Robots, Sisterhoods, and Vampires: A Tribute to Terrance Dicks

The things we see and hear, watch and read in childhood can have a lasting impact on our lives. They influence us, often in imperceptible ways, and help shape us into the people we become as adults. Some have more influence; some have less. Some we’re aware of; some we’re not.

Some of my earliest memories are of Doctor Who, years before I even started watching the programme regularly. My mom watched it though, and I often caught bits and pieces of it. It usually terrified me, so I wouldn’t stick around for entire episodes. Yet, perhaps because of that fear, it imprinted itself on me. The adventures of the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith became a significant part of my early childhood even if I only partially watched them. I talked about this a little more when I paid tribute to Elisabeth Sladen in my review of The Sarah Jane Adventures episode, “Sky”.

I started watching Doctor Who regularly when I was ten after I saw episode two of “Full Circle”. It hooked me in for good. Just a few weeks later, the story “State of Decay” began and that became one of my favourites at the time. This story of the Great Vampires was written by a certain Terrance Dicks, a name I would soon come to know very well, a name that most fans of 60s through 80s Doctor Who know well.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Movies, Spin-Offs, and Other Media, Plus Addenda

Doctor Who has become far more than just a television programme. One can think of that metaphorically in terms of the effect it has had on its fans, but here, I mean it literally as well. It has expanded into numerous other media, from comics and annuals to stage plays to movies to books to audio productions, and beyond. Some of these are just things fans put together in their own homes, while others are professional productions or publications. No look back over the history of Doctor Who would be complete without including a mention of these various things.

There is so much out there that it’s unlikely that any single individual has seen, read, or heard it all (if there is any such person, I’d love to meet him/her). I certainly haven’t. I’ve already mentioned in these reflections that, to my chagrin, I have heard very little of the Big Finish audio productions, something I really hope to correct some day (especially to hear the Paul McGann ones). I also haven’t read most of the novels of the last ten years or so. However, I’d like to take a look back at the things I have experienced. It’s likely that I don’t remember everything Doctor Who-related that I’ve ever come across, so no doubt some things will be left out. Also, I’ve touched on the books in previous reflections (both the Target novelizations and the later original novels from Virgin and then BBC Books), so I won’t retread that ground here. Primarily, I’m looking at the movies, spin-off television programmes, and some selected other media, such as comics and roleplaying games.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Eleventh Doctor

Doctor Who is undoubtedly hugely popular at the moment, perhaps more than it’s ever been. The 50th anniversary special, which is less than two weeks away, will be simulcast in over 75 countries worldwide—and not just on television, but in movie theatres as well—in 3D, too. When I was growing up, such a thing would have been beyond belief. Even now, as the 50th approaches, it doesn’t quite seem possible. Until I’m sitting in the theatre watching the special on the 25th of November (alas, due to a computer mess-up, tickets for the 23rd were sold out before I could get some for that day), there’ll be a part of me that doesn’t quite believe it, perhaps not even then. But Doctor Who is big now.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the British tabloids from occasionally running stories about slipping ratings. They’ll carefully select the overnight ratings from episodes a few years ago, compare them to the overnights of a recent episode, and declare the show in trouble. They’ll completely neglect to mention that overnights don’t really matter to the BBC. The final ratings, which include everyone who watched the episode within seven days, are just as strong as ever. The only thing that’s really changed is that more people are watching the episodes at the times of their choosing rather than the air-times. A.I. (appreciation index) scores have also remained more-or-less stable, indicating people still like what they’re watching.

These tabloid stories also don’t take into account the massive increase in popularity Doctor Who has received in the rest of the world, outside of the U.K., particularly in the United States, since Matt Smith took over as the Doctor and Steven Moffat became showrunner. This is due in large part to the amount of publicity BBC America has given the show in the U.S. When the Sci Fi network carried the programme during the David Tennant years, they did little to publicize it (similar to how CBC handled publicity here in Canada). BBC America’s publicity campaign has brought in hordes of viewers. However, while publicity has brought the viewers in, the show has kept them watching. People obviously like it.

As with any period in Doctor Who’s history, there are, of course, people who are dissatisfied. There were fans who complained loudly about Russell T Davies. Before him, it was John Nathan Turner. Nothing can satisfy everyone. So it’s not surprising that there are very vocal fans who are disappointed with the most recent period of the programme. But from my perspective, there’s one major difference this time round: I’m one of the dissatisfied.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Tenth Doctor

I commented a couple weeks ago that the recent periods of Doctor Who somewhat eerily mirror the periods of my own life. I had my own wilderness years of sorts during the show’s wilderness years. In the early 2000’s, I relocated and started to build my life back up to something of a high point, and around the same time, Doctor Who came back and also built itself back up to a high point.

