DALEK I LOVED YOU
By Nick Griffiths
DALEK I LOVED YOU
Nick Griffiths
Published by Harrison Dextrose Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Nick Griffiths
Also by Nick Griffiths:
Who Goes There
In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose
Looking for Mrs Dextrose
Further info: http://www.nickgriffiths.co.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsdextrose
For my Mum & Dad
In memory of Lis Sladen and Nick Courtney, who passed away after this book was written
Author's Notes
1. A few names have been changed, to
protect the innocent. Annoyingly, the only name I can't change is my
own.
2. These are my memories of events, some of which took place
more than 35 years ago. I cannot always guarantee their accuracy
(though where facts are checkable, I have done so). But this is a
book about impressions that lasted. I could not put it any more
perfectly than lovely Uncle Monty did, in Withnail & I: ‘There
is no true beauty without decay.’
3. This eBook is an electronic
version of the Dalek I Loved You paperback, originally published in
2008. It encompasses the seven chapters of the hardback, plus an
update (Chapter Eight) which was written after the third season of
the new Doctor Who. Like the television stories themselves it has
become a snapshot in time: a vivid memory of how it all was.
4.
You can find accompanying photographs in the DILY section of my
website at http://www.nickgriffiths.co.uk.
Foreword
‘My name is Nick and I am a Doctor Who fan.’
Don't let that put you off me, if you're not Who-inclined. I also love David Bowie, Interpol, Boards of Canada, Godspeed You Black Emperor and swathes of electronica. I'm a Tottenham Hotspur season-ticket holder, so I do get out. I don't own any black T-shirts with rubbery sci-fi logos that smear when ironed - actually, I would never iron T-shirts, or any type of clothing frankly - nor do I wear an outsized, multi-coloured scarf. I'm married, with a gorgeous son from a previous relationship - proof that at least two women have been prepared to do it with me - and his name is Dylan, not Gallifrey Davros Zarathustra. I don't spot trains and I don't own a single model of a Dalek.
No, hang on, that's not true. I just remembered the Palitoy Talking Dalek, which I purchased as mute and lovingly restored to its former ‘Ex-ter-min-ate!’ glory.
And the ancient Rolykins Dalek, which I picked up at a snip.
Equally, if you're a fellow fan, please don't think that I'd want to find a cosy corner of a convention with you, to discuss continuity errors in The Masque of Mandragora, Season 14, Production Code 4M.
(Don't be fooled: I had to look up those production details on the BBC's Doctor Who website - and in doing so got sidetracked into playing Attack of the Graske featuring David Tennant. The internet is a wonderful thing. This morning, I started writing my book and saved the universe.)
With admirable hypocrisy, I am actually wary of other Doctor Who fans. There's an unwritten Nerd Scale which ‘normal’ people apply to fans of any science fiction/fantasy and I'd like to imagine myself around their 2 or 3 mark. (That framed set of nine Tom Baker bathroom tiles on the wall behind me suggests the truth may rank somewhere higher.)
I fear that if I mingle with Whovians - other people are Whovians; I am a Doctor Who fan - around the 7 or 8 mark, my own rating might creep a little higher. Of course, most other Whovians are thinking exactly the same of me. It's a tough one.
Most frustratingly, because I love Doctor Who, people imagine that I love every other form of sci-fi. I would sooner bed down for the night among argumentative raccoons than watch an episode of Stargate. Star Trek bores the pants off me. It's so earnest. I put all Star Trek fans somewhere around 8 or 9 on the Nerd Scale, again the hypocrisy not being lost on me.
The over-riding reason that I regard Doctor Who with such affection is that it transports me straight back to my childhood. It's my own time-travelling Tardis.
Any time I'm feeling low, or admittedly sometimes for no reason other than errant laziness, I'll draw the curtains, pull out a classic Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker story and take myself back to a time before bills addressed to me landed on the doormat and girlfriends announced that they were leaving because I was barely more liveable-with than Pol Pot.
Rarely do I tell anyone about these video trysts. Doctor Who fandom is definitely a badge, worn with pride among fellow admirers and hidden from view on the high street. People make assumptions about you. Not always glowing assumptions. Some of them think you want to follow them home, bleating about Zygons, then sellotape their heads to a television screen while playing The Five Doctors on the DVD.
It hasn't always been easy, remaining accepted in society.
How did I get into this mess?
People will tell you they can remember their precise whereabouts when JFK was assassinated, the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, or when they heard that Princess Diana had died. In my case, respectively: not alive; in bed asleep; and waking up after an night of cider abuse and resultant fumbling with a lovely/drunk woman in Stourbridge. That's three women who have slept with me so far. Feel free to keep a tally. Actually, don't, because the number doesn't rise significantly.
Personally, I like to tell people that I know exactly where I was when I first watched Doctor Who. I was on my parents' sofa at 63 Murray Road, Horndean, Hampshire, which I can state with certainty because I would have been four-and-a-third years old at the time and didn't get out much around dusk.
