through and acquired the then-available early black-and-white serials featuring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Oh, the sensawunda when the grainy title card reading "An Unearthly Child" flashed onto the screen!
I continued to watch through college -- I introduced a whole group of fellow-geeks to the series and we made a habit of congregating every Saturday night to enjoy ourselves in properly nerdly fashion, I critiquing the storytelling and they the technobabble (even then I was generally the only English major in a room full of scientists and techies). It was heartbreaking to see the series lose its way, fluctuating between creative concepts, and finally run itself out at the end of the Sylvester McCoy era. After that, I lost track, content to pull out my tapes now and then and rewatch the old stories after cable sucked all the reruns off broadcast t.v. I read a few of the tie-in novels (both the serial novelizations and the original adventures), but the writing was sufficiently uneven that I didn't desire to pursue a collection (I have the same difficulty with most media tie-in series -- I want my SF well-crafted, thanks, and I'm dreadfully picky). And then I heard about the new series and wondered whether it would be as entertaining in its way as the classic version(s), but resigned myself to not knowing until the day came that I signed up for cable (ha!) or got around to purchasing the DVDs (and given how much else was in the queue ahead of a series whose producer was given to downplaying the SFnality of his work -- what is it with these people? does the man on the street really think, after all the SF that's made it out into popular culture, that these stories don't speak to human experiences, but are merely empty spectacles cut loose from reality? sheesh! -- I suspected I might have better uses for my hard-earned dollars).
Now, of course, I think differently ...
I was a fan of classic Who when it was broadcasting on PBS stations back in the early eighties (yes, I date myself -- what of it?). I first saw the odd episode of the late-late version on one channel which a particular babysitting assignment pulled in fuzzily with its VHF aerial. I caught parts of The Three Doctors and The Green Death and was intrigued. SF! Humor! Buckled swash! Right up my alley. Then, alas, the babysitting job dried up for a while, but for some reason I mentioned the show to an acquaintance who rode the same bus home from high school as I. God bless you, Kevin Cronin, wherever you may be: he began telling me the stories I hadn't seen, serially, another installment each afternoon. He was a good narrator and I soaked it all up, eager every day to learn more.
And then we heard the news: the statewide PBS network had scored a coup, licensing all of the Fourth Doctor's episodes for broadcast as whole stories on Saturday evening, plus The Five Doctors to kick the extravaganza off. I counted the days until the premiere, and was in the event completely enthralled, to the point of writing a long plot synopsis in my journal so that I could keep the story straight in my head. It was easy to become a fan: sure, the production values were on the quick-and-dirty side, but the storytelling was, in general, top notch (and my PBS affiliate always preceded Doctor Who with a broadcast of an episode of one of the old Flash Gordon serials. After you've seen a spaceship commander order, "Up, periscope!" you don't mind yet another quarry-style planetary landscape). When my parents finally broke down and purchased a VCR, I began videotaping my favorite serials -- I have a fairly substantial collection spanning the first six Doctors. Kevin and I and some of our friends formed a fan club, the Theta Sigma Society, had meetings and attended conventions now and again -- we became an affiliate of the Doctor Who Fan Club of America and I still have, tucked away somewhere, all the paraphernalia to which that entitled us (newsletters, mostly). We leaped about in geekly joy when, again, the local PBS network came through and acquired the then-available early black-and-white serials featuring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Oh, the sensawunda when the grainy title card reading "An Unearthly Child" flashed onto the screen!
I continued to watch through college -- I introduced a whole group of fellow-geeks to the series and we made a habit of congregating every Saturday night to enjoy ourselves in properly nerdly fashion, I critiquing the storytelling and they the technobabble (even then I was generally the only English major in a room full of scientists and techies). It was heartbreaking to see the series lose its way, fluctuating between creative concepts, and finally run itself out at the end of the Sylvester McCoy era. After that, I lost track, content to pull out my tapes now and then and rewatch the old stories after cable sucked all the reruns off broadcast t.v. I read a few of the tie-in novels (both the serial novelizations and the original adventures), but the writing was sufficiently uneven that I didn't desire to pursue a collection (I have the same difficulty with most media tie-in series -- I want my SF well-crafted, thanks, and I'm dreadfully picky). And then I heard about the new series and wondered whether it would be as entertaining in its way as the classic version(s), but resigned myself to not knowing until the day came that I signed up for cable (ha!) or got around to purchasing the DVDs (and given how much else was in the queue ahead of a series whose producer was given to downplaying the SFnality of his work -- what is it with these people? does the man on the street really think, after all the SF that's made it out into popular culture, that these stories don't speak to human experiences, but are merely empty spectacles cut loose from reality? sheesh! -- I suspected I might have better uses for my hard-earned dollars).
Now, of course, I think differently ...
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Date: 2007-09-05 11:30 am (UTC)I was lucky, before my one friend in that town moved away, she tried to introduce me to some of her friends, and in doing so, one of them in passing had mentioned Doctor Who. Her having a decidedly German name in a decidedly unGerman town, she was easy enough to track down.
Ahhh, high school/college and Doctor Who...the real start of my geek phase. *nods*