Of course, everyone has their own opinions on when the show has been at it its best, but for me, I do see the Russell T Davies years (both the ninth and tenth Doctors) as the years when Doctor Who was at its most consistent best. This doesn’t mean every episode was great and perfect, and it doesn’t mean there weren’t great and incredible periods before it (I wouldn’t have been a fan for all those years if there weren’t). There were weak episodes during the ninth and tenth Doctors’ periods and there were brilliant episodes, but the gap between weak and brilliant never seemed as great as the gap between weak and brilliant could sometimes be in the classic series. Just look at the difference in quality between “The Caves of Androzani” and the story that came immediately after it in the same season, “The Twin Dilemma”. There was an overall greater consistency under Russell T Davies’s control, and I was immensely satisfied with what I was watching, even after turning my rather critical eye upon it. And I don’t deny I can be very critical of what I watch.

As I covered last week, I loved Christopher Eccleston’s series. I was disappointed that he wasn’t sticking around, but I was eager to see what the new Doctor would bring to the role. Like most of the other Doctors, I hadn’t heard of David Tennant when he was announced, so I had no preconceived notions of him, but I trusted that he would be good. Before Series One has started, I had worried about the quality of the show itself, but those worries were now completely gone. I expected brilliance. Alas, there would be quite a wait for some of it.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Ninth Doctor

As year by year passed after the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie, the likelihood of new Doctor Who (at least in my mind) seemed to diminish—even more rapidly than it had diminished between the end of the original series and the TV Movie. It seemed to me that they had tried a comeback and it had failed. Thus, the coffin was sealed. As I mentioned last week, these next several years became the years that I was least connected to Doctor Who. It wasn’t gone from my life; there were just other, newer things to focus on for the time being.

In the summer of 2002, I left Montreal and returned to London for a couple of months while I searched for new work in Toronto. I then moved to Toronto that September and began a new chapter of my own life, little realizing that efforts were under way for a new chapter of Doctor Who as well. My first year in Toronto was very much a time of establishing myself and making sure I could pay the bills month to month (Toronto is an expensive city to live in; my first apartment here cost more than my one in Montreal and was only about a quarter the size). At some point along the way (either that year or the following year), I acquired my first-ever DVD player and the first-ever DVDs I bought were the complete “Key to Time” season of Doctor Who.

Apart from the very slow change-over of VHS tapes to DVD, however, there was very little Doctor Who going on in my life. I wasn’t paying much, if any, attention to the wider world of Doctor Who fandom and rarely even bothering to check up on the latest news. What news there was, was generally of a kind that either didn’t effect me or just frustrated me: new book releases that never showed up in any local stores, or audio adventures that I couldn’t afford to buy. There seemed little point to following the world of Doctor Who news. Nonetheless, I still checked up on news from time to time and looked at the occasional Doctor Who messageboard. After all, there might occasionally be something to interest me.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Eighth Doctor and the Wilderness Years

The years 1990 to 2005 are known among Doctor Who fans as the “wilderness years”, the years when, with only one brief exception, the show was off the air—well, “off the air” in the sense that no new episodes were being made. For much of the 90’s, here in Canada, YTV continued to air repeats of the show, albeit in ever later and later time slots. It moved to 1:30 a.m. five days a week for a while, and then 2:30 a.m. seven days a week—a slot it stayed in for a few years before they stopped showing it altogether.

It was an exceedingly annoying timeslot, as I was desperate to get all the episodes on tape—again. I had taped them all previously, but large chunks of them had ended up with commercials in them. The 1:30 slot wasn’t so bad as it was a time I could pretty much guarantee being home at and I was always something of a night owl. But 2:30... Ugh. Even for me, staying up till 3 in the morning was exceedingly late, and as it was seven days a week, it wasn’t even possible to get a weekend relief. And I was in university and had classes. But I was dedicated and a fool. At least I was successful. I eventually replaced all my commercial-filled copies. Of course, by then, the release schedule for the official tapes had picked up somewhat and I began replacing them all again. Then later, VHS got replaced by DVD. Sigh. That’s something I’ve had enough of, these days. If ever the series is re-released on a new medium, I won’t be getting them again. I’ll keep my DVDs until they wear out and only replace them at that time.