I recall the story vividly. It was Spearhead from Space, which was broadcast in January 1970 and formed Jon Pertwee's debut as the Doctor.
I remember Pertwee clowning around in his nightgown, I remember the Brigadier getting all official on his ass, but most clearly of all I remember the Autons. They were utterly terrifying. Deliciously so.
Faceless shop dummies with snap-down wrists, guns and denim suits, coming alive in shop windows, smashing their way out into the street and wreaking havoc on a defenceless small-town community. The bobby on his bike, horror-struck. I'm sure I had never seen anything like it before, death-and-destruction being low on the priority list of the writers of Mary, Mungo and Midge and The Clangers.
I was hooked. Jon Pertwee became my hero.
Did I hide behind the sofa? Since it was up against the wall and moving furniture around was frowned upon, disappointingly no. Instead, I made for the armchair in the corner and cowered behind that, peeking out at intervals to check when the coast would be clear.
Would an armchair have saved me from death-by-Auton? I certainly believed that it would.
The Silurians, the Axons, the Sea Devils - such a work of genius! - the Draconians, the Ogrons, the Daleks, inevitably . . . These are all imprinted on the relevant part of my brain and have no doubt seeped into less relevant areas which should have been reserved for Geography O-level revision.
Saturday teatime in front of Doctor Who became a religious experience. I devoured all of the Pertwee stories and was disturbed when Tom Baker took over. No child enjoys change and I distinctly remember my Mum voicing the opinion that Baker was ‘very silly’, which I initially took on board.
At least I quickly came to worship at the great man's altar of eccentricity and, as I grew older, realised that my mother was voicing the self-same opinion when we watched things like The Young Ones or The Smiths on Top of the Pops.
Contrary to popular opinion, never trust your mother. As Peter Davison, whom I had typecast as the kindly, bumbling vet from All Creatures Great and Small, took over, then Colin Baker, then Sylvester McCoy, I lost interest in the new episodes of Doctor Who. Music had taken a hold in my life, along with an unrequited curiosity about girls.
And it might have remained that way, but for two life-changing events.
One was the discovery, in London's Free Ads paper, Loot, of an advertisement for home-recorded archive Doctor Who stories - this was in the days before the BBC's commercial versions, and before I could afford satellite television and UK Gold's re-runs - which would open up the chance to relive those seventies glory days. Not only that, but I could catch up on stories I had missed, delve into television's monochrome era to find out what William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton were really like, even revisit the likes of Baker C's Doctor, whom I had perhaps judged harshly. (As it turned out, I hadn't.)
I remember receiving the list of available stories and it was enormous. The Green Death, The Claws of Axos, The Daemons, Planet of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Talons of Weng-Chiang - episodes I was dying to see again. That was my childhood writ there, within reach.
The second life-changing event was finding myself working, as a freelance writer, for the Radio Times. This was in the mid-nineties, when Doctor Who was in abeyance, when rumours of a revival abounded but came to nought.
The BBC and the Radio Times march inextricably hand-in-hand, like a giant marshmallow Auntie and Uncle, down the highway of good, clean, traditional, family entertainment. The magazine and the Time Lord maintain a magnetic association that dates back to An Unearthly Child, the first Doctor Who story.
One of my most treasured possessions is my Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special, purchased on a shopping trip to Southsea in 1973, and read so many times that its cover has fallen away and its glossy pages are smudged with the greasy thumbprints from the bedtime snacks of ages. I adored that magazine.
Amazingly, fate decreed that I myself would write swathes of 1996's 16-page Time Lord Souvenir issue, published to coincide with Paul McGann's Doctor Who movie, as well as the similarly sized 40th Anniversary Special.
It meant that I would interview and meet most of my heroes, Doctor and companion. I once stood and chatted to Tom Baker. And - let's not try to sound professional here - the experience was jump-around-afterwards exciting, a bold, flourished tick in the box of Achieved Ambition.
Then, out of the blue, the series returned in 2005. I would turn 40 in the same year and was allegedly too wise to become excited. Anyway, history dictated that I harboured only minor hopes for it, with so many burnt-out shells of revivals littering the show's past.
I had not reckoned on Russell T. Davies and his team.
Christopher Eccleston, the new Ninth Doctor, had been in Our Friends in the North, fondly remembered, critically fawned-over drama which had won proper awards. He had done Shakespeare, while professing that he wasn't a big fan. That's so cool.
His companion, Rose, was to be played by Billie Piper, who at 15 became the youngest ever artist to debut at Number One, with Because We Want To (essentially a teen declaration of intent to run around a lot and play music naughtily loud, because she and her mates felt like it), and who had become an actress of note after an eye-catching performance in Chaucer's updated Canterbury Tale, The Miller's Tale, on the BBC.
