My first proper memory of television? I can date that with absolute precision, because I’m a Doctor Who fan, and we love the facts. I was three years and 188 days old, 29 October, 1966, The Tenth Planet, Episode Four. The First Doctor, William Hartnell, fell to the floor of the Tardis and regenerated into Patrick Troughton. I was agog. Terrified. OK, I barely knew what was happening, but I felt a deep, unnerving sense of strangeness and fear twisting in the pit of my heart. Did that moment shape my entire life? Well, here I am.
That episode has been missing from the archives for decades. Back in the old days, before anyone imagined the VHS, let alone streaming, they thought television programmes would only be shown once. So they wiped them. Taped over them. Perhaps some episode of Tomorrow’s World erased the Doctor’s escape from the Cybermen at the North Pole. But it’s not gone from my head. The images are carved in deep, an engram in my memory. And in a nice piece of TV trivia, which really marks out the fans, fragments of that regeneration remain because they were once used as a montage on Blue Peter. It’s said that the episode was sent to the BP office … and never returned. Part of the romance of Doctor Who is to imagine some employee sneaking out of TV Centre with a film canister tucked up their jumper. Val? Surely not?
It’s hard to work out when I shifted from being a viewer to a fan. We only had three channels in the 60s and 70s, so everyone watched Doctor Who. Though even then, long before my gaydar activated, I had a keen sense of people on the same wavelength. When I was 10, we had a student teacher at Sketty primary school in Swansea who couldn’t resist telling us the solution to the cliffhanger of Death to the Daleks, Part One. He correctly predicted the Dalek guns wouldn’t work because all power was being drained by the mysterious Exxilon City. That was an amazing moment for me, to see a teacher so thrilled by a piece of TV. I felt that connection, a thrill, a kinship, a hum and a buzz between us. I wonder who he was. Still watching, sir?
The turning point came at the age of 11 – a huge change for me and for the show. I went to comprehensive school; the Doctor became Tom Baker. I have a crucial memory of TV Comic’s weekly Doctor Who strip printing a gorgeous piece of artwork (drawn, I now know, by Gerry Haylock) showing Tom Baker in full hat, scarf and toothy grin. And something clicked in my head. Something clicked and has stayed clicked ever since. A simple thought which said: I love you.
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It’s easy to draw a link between gayness and fandom. So easy, maybe it’s true. Because as those teenage years advanced, two things synced up. I was gay and went silent, watching all the parties and fancying boys at a remove instead of getting drunk on cider, scared of giving myself away. At exactly the same time, I watched TV fiercely. Both things became closeted. Doctor Who became the other love that dares not speak its name.
It lasts, the closet. Many years later, in my late 20s, when I’d moved to Manchester and worked in TV and went to Canal Street every weekend, I copped off with a nice lad who saw a book about Doctor Who on my shelf and said: “I was in that! I was a soldier in The Caves of Androzani.” And I lied, I lied to a man I’d just had sex with, I said: “No, that book’s from work, it’s someone else’s, I don’t really know what it is.” Sorry, soldier.
I wonder now why I fell in love so hard. Though can anyone ever answer that? Some of the secret exists in what the Doctor is not. He/she/they have never had a job or a boss or even parents, they never pay tax, never do homework. They never have to go home at night. Maybe you fall in love with the show when you’re a kid because the Doctor’s a big kid, too. I could never love Star Trek in the same way because they’re the navy; when I survive to the year 2266, they won’t allow me on board. I’ll be scrubbing the floor below decks, at best. But Doctor Who’s greatest idea is that the Tardis can land anywhere. I’d walk home from school wishing I could turn the corner and see that blue box and run inside to escape everything. I don’t think that wish has quite gone.
My first trip on board the Tardis would be to nip back to the 1960s, find my little self and tell him: “You’ll be running the show one day!” (And also: “Don’t kiss Johnny Stone,” but that’s another story.) I found my way to that job by opening both closet doors at once. I wrote Queer As Folk, and at the same time, I made one of the lead characters a Doctor Who fan. The climax to the series was Vince trying to decide between two men by asking them to name as many Doctors as possible. In order. It hadn’t been my actual plan, but that show linked my name with Doctor Who in the industry, so when Jane Tranter decided to bring it back in 2002, her eye fell on me. And it turns out, she’d been in the closet, too. She’d become controller of drama at the BBC while secretly harbouring a desire to bring back the one show she’d truly loved since childhood.
I think that spark burns quietly inside so many of us. Smouldering since those days when everyone watched. A few weeks ago, I went to have my hair cut. The new barber glared at me, a tough, gnarly, squinting Scotsman. I was a bit terrified. Far too scared to turn round and walk out. He sat me down and asked me what I do. I said that I work on Doctor Who. “Never watch it,” he barked. OK.
But then he drifted. He smiled and got a faraway look in his eyes. He said he did watch it when he was a wee lad. Tea with mum and dad then the TV on a Saturday night. He remembered how scared he was, one week, when a woman simply walked into the sea. I said: ‘That’s Fury from the Deep! From 1968! That was Maggie Harris, possessed by a Weed Monster from under the North Sea, walking to her death.” I told him he could go and watch it again, on the iPlayer, 55 years later. He laughed and said he might, and then we talked about everything – TV and family and life and love and loss. All because of an old TV show.
I’ve been very lucky with Doctor Who. I have loved something and it has loved me back. And somewhere out there, some kid is watching. In 40 years’ time, it will belong to them, just in time for the 100th anniversary. Maybe they’ll produce a holovid eyeball-injected eidetic-image laser-think-version of the show, but in some shape or form, I am certain … Doctor Who will still be here.
This article was amended on 17 November 2023. An earlier version incorrectly said The Tenth Planet, Episode Four aired on 26 October 1966, whereas the date was 29 October 1966.
Doctor Who returns on 25 November on BBC One at 6.30pm.
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