While there may not have been any new television episodes, there was nonetheless new Doctor Who coming out—novels! For the longest time, Doctor Who novels were just novelizations of television stories, but as the television series came to an end, Virgin Books began The New Adventures, a monthly series featuring the seventh Doctor that continued on from where the TV show had left off. I fell in love with these books right off the bat, and they continued to get better as they went along.

I’ve rarely been into TV or movie tie-in books. I find they tend to be poorly written and are little more than an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the programme they were about. Over the years, I’ve read a few Star Trek and Star Wars books, Dragonlance or various other Dungeons & Dragons-related books, and books for various other series, and I have pretty much always been disappointed (with a few notable exceptions). I expected much the same from The New Adventures. Yet they surprised me. They were better than other tie-in books. The weren’t necessarily masterpieces (especially several of the early ones), but they were well-written and enjoyable. In some ways, I actually started to prefer the books to the show. They could do things that would have been impossible for the TV series to pull off—not just in terms of special effects, but also the style of storytelling. The New Adventures could delve into topics and issues that there just wasn’t time to deal with on TV. More than that, the characters developed in ways that they rarely had on the TV show. They had story arcs and they grew as people. Actions—even and especially the Doctor’s actions—had consequences later on, and the characters had to face these consequences.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Seventh Doctor

The first I ever heard of Sylvester McCoy was on the cover of Doctor Who Magazine announcing him as the seventh Doctor. Similarly to when I first learnt of the sixth Doctor, my first thought was that it seemed a little soon for a new Doctor. The difference here, however, was that this time, I was more aware of how long Colin Baker had been the sixth Doctor already (even though we were only just getting to his episodes in Ontario). When I first learned of the sixth Doctor, I mistakenly believed Peter Davison had only been around for one year. When I first learned of the seventh, I knew Colin Baker had only had two seasons.

It would be a couple years before I actually got to see the seventh Doctor in action. However, it did come sooner than I would have expected. TVOntario had always been several years behind the U.K. in its broadcasting of Doctor Who, but in the late 80’s, it began to catch up. The ‘85 hiatus provided the first opportunity to catch up a year. Then, when TVO reached “The Trial of a Time Lord” season, they actually purchased both that and Sylvester McCoy’s first season together and aired them as one season. TVO ran several advertisements for the new “season” before it started, and they focused entirely on the seventh Doctor, showing scenes from “Time and the Rani”. I was actually a little worried at the time that they were going to skip “The Trial of a Time Lord” for some reason. They had skipped “The Five Doctors” a couple of years previously, so it didn’t seem impossible that they might skip that one too. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and they showed “Trial” before moving on to the seventh Doctor.

I was well into high school by that time, and was surrounded by people who mostly despised Doctor Who, and would make fun of it and anyone who dared admit to watching it. Even most of my friends made fun of the show with a certain regularity, mainly taking it to task for its terrible special effects. Star Trek: The Next Generation was becoming extremely popular at the time, and it was generally the programme people held Doctor Who up to. Even the one friend I had who was a big Doctor Who fan (the one I used to swap VHS tapes with at the time, as I discussed in my first and second Doctor reflections) once said to me, “Let’s face it, Michael. Doctor Who will never be as good as Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I disagreed, of course, but I was alone in that assessment.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Sixth Doctor

Much like with the fifth Doctor, the first I ever heard of the sixth Doctor was from the cover of Doctor Who Annual—the very next one I got after the one that revealed to me the existence of the fifth Doctor. Peter Davison’s episodes had only just started airing in Canada and there was yet another Doctor staring back at me that Christmas morning. Already? I thought. I still didn’t realize just how far behind TVOntario was with airing Doctor Who episodes and had always figured we were just a little behind.

The frustrating thing was, unlike the previous year’s annual, this one didn’t have a handy article explaining all about the different Doctors. There was no mention of another regeneration having occurred, simply a bunch of short stories featuring this new Doctor and a new companion named Peri. It didn’t even mention the actor’s name! I honestly can’t remember when I first learned Colin Baker’s name. It was probably when I discovered Doctor Who Magazine, which was sometime in the next year or so, but I can’t be sure on that. Whatever the case, much like when I first learned of the fifth Doctor, I became very eager to see the new Doctor to find out what he was like.