She's bright, sassy and noticeably foxy. But at 40, I was allegedly too wise to become excited.
Since I still contribute to the Radio Times, now their unofficial Doctor Who Correspondent, the privilege of entering the world of Who remains. I remember visiting the Cardiff set before the series aired, gazing at the Tardis, actually twiddling its knobs and sitting in the swish new leather seat . . . and not being that thrilled. At least, not as thrilled as I should have been.
Had my Doctor Who mojo died? Had it heck as like. Later that same day I interviewed some Autons (a bizarre experience) and something inside the grey matter sparked.
The series began broadcasting and, along with most of the rest of the nation, by the time that weird old Victorian parlour-maid had risen from her death bed to walk towards the camera, moaning like a good'un, eyes all icy, in episode three, I was hooked. As, amazingly, was my son. Though you hope your progeny might follow in your footsteps, I could hardly have said to the kid, ‘Here, watch this twenty-six-episode DVD box-set of The Key to Time - my American version; there isn't a British one; consider yourself lucky - then go tell your friends how cool it is.’
As luck would have it, loving the new Doctor Who, which entire families did, was perfectly acceptable in noughties society. Encouraged, even.
History was about to repeat itself, somehow eschewing nerdiness.
Dalek-mania came back. Only the Talking Daleks of today speak more than one word, trundle around under remote control and would probably make your tea for you, if they could only stop exterminating the cat.
Once again, I find myself having interviewed most of the cast and crew.
I have met the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, and he used the word ‘chutzpah’; I have spoken to Piper, while swooning anciently on the other end of the telephone; I have walked in the spaceship of the Sycorax and chatted with their leader in his trailer, while he changed his trousers.
And, best of all, there is more to come. It has been an incredible ride, this life with Doctor Who, filled with cosiness, quarries, tolerance and intolerance, hero-worship, unnecessary purchases of memorabilia, a slag heap made of Cornflakes scattered with peppermint cream Giant Maggots, and yes, probably even a little chutzpah, once I find out what the word means.
This is how it happened . . .
Chapter One
Age 4-7
They Tuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad
‘Dreams are important. Never underestimate them.’
The Doctor, Snakedance
Welcome to January 1970.
The sixties are over. While a nation recovers from wearing flowers in its hair, a small boy living at 63 Murray Road, Horndean, Hants, is recovering from the excitement of Christmas.
The events of 1969 have largely passed him by, which is fortunate because they had involved plenty of warring and turmoil.
America had remained ensconced in Vietnam, getting nowhere. The alleged assassins of both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been up in court. Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ had committed bloody murder, British troops had entered Northern Ireland and Richard Nixon had been sworn in as the new President of the United States. Later, history records, he would be hurriedly sworn out again.
Music had had its Woodstock and The Beatles had performed their last, atop the Apple Building.
Oh, and man had landed on the moon.
Only one event of 1969 had deeply affected young Nickolas [sic] Griffiths. In July, the halfpenny had ceased to be UK legal tender. HOW ON EARTH WAS HE GOING TO AFFORD ANYTHING NOW?
Happily, Christmases chez Griffiths have always been a time of giving. What four-year-old me received that Christmas of 1969, I really couldn't tell you - it was too many years ago - but I do know that the presents would have stacked impressively, because my parents/Santa were always generous at Yuletide, and that these lovely freebies would have arrived in a gaudily coloured, thick-paper bag, because they always did.
I always thought that bag was absolutely enormous, until I came across it in the loft one day, long after said bag and my childhood had been dispensed with. When you're six foot tall, it suddenly seems much less enormous.
Note to self: consider revising opinion of parents' generosity.
Being a child is a wonderful thing. At its start, people actually wipe your arse for you. They applaud when you perform even basic functions. For ages after that, they do everything for you, and they buy you things. And for ages after that, they applaud when you perform slightly less basic functions (such as getting a job) and continue to give you cash, even though you have a job but have spent all yours on booze.
Actually, I'm being a bit unfair here. When I said ‘people’ and ‘they’ I meant ‘my parents’. ‘People’ didn't wipe my arse for me when I was two years old. I didn't toddle out into the street and flag down passers-by, proffering my soiled bum-crack.
Note to self: consider not revising opinion of parents' generosity.
I was born in the south-coast naval city of Portsmouth in August 1965, just a week after – though no one thought to tell me – J. K. Rowling, and had been driven bawling back up the M3 to the nothing-town of Horndean, where I would lead the first seven years of my life.
My father, Norman, is an engineer, works manager at Tri-ang, a subsidiary of the world's biggest toymaker but which will decline into receivership, the people who make Hornby trains and Scalextric cars; my mother, Lilian (Lynne), is a housewife. They're noticeably into their forties already and my four brothers, Max (actually Norman also, but you can see why he changed it), Michael, Gordon and Brian have long since left home. I am effectively an only child. Generosity and expectations will be showered upon me. It will suit me fine.
