Doctor Who: The Show That Changed My Life
The BBC series created to draw in a tea-time family TV audience led me to my life’s interests.
By DEREK KOMPARE
I first encountered Doctor Who (1963–89) in 1980, not on television, but in print. A friend had a few of the US novelizations, with titles and covers that promised the sort of sci-fi adventure I was already devouring in the likes of Star Trek (1966–69) and Star Wars (1977).
Starlog magazine also provided occasional articles on the series — then new to the US — offering tantalizing glimpses. I finally saw the series on vacation at my grandparents’ house in Chicago (the Tom Baker story “The Robots of Death,” which remains one of my favorites), and it exceeded my expectations.
What struck me first about Doctor Who was that it was shot on video, and paced like a play — light-years from the gloss of the Enterprise or Millennium Falcon, but weirdly compelling. Tom Baker’s legendary Doctor also offered a new kind of hero: a bumbling wanderer with a silly screwdriver who could turn intense and compelling in an instant.
When episodes finally started up on my local PBS station (KAET in Phoenix) they confirmed my interest, and eventually made me a lifelong fan.
But Doctor Who was never a show I just watched. In between those late Saturday nights, I continued to pursue it in print: Target novelizations of previously aired stories, Doctor Who Magazine (still running uninterrupted since 1979), and fanzines and newsletters.
I was also engaging with TV at that time with a book about The Twilight Zone, which I consulted alongside watching reruns of the series. But with its sprawling history, and seemingly endless future, Doctor Who became my primary companion.
Moreover, I discovered early on that this fandom was as much, if not more, about what happened behind the camera as in front of it. Soon after I could tell a Cyberman from a Sontaran, I learned to recognize the tropes of particular producers, writers, and directors. And in real time, I learned about poisonous fan and corporate politics as the series’ divisive final five seasons unfolded in the late 1980s.
The cancellation of Doctor Who ironically intensified fans’ appetite for its history — as access to people and materials increased, previous accounts were debunked, and fan-driven history and analysis grew deeper and more sophisticated through the 1990s.
The methods and approaches of media scholarship I was learning in grad school then were echoed in much of the Doctor Who fan work I read and discussed at the same time. To jump ahead to 2015 (VWORP VWORP VWORP), I continue to use these skills every day in researching, writing, and teaching about the media.
My experience of Doctor Who (and its fandom) has always paralleled my experience as a media scholar: analyze textual bits and pieces, weigh theories, sift through primary and secondary historical evidence, and assess and interpret new information. As much I admire the Doctor as an intriguing and (mostly) ethical character, it’s Doctor Who, the stubbornly real-world series itself, that led me to my life’s interests and my career.
Doctor Who may have been (and still is) about the adventures of a traveller in time and space, but for me it’s also been about how an idea conceived at the BBC in the early 1960s to draw in a tea-time family TV audience has lasted through decades of shifting television and cultural politics to continue to inspire millions of fans.
There’s something profound about the power of popular media there, and I’m grateful for its impact on my life.
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