I have to admit, I was very taken by his appearance. It screamed Doctor at me in ways that Peter Davison’s didn’t. Not that I had a problem with Peter Davison (I explained last week how baffled I was that people could so strongly prefer one Doctor over another), but there was something about Colin Baker’s face and, yes, his outfit that just said to me that this was the Doctor through and through. Looking back now as an adult, I completely understand the criticisms of the sixth Doctor’s outfit. It was horrendous and garish. And having heard Colin Baker’s original idea for his costume (which would have had him sporting an outfit very similar to what Christopher Eccleston eventually wore), I agree that would have been far, far better. However, at the time, I liked the outfit, simply because it was bad. In my head at the time, the Doctor was supposed to dress in ridiculous outfits. The fourth Doctor had a 17-foot-long scarf! The fifth Doctor wore a strange amalgam of cricket uniform and Edwardian frock coat with a piece of celery on his lapel! Of course, the sixth Doctor had to look weird. In fact, he looked the weirdest of them all, and therefore was unequivocally the Doctor.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Fifth Doctor

I moved to a new school the year that Peter Davison’s Doctor finally premièred in full in Canada. I had been identified as “gifted” and was being moved into a gifted programme, something that didn’t earn me a lot of popularity at the school I was leaving. Of course, since I was leaving the school (and never actually had much in the way of popularity anyway), that really didn’t bother me. Popularity was never something I was after, anyway. I did my own thing, and I really didn’t care what other people thought of that—well, that’s what I told myself anyway. In my new class, I found a much greater level of acceptance (even of the fact that I liked Doctor Who) and forged much stronger friendships, and that was really rather liberating. Of course, the school as a whole still shunned the gifted class, but at least we had each other.

The day “Castrovalva” Part One aired on TVOntario, I wasn’t actually expecting it. There had been a straight run of repeats for numerous months (most of which were actually new to me at the time), and I hadn’t been paying attention to when the new season might start. There had been no announcements or previews of the new season that I had seen, so I sat down that Saturday evening expecting another Tom Baker story. If I remember correctly, the one that had been repeated the week before was “The Leisure Hive”. At the time, I had no idea what came after that story since the repeats hadn’t caught back up to where I’d started watching (with “Full Circle”). I think I half expected the repeats to continue all the way up to “Logopolis” again before the fifth Doctor would finally start.

The TVOntario ident came up on screen and then the most bizarre thing ever happened: the Doctor Who title sequence didn’t start. Instead, there was a scene of some scaffolding and a person lying on the ground behind it. For a brief moment, I panicked. Was Doctor Who not on? What was happening. And then, as Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan came running into the scene, I realized that was the Doctor lying on the ground. These were the ending moments of “Logopolis” as the Doctor was about to regenerate. I had never seen an episode of Doctor Who start with a pre-titles sequence before, but it made instant sense to me that this one had to. The titles would start as soon as he had regenerated. This was clearly how it happened with every new Doctor. I know now I was wrong—that really was the very first time the show had ever had a pre-titles sequence—but it made logical sense to me at the time.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Fourth Doctor

Although Jon Pertwee was technically my first Doctor, the honour really belongs more to Tom Baker. He was the one who imprinted himself on my memory, going so far as to take Pertwee’s place so that I forgot the third Doctor had ever existed. It was the early fourth Doctor period that had the most effect on me in my early formative years. But it wasn’t just Tom Baker. It was also Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Indeed, to some small extent, I think Sarah may well have had more effect on me than the Doctor himself did.

In those years, to me, Doctor Who was about the Doctor and Sarah—and sometimes Harry (I knew Harry existed, but he wasn’t always there, so I didn’t really include him to the same extent). They were the stars of the show and they had always been the stars of the show. There were no other companions and no other Doctors. As I detailed last week, my memories of “Day of the Daleks” had replaced both the third Doctor and Jo with the fourth Doctor and Sarah. Similar things happened after Sarah’s time on the show. I have a distinct memory of seeing “The Invisible Enemy”, specifically the scene where the Doctor and Leela are about to cross the bridge between the two parts of the Doctor’s brain. But my child mind didn’t notice Leela. No, that was Sarah. Right up until I started watching the show regularly (when I was confronted with the harsh reality that the person I thought was Sarah was being repeatedly called Romana), every female character on the show who spent any amount of time around the Doctor was Sarah. (I should point out that I have always had a rather poor visual memory. I’m an audio learner and remember sounds far better. When it comes to vision, I remember actions—movements and things people do—without any problem, but when it comes to what people (or things) look like, I can’t give more than the vaguest details (gender, skin colour, very approximate height, maybe hair colour). It’s perhaps not surprising that I never noticed Sarah’s changing appearance or that Tom Baker looked very different from Jon Pertwee.)