My Dad has noticeable ears, a kindly expression and a suit for work. Sometimes people hear him speak and think he is Australian. You might imagine my Mum as one of those pre-war film stars, with her dark loose curls and bright lipstick. She also looks a tiny bit like the Queen.
I like them a lot, which is handy since they are in charge of me.
What was life in Horndean like?
I can see a back garden path framed by trellises about which roses grow. I can see pine trees lined along the back, whose branches I regularly force my way up through. I will spend a lot of my childhood up trees and am gutted when those pines are one day chopped down without my permission.
There's a muddied area out there somewhere, cordoned off with wire netting, where I will one day be allowed to keep a rabbit in a hutch.
On the patio, I will take apart a large robot which had been given to me as a present, and I won't be able to put it back together again.
In the kitchen is a table. Its legs are metallic white and its top is yellow Formica covered in a bizarre pattern of black lines and dots, with a black plastic trim. Sometimes I will shelter under there with an empty pill bottle, mixing potions in the hope of becoming a wizard, while Mum whistles as she works at the sink. Except it's not really a whistle, more a blowing through pursed lips. If you get up close, you can smell the instant coffee.
I have a breakfast cereal plate which is plastic with a colourful comic design in the centre and a rim at right angles to the base. Presumably I am a messy sod. I remember first eating Shreddies off that plate.
Murray Road itself is built on a hill, which is great for cycling down at speed on one's blue-and-yellow bike with wide white wheels. At the top is Merchistoun Hall where I attend nursery school.
Please don't concern yourself that this book is going to be filled with poo anecdotes, but my sole memory of those nursery schooldays is of finally pulling my way up on to the supporting crossbar of one of the swings, swiftly filling my pants, recognising the hopelessness of my situation, and having to ask a passing friend to get a teacher to rescue me.
I remember being cleaned up - what wages were those people on? - and being allowed to walk home down the hill on my own, and my mother expressing surprise that I am back early. I don't recall my excuses but I do recall the washing machine going.
Other early memories? Weeing on the front lawn. (Sorry.) Playing with my only friends from just up the road, Peter and Stephen. Peter is my age, his brother is a couple of years younger and I am wondering now how exactly one plays with a two-year-old. And sitting on my toy tractor in the middle of the road, while the heavens tipped buckets on my head, wondering who I was and why I was there: my first existential ponderings. I can still smell that sodden tarmac.
And my favourite anecdote: I am playing on the small triangle of unkempt grasses beside the hedgerow that forms the boundary of Merchistoun Hall. A stranger arrives beside me, a small but older boy. He picks up a discarded rusty metal bucket, stuffs twigs, stones and leaves into it, and when he tips it out there is a ladybird among the rubble. ‘I've made a ladybird,’ he announces.
For weeks after that, when I am allowed out to play, I will return to the same spot and try to make my own ladybird. Unsuccessfully.
If you are that boy and you are reading this, please do get in touch. I'd like to punch you on the nose.
I've just looked at a Google map of Horndean, which has brought memories flooding back. The town itself is famous for one thing, a Gale's brewery that doesn't smell good: a cloying, bitter-sweet hop-scent that carries on the wind.
Nearby is Cowplain, where my dentist dwells - a defiant sadist with a syringe the size of a fire extinguisher - and where a newsagent sells multi-coloured gobstoppers in a glass dispenser, which I covet. One day my Mum will offer to pay for one, provided I ask for it. I will battle my debilitating self-consciousness and eventually walk away.
That personality trait has never left me. Try being nervous of talking to strangers while holding down a career in journalism. Every phone call I make, I first take a deep breath.
These days, when we go on holiday, I do the ‘driving and hiding’, my wife does the ‘talking to strangers’.
My mother and I shop regularly in Cowplain or, if we are feeling adventurous, further afield in Waterlooville, which is bigger. There is a restaurant in the latter in which we often take lunch, and I am obsessed by a certain dessert cake which is a cube of sponge surrounded by chocolate wafers, with a dollop of cream on top, into which are stuck, butterfly-wing-style, two further chocolate wafers. I believe it was called the Chocolate Box.
The only problem: I am petrified of the stairs up into said eatery, which have gaps between each step, so one can see the floor way below as one rises. As we have already ascertained with the Christmas-bag incident, relative smallness can make heights and distances appear deceptively great. I have to crawl on my hands and knees up those stairs, just to reach my dessert heaven.
Fear of heights is another trait that will never leave me. Some 12 years later, I will find myself once again on hands and knees, edging petrified along the ridge towards Snowdon's peak.
What I am doing up there, fuck knows.
Crucially, into this carefree, only occasionally hair-raising existence, one day enters a tall man with a noticeable nose, wavy silver hair, friendly eyes and old-fashioned clobber, going by the name of the Doctor.
The day is 3 January 1970, the time 5.15 p.m., on BBC1. It's the first episode of Spearhead from Space, marking Jon Pertwee's debut as the nation's favourite Time Lord.
Spearhead from Space, for the unfamiliar: Patrick Troughton has regenerated into the Third Doctor (Pertwee). He's aided by companion Liz Shaw (a boffin, though obviously rubbish compared to our hero) and bossed about without effect by Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (uniform, baton, moustache). The Nestene Consciousness plans to take over the Earth (a recurring theme) by controlling plastic - notably these shop dummies which come alive and are known as Autons. The same aliens would battle Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, to herald the show's triumphant return.
I had never caught any Troughton stories, presumably having been deemed too young to handle the tension. Presumably also, my parents had no idea how terrifying the Autons would be. Boy, were they scary.
It had been my Dad's idea to plonk me in front of the murderous mannequins. He had watched both Hartnell and Troughton, while I slept, dreaming of bunnies or similar, and had become a fan.
Doctor Who has always appealed to whole families. That's one of its beauties. It gobsmacks me that at a time when the BBC were reviving the likes of Blankety Blank, The Generation Game (with Jim Davidson!) and Ask the Family, or airing shows hosted by Ian Wright (clearly a former footballer), they had no idea what impact the return of a well-produced Doctor Who would have.
Indignation over.
My Dad - who is almost 90 but wears it so well that he still has hair that isn't fully grey, albeit splendidly wispy - tells me that his mother used to make sandwiches for the beat bobbies (including his stepfather) back in the twenties, and he had to race around after them, delivering the much-needed nourishment.
Often, he says, these bobbies would hole up in a police box, exactly like the Tardis, where they could eat their sandwiches in peace.
Spotting this blast from the past in a BBC television series was one enticement for him to watch.
Mine was far less nostalgic. I had seen nothing of anything that occurred in Doctor Who before. It was all utterly new, a seismic blow to the mind, such a giant leap for my imagination that I was instantly hooked.
When you are that young, you don't see the joins or the wobbles - that stuff is real. And they had set it on Earth. One scene, in which the ‘shop dummies’ come alive, is set in a regular high street where ladies and gentlemen wear autumnal browns of low fashion sense and the days pass predictably. Forget the Earth - it might as well have been set in my house.
I cannot stress enough how much of a departure Doctor Who was from my previous - and would be from my near-future - televisual experiences. Here are:
Some Things . . . I Also Remember Watching As A Small Boy
* Andy Pandy - Wooden puppet in
stripy jim-jams has low-key adventures with a teddy bear and
‘Looby-Loo’, then falls asleep.
* Mary, Mungo and Midge - In
the opening credits of this very basic animation, mouse sits on dog's
nose to reach lift button; they ascend until they reach Mary's flat;
what they do when they get there escapes me. Am wondering now whether
it was worth their effort.
* On the Move - I actually remember
being glued to this lunchtime programme for people who were hard of
hearing, even though I wasn't.
* Vision On - Bizarrely, another
show for the hard of hearing, in which Pat Keysell and Tony Hart did
arty things or something, and a bloke invented Heath Robinson
contraptions.
* The Herbs - Animated adventures in a herb garden.
The hoot of that owl used to give me the willies.
* The Clangers -
The closest I had previously come to watching outer-space adventures.
I bloody loved The Clangers, and still do. My Mum knitted me one. No,
not recently.
* Pogle's Wood - Like The Clangers, another Oliver
Postgate and Peter Firmin creation. The men are geniuses. Pogle's
Wood captivated me. This one featured puppets (squirrel living with
family in woods) in real-life settings. I watched it again a few
years back, and what I didn't realise was that it was educational.
These people are telling me how bees make honey! Was highly amused by
Mr Pogle's ‘Where's moi tea, Woife?’ Mr Pogle clearly not
reconstructed.
* Joe - Animation. Small boy, bowl haircut, large
eyes. In a café?
* Trumpton / Camberwick Green / Chigley - I'm
having problems differentiating between the three, but I recall being
entranced by the musical box from which a mystery character would pop
up, and of course that roll-call: ‘Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew,
Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub . . . peep!’
* Blue Peter - Rarely
Magpie. We were a BBC household. Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves,
John Noakes. I just loved counting down to Christmas with them, with
that ‘Advent Crown’ made of coathangers.
* Love Thy neighbour
- By the time I was seven or eight, I was allowed to watch this
sitcom about a bigoted white bloke living next to a black family.
Memories of weeping with laughter unforthcoming.
* The Generation
Game - Likewise, this popular gameshow, starring Bruce Forsyth. ‘Nice
to see you, to see you, nice!’ was his catchphrase. Adults making
total fools of themselves. ‘Give us a twirl, Anthea!’ That
conveyor belt and the inevitable cuddly toy. These things are
ingrained on my subconscious. Is that a good thing?