In many ways, I was kind of enamoured of Sarah. She was the one I looked up to more so than even the Doctor. The Doctor was clearly a hero, of course. He was the good guy and he saved the day in the end. But the Doctor was distant, intimidating, even a little bit terrifying in his own right. He was powerful and if the monsters could harm him, they had be really, really bad. Yet Sarah was a different sort of hero. She was more like me. She was afraid of the same things I was afraid of, had the same sort of vulnerabilities. In short, she was human. The Doctor wasn’t. Sarah showed that a normal person could rise up and defeat the villains, too. You didn’t have to be a powerful alien like the Doctor.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Third Doctor

Jon Pertwee was my first Doctor. The funny thing is, it was a long time before I realized this. During my childhood, Tom Baker managed to supplant himself into my memories of Jon Pertwee stories. It became like Jon Pertwee never existed and it had been Tom Baker all along. A couple years ago, when I reviewed the Sarah Jane Adventures episode “Sky”, I talked a little about my original introduction to Doctor Who, and my attempts to figure out which story my earliest memories of the show came from—a Dalek story with Tom Baker, and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Except, it wasn’t with either of them.

I can’t say for sure what the very first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw was. I was so young then, that what memories I have of that time are nothing more than images, like photographs in my head—and blurry photographs at that. In all likelihood, my first exposure to the show was not a full episode, but rather just a few moments. My mom used to watch the show regularly, so I’d hear or catch glimpses of it from week to week. It used to terrify me. To me, Doctor Who was not a science fiction show; it was a horror show. So not surprisingly, my earliest memories of it are piecemeal. Memory is never a particularly reliable thing (studies have shown just how poor human memory actually is) and during the earliest years of life, it was even less reliable, so I suppose it’s not so strange that Jon Pertwee managed to morph into Tom Baker in my memories.

It’s still a weird sensation. I still have a very vivid memory of Tom Baker strapped to a table with Daleks hovering over him. But that scene doesn’t exist anywhere. It never happened. The scene is from “Day of the Daleks” and is actually of Jon Pertwee strapped to a table. I’ve seen the story many times now, so obviously, I have a memory of the real scene too, and the two memories conflict in my head. The Tom Baker one won’t go away even though I know it’s not real.

With Tom Baker taking over Pertwee’s place in my early memories, one might reasonably think that Pertwee didn’t have much of an effect on me. After all, if I forgot him so easily... But there’s no doubting the show itself did have an effect—in more ways than just scaring me—and Pertwee was an important part of the show. Despite being terrified of the show, I was strangely drawn to it. It was a long time before I was willing to watch an episode all the way through (not until well into Tom Baker’s time), but it still held a prominent place in my mind. I can’t really explain it, but Doctor Who was significant somehow, in ways that other television shows weren’t. It had already been running longer than most other shows, but I certainly didn’t know that at the time, so what made it more significant than other shows—even the ones I watched regularly and all the way through—I can’t really say.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the Second Doctor

Of the eleven Doctors, I think I probably have the least to say about Patrick Troughton’s second Doctor. This isn’t out of a dislike of Troughton, his interpretation, or performance. I like his Doctor, and I enjoy watching the few episodes that still exist from his time. It could perhaps be because his era of the show is the most badly hit with missing episodes, and so there is less for me to reflect on and less to have impacted me. But that can’t be the entire reason. There are other Doctors with small episode counts (Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston) and I suspect I’ll have quite a bit more to say about them when I get around to them in a few weeks’ time. For whatever reason, finally being exposed to his episodes just didn’t have as much an effect on me as other Doctors have.

I wrote a fair amount last week about my early years searching for novelizations of the first two Doctors, as those books were the only way I had of experiencing them. Much like the first Doctor books, second Doctor books were difficult to find. I can’t remember now what exactly I read of the second Doctor. I do remember reading The Web of Fear—although, to be honest, I don’t remember the actual reading; I just remember finding the book in the library and seeing the very prominent picture of Patrick Troughton on the cover. I remember the excitement of seeing that book, and that may well have been the first second Doctor book I read.