* Morecambe &
Wise - These two, I really did find funny. One Christmas special, I
was lying on the pouffe in the lounge, laughed at a gag and my
Christmas cake went down the wrong way. I choked, my parents
panicked. Recall gasping, ‘I don't want to die,’ while becoming
acutely aware of how young I was. Dad, unfamiliar with the Heimlich
Manoeuvre, repeatedly whacked me on the back. I survived. Phew.
Naturally, I have watched Spearhead from Space since that original airing. A few times, in fact, given its pride of place in my past. So I must work hard to separate the memories specifically from those four Saturday evenings in January 1970.
First, of course, there was Pertwee himself. It helped that I had never seen him before. Recognising him from, say, All Creatures Great and Small, or his companion as, say, Bonnie Langford, that screeching infant harpy from ‘talent’ show Opportunity Knocks, would have instantly destroyed the illusion.
I had no idea that he'd been a star of Carry On films, nor that he had appeared in the likes of Ladies Who Do, Nearly a Nasty Accident or The Gay Dog. Neither was there ever a radio in our house, so I would have known nothing of his time on The Navy Lark. My Mum enjoys tranquillity and seems to regard any sort of music or performed spoken word as ‘just a noise’.
So Pertwee already seemed somewhat other-worldly to me when he staggered on to the set, bulging-eyed and talking gibberish. I remember his nightshirt, which was odd because it was old-fashioned, and him staggering around corridors in it, but most of all he represented boundless wisdom and safety.
The Autons were terrifying, destructive, emotionless creatures, but Pertwee's Doctor took charge and defeated them. If he were around, everyone - and that included the viewer, because the Autons would definitely have come for me too - was safe.
Even today I am obsessed by cosiness: a bosomly, low-lit, warm environment, an emotional womb. Give me a traditional local pub over an All Bar One any day, or a country kitchen over something run by Conran. Or my home over anyone else's. Give me cushions, supersoft fabrics and a real fire, and a woman's arms to lie in, ideally while she subconsciously scratches me. Yes, it's indulgent.
Doctor Who provided cosiness then, and always will, because it represents nostalgia and sanctity from harm.
People who say that Doctor Who is too frightening for children are fools. If the Doctor and his mates regularly got wiped out by the Daleks, they wouldn't be.
What else of Spearhead from Space?
The Brigadier struck me as purely The Authority Figure; it was only later that I would recognise the man as being a well-meaning buffoon. And Liz Shaw made no impression whatsoever. Indeed, when my thoughts returned to the Pertwee era during my twenties, I could recall only Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith as having been his companions. Perhaps if I had been a girl - and my Mum did call me ‘Nicky’ for ages, until I put a stop to it - things would have been different.
But there is one image that haunts me from that story, and I can picture myself as a four-year-old watching it now. That scene where the Auton is wading through ferns and woodland, hand snapped down to reveal its gun, hunting. How scary is that? This bald bastard in its durable denim, stalking remorselessly through the British countryside, stopping as if to sniff the air, intent upon murder.
If you haven't seen Spearhead from Space, do yourself a favour and order the DVD off Amazon (or any other reputable retailer).
Will it stand the test of time? Let's find out. I'm going downstairs to watch it now, for the first time in maybe ten years, and I'm going to try to do so objectively. It's cold out, and I'm going to get the open fire going. . . . OK, so the tape was missing. Unusual, since I am a dedicated hoarder with the covetous instincts of an only child. Woe betide anyone who picks up one of my LPs by its corner, potentially creasing the cover. So I was forced to take my own advice and order the DVD off the internet - Play.com was cheaper than Amazon when I visited - and watched it instead one Sunday afternoon, with my wife, Sinead, and my son, Dylan. Be interesting, I reasoned, to see how they reacted. We didn't make it past episode three.
The action opens on two bit-part members of UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce - the ‘Intelligence’ part being wishful thinking) debating the identity of a formation of mysterious blips on a radar screen. The set around them is wonderfully seventies, back when computers were the size of garden sheds and lights flashed constantly to prove to viewers that everything was working.
Sadly, the director chose to show the objects in flight through the earth's atmosphere, when clearly the budget couldn't cope.
‘They're so fake!’ trills Dylan triumphantly.
He's eleven years old and used to high-end computer graphics. I was four years old and used to stuffed Clangers. But he is right, of course. This supposed storm of streaming energy orbs looks more like a QVC ad for rubbish perfume. I don't care. He does. Different eras.
Enter Liz Shaw, on the back seat of a limousine, accompanied by lounge music suggesting she is both sexy and cosmopolitan.
‘Do you fancy her?’ quips Sinead.
No,’ I mutter darkly.
Liz encounters the Brigadier.
‘Do you fancy him?’ quips Dylan.
This really isn't going to plan.
It turns out that ‘Miss Shaw’ is a bit of a brainbox. According to the Brig, she has degrees in medicine, physics and ‘a dozen other subjects’. Fourteen degrees! That's enough trajectory to launch a missile! Given that ‘Miss Shaw’ looks to be in her early twenties, I wonder where she found the time to play doctors and nurses.
She is the sceptic to the Brigadier's believer. Scully to his Mulder, if you will. (I accept that many won't.) He has met the Doctor twice before, so he knows. As humans have sent probes deeper into space, he tells her, ‘We have drawn attention to ourselves, Miss Shaw’.
Miss Shaw scoffs audibly.
‘She's like you!’ Sinead accuses me, also triumphantly. ‘Refusing to accept anything unless it's already proven!’
It seems, in gathering together my little reviewing panel of loved ones, that I have opened a can of worms.
Yes, my take on things is always logic-based. I did a degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, after all. By mistake.
But I should point out that this little set-to with my wife stems from a radio show we were listening to on Xfm (London's alternative music station), when guest Uri Geller claimed that he could make listeners' broken clocks and watches work again, if they held them next to the radio and we all shouted together, ‘Work! Work! Work!’
A derisory plan.
Yet Sinead sided with Geller!
How could I know for certain, she chided, that the arch spoon-bender's techniques wouldn't work?
Well. Er. I just did. Put that on your exam sheet and smoke it.
Did Einstein have to put up with this sort of thing?
There are often paradoxes, being a Doctor Who fan. I am prepared to wallow in the existence of knobbly-faced alien life forms, while knowing with reasonable certainty that there aren't any. And the one person capable of dealing with them knows for a fact that they do exist, and deals with them in a wholly pragmatic manner.
Argue your way around that little hornet's nest.
Back to Spearhead from Space, and the Doctor is tumbling out of his Tardis into Epping Forest, conveniently the landing site of the mysterious objects from earlier.
Meanwhile, some local yokel poacher has found one of the things - a blue/pink, pulsating, misted plastic casing, housing heaven knows what, emitting a high-pitched signal - and is digging it out of the earth.
Don't do that, you fool!
Suddenly, all hell breaks loose back at UNIT HQ, where an earwigging, adenoidal cleaner has told the press about the radar blips and about the Doctor, who is by now tucked up in a cottage-hospital bed.
The Brigadier fobs off the Fourth Estate, while a dubious-looking chap with a strangely shiny face in the background takes everything in. Clearly an agent for the forces of evil.
Cut to: the Time Lord is being kidnapped by fake ambulance men, with his mouth taped shut. Ever resourceful - and I had totally forgotten this scene - he clobbers one of the kidnappers and makes his escape in a wheelchair.
In a wheelchair! How many times have you seen that on your TV screens?
UNIT men fire on the departing ambulance. 'Shoot at the tyres!' one officer barks, failing to spot the irony that his privates haven't previously managed to hit the entire vehicle.
Cut back to: the Doctor, wheelchair discarded, stumbling on foot into a small Epping Forest clearing and surprising two UNIT soldiers. One takes aim and fires. He's hit something for once! Only it's our hero.
Episode one end credits roll.
‘So they've just killed him?’ enquires Dylan.
I explain that the bullet probably only winged him. No one ever actually offs the Doctor. Certainly not at the end of episode one.
‘What an idiot!’ notes my son of the UNIT dolt.
The point, though, is that he's into it, just as I was almost four decades earlier - and we haven't even glimpsed an Auton yet. (Sinead is by now reading a magazine.)It's alright, breathe easily: I'm not going to drag you scene-by-scene through all four episodes. These classic Doctor Who stories were never intended to be watched in one go, there are always lulls in the action if you try, and I am frankly grateful when Dylan asks if we can go to the park before the end of episode three - before the appearance, I am well aware, of one of the show's least-credible-ever monsters: the Nestene Consciousness.
How he and Sinead would have hooted at the sight of those rubbery octopus tentacles, sagging out of the big vat, which Pertwee had to wrap around himself while gurning, to act ‘being attacked’.
What is the point in explaining to a child of today that wobbly sets and rubbery aliens were always part of Doctor Who's charm? Naivety, on the part of the viewer, is a blessing in disguise. When we lose it, a fair wodge of inner beauty dies.
I'm not the sort of person who collects hilarious tales of my two-year-old's utterings and sends them in to tabloid Letters Pages. (But here is one.)
I do remember just the one anecdote, from when Dylan was three or four. We were driving - it's all right health and safety fascists, I was at the wheel - around the Tottenham Hale one-way system and there's a car dealership on the right.
The sales bods had tied balloons to each of the vehicles, highlighting some unbeatable deal on offer. The boy spots this and says to me, ‘Look, Dad! You get a free car with every balloon!’
If only it were true. We could puncture all the petrol-guzzlers shortly after purchase and spend ages batting around the air bags.