It wasn’t until much later that I actually got to see Patrick Troughton in a television story. The first was "The Two Doctors" during Colin Baker's time. Then I got to see "The Five Doctors" when it came out on video (since TVOntario skipped it). But the first actual story I saw from his era came about in a very unusual situation and was completely unexpected. The series was finally starting to come out on VHS. A local video rental shop near where I lived in London, Ontario had a few Doctor Who videos and they had the ones that the local comic store I bought them at refused to stock (as I mentioned last week), so I decided to rent them (and I will confess, I copied them). One of the ones I rented was the Tom Baker story “The Robots of Death”. Well that’s what the box said, at any rate. So did the label on the actual tape—sort of. When I got home and took the tape out of the plastic case the rental shop placed it in, I noticed something odd about that label. With a ballpoint pen, someone had crossed out the word “Robot” and scribbled in “Seeds”. That was odd, I thought. Could this be a mislabelled copy of “The Seeds of Death” that had also been put in an incorrect box? Excited at the possibility, I slipped it into the VCR, pressed play, and lo and behold, it was “The Seeds of Death”.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary - Reflections on the First Doctor

On Saturday, 23 November, 1963, Doctor Who aired on BBC television for the very first time. Twelve weeks from today, it will be Saturday, 23 November, 2013—fifty years to the day after that original airing, and the show is still going strong. It’s had its ups and downs, of course, including sixteen years during which only one new television production aired. But even during that time, it continued in other forms. Doctor Who is the world’s longest-running science fiction television series, and also holds the Guiness World Record for most successful sci-fi series in the world. It has become an enduring icon of British television, and in recent years, has achieved phenomenal success in the rest of the world as well. According to a recent international trailer for the 50th anniversary, the show has over 77 million fans worldwide, a number that seems to be continually growing.

Doctor Who has also had a huge effect on me throughout my life, both growing up and as an adult. While other TV shows—many of which I fondly remember, while others lie forgotten—come and go, Doctor Who lives on constantly in my mind and thoughts. It has shaped me in very perceptible ways. I became a full-fledged fan at the age of ten, but I was well aware of the show for years before that—scared stiff of it, yet somehow intrigued and drawn to it.

In recognition of all this and of its upcoming 50th anniversary in November, I’d like to take a look back at my own history with the show. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my review of The Sarah Jane Adventures episode “Sky”, I also wrote about my introduction to Doctor Who. Last year, on the 49th anniversary, I mentioned that I might write a more detailed account of it this year. Well, that’s what this is—and more. Over the next twelve weeks, I’m going to examine my life with Doctor Who one Doctor at a time, one per week, and then on the final week, a look at the spin-offs and expanded universe. I will look at my earliest childhood memories of the show, how and when I fell in love with it, and all the way up to my current experiences and how I struggle with loving a programme that I now find so problematic. Of course, my exposure to Doctor Who wasn’t in order. After all, the show is older than I am. However, the Doctor is a Time Lord. He doesn’t have to do things in order, so neither do I. So I will look at the Doctors in order, even though it’s not in the order of my life. It just seems fitting somehow. So naturally, I begin with the first Doctor, William Hartnell.

The Sarah Jane Adventures - Sky

My earliest memory of Doctor Who is seeing an episode with the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) up against the Daleks. This was several years before I became hooked on the show and began watching it religiously. It was at a time when Doctor Who terrified me and gave me nightmares. I remember seeing the Doctor tied up on a table being interrogated by the Daleks. I remember seeing the Daleks exterminate a man who had betrayed them, and most terrifying of all, I remember an army of Daleks coming out from under a bridge to exterminate everyone.

I often saw snippets of episodes, as my mom watched the show every week. They always scared me, so I never really sat down to watch whole episodes. Nevertheless, there was always something about the show that intrigued me, and the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith became prominent figures in my mind. Eventually, I saw episode 2 of “Full Circle” and I was hooked for life. Of course, by that time, the companion was the second Romana, and Sarah Jane Smith was long gone. Still, Sarah Jane had formed a huge impression on me over the years. To me, she was part of what made the show Doctor Who.

Now that I was hooked, I simply had to find out more about the programme I had been missing all those years. I began voraciously reading the novelizations of the episodes, and would frequently discover moments I remembered seeing on television. Naturally, I was curious about my earliest memory. I quickly discovered that there was only one Dalek story with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane: “Genesis of the Daleks”. I found a copy of the novelization in the library, read it, and was surprised to find that it didn’t really fit my memory. Now, the old Target novelizations sometimes deviated a bit from the TV episodes. They were often condensed considerably, so I thought that maybe the book had just handled the scenes from my memory differently than the episode had. I wasn’t fully convinced of that, though, so I tried double-checking that there wasn’t another Dalek story that could fit my memories. Sarah Jane had been in the Third Doctor story, “Death to the Daleks”, so I considered the possibility that that was the one I remembered. I really didn’t think it likely because Tom Baker was so clearly in my memories of the story in question. Nonetheless, I read the novelization of “Death to the Daleks”. It didn’t fit.