I have seen some mind-blowing sights. Many parts of the Scottish Highlands. Spurs players scoring against Arsenal. The view from the back of our hotel, when we dropped off Mexico's Copper Canyon train ride in El Fuerte, was as unexpected as it was stunning (and there were hummingbirds on the porch).
But in those situations your mind is programmed what to think. ‘Gosh, what a view!’ - that sort of thing.
When a small child lets go of their helium balloon and it floats up into the sky, and you watch it bounce around in the thermals, the mind is set free. Where will it end up? What journey will it take and what sights will it see from that enviable vantage point?
The tot who lost the thing, assuming they are not bawling, is even better off, because their imaginings may well involve dragons and princesses and castles in the air.
It's a similar story with the message in a bottle, only we should avoid littering the sea with our empties. Plus, too many people would waste the opportunity. Imagine actually coming across a bottle washed up by the shore one day and feverishly unfurling its message to find: ‘IM GONNA B FAMOS! CARLY XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’
I consider myself a nailed-on cynic. In my day job as a TV writer/reviewer, you should hear me railing at the screen over plot inconsistencies or rubbish scripts. I remember when someone had a gun trained on hugely tedious doctor-detective Dangerfield, I was shouting, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’
But I never apply the same standards to Doctor Who.
Why? It would be arrant madness!
The whole thing is crazy. You just have to let your mind go. Imagine thinking, ‘You surely can't defeat the Daleks by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow?’
That is one of the reasons why Doctor Who is so great.
Of course, as a fan of the show, I do sometimes find myself marginalised and on the defensive. In response, I have developed a devil-may-care-shrug and subsequent-sulk manoeuvre.
It's funny, and this goes for any hobby that is not socially accepted - i.e. anything from the collecting of stamps or porcelain frogs to angling, as opposed to the playing of football or fighting while smoking - but you often find yourself cocooned in an artificial world of your own devising, gradually building up the courage to cry, ‘I am an individual!’ followed by, ‘Ouch! Leave me alone!’
Until, that is, you go off and meet a group of fellow enthusiasts, when you can bask in the collective obsession, praying that cool people don't spot you.
Actually, I do have to mention the beginning of episode two.
An officer is standing over the UNIT idiots, who are kneeling, inspecting a prone, unmoving Doctor.
‘Gave us no warning, sir!’ says the idiot with the gun.
‘How could he, with his mouth taped?’ his superior points out.
‘Is he dead, sir?’
Is he dead? Fuck me! You're the ‘professional’ serviceman who's been bending over him for the last five minutes!
Doctor Who's writers really didn't seem to have much time for men in uniform.
Many years after Spearhead from Space went out, as fate would have it, I got to meet some Autons and chat to them. Which was odd. Not the Pertwee-era ones, but the remodelled Autons that kicked off the new series in 2005.
This was for a Radio Times feature to accompany a photo-shoot, which took place in a hangar cum studio on an estate outside Cardiff. Television studios are usually daunting, chilly places where technicians echo, but the wind outside was blowing a gale that could freeze eyeballs, enough to make its space feel welcoming.
And in there was the redesigned Tardis interior: all organic and curvaceous, like a heart inside an orchid. Hard metal walkways, a swish, added seat and console spattered with antiques shop detritus.
Though it looked amazing, nothing inside me stirred. It felt disconcerting. Junior Nick would have leapt up there and transported us all back to 1562 by mistake, then crapped himself while waiting dutifully for teacher's wrath. I guess I just didn't hold out much hope for the series, because of all the promises and subsequent failures of yesteryear. (All right, I did allow myself to sit in the seat, and very comfy it was too.)
A new version of the show - I believed at that moment - could never recapture former glories, clutch me to its nostalgic bosom. And I had no intention of raising my hopes, only for them to be dashed once again.
As the day wore on, I spoke to make-up people, Edward Thomas, the Doctor Who designer, and a delightfully friendly costume designer. I saw photographs, mere tantalising glimpses, of a pig in a spacesuit, the reworked Dalek, that mad old bird who would zombie towards the screen in episode three, and finally the Autons, in real life. As it were.
There were Auton men in suits and Auton brides in full wedding fluff; their features were kitsch, well-defined, with eyelids, sexy noses and full lips. To me they didn't have the same menace as their hastily featured, hairless predecessors. Or did they?
The actors were all extras drafted in for the day. Their latex masks, which covered the entire head, had sat waiting for them, lined up on stands, while they donned their costumes - kind of Man at C&A meets Berketex.
It was hot in there, they would all report, and not overly pleasant, but none of the six had claustrophobia issues, and one chap told me that he had done NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical) warfare training, so he was extra-fine. Bit of a show-off. I didn't quiz him any further on the point.
Clustered pinpricks in the eyeballs of each mask allowed the wearer to see (just) and when the photographer was not snapping, straws were inserted into their mouths, to open up the air gap and allow the actors to breathe more easily.