The Empty Children: Growing Up as a Doctor Who Fan in an Age of Scarcity

Unlike the Whizzkid, I did get to see the early days of Doctor Who via those BBC2 repeats from 1992 onwards. I can still remember the general intrigue and Viking action of The Time Meddler giving way to the mind-blowing strangeness of The Mind Robber. I was hooked from the moment that Zoe and Jamie, clinging on to the TARDIS console for dear life, descended into the darkness.

As a 35-year-old man, I realise now that Wendy Padbury’s spangly catsuit was possibly also a contributing factor. What I also realise is that I wasn’t the only weird kid who was falling in love with this near 30-year-old telly show.

Without wanting to sound like a grumpy old man, being a Doctor Who fan was way better back in the dim and distant 1990s. Aside from sporadic specials and sketches, there was no show on the telly, you had to root around car boot sales and charity shops for new Target novelisations, and you could barely watch Terror of the Autons in standard definition, let alone HD with enhanced CSO and updated special effects.

Although I never got to see the early days, I know it’s not as good as it used to be, but I’m still terribly interested.

Whizzkid, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

And as for a glut of brand-new audio adventures for your favourite Doctors and companions each month, you had to make do with such copyright skirting offerings as ‘The Time Travellers’, ‘The Wanderer’, ‘Adventures in a Pocket Universe’ and a smattering of Yeti, Zygon, Sontaran and Rutan spin-off movies and audios. Alongside all of this were the licensed novels from Virgin publishing and then BBC books and the comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine. The so-called Wilderness Years of Doctor Who are something of a misnomer, although the levels of accessibility to most of this material was much less democratic in these early days of the internet, pre-streaming.

As a kid with no disposable income, I had to be sparing in what I indulged in. Especially as a copy of Inferno on double pack VHS would set me back £18.99 (roughly £34.79 in today’s money). My one other fan friend Leo and I used to swap videos, and we’d scour the catalogues of Virgin Megastore and, weirdly, Boots the chemist to find and order harder to find stories. We were regularly disappointed to find the words DELETED next to the entry for stories such as The Hand of Fear, The Daleks or The Two Doctors.

Desperately seeking Doctor Who was part of the fun of being a fan in those days, and I’d regularly try and catch snippets of the show in Blue Peter clips packages, Radio Times pull-out magazines or charity shop and car boot sale visits with my mother. I remember one incredible day where she came home with a fruit box chock-full of Target novelisations. Many of which are still on the shelf behind me as I write this. I wouldn’t read them in the order dictated by the numbers on the spine, or in the order of broadcast, I’d just pick whichever cover looked the coolest.

Due to the release strategy of the VHS’, it wasn’t even possible to watch the show in story order. Even if it were, there would always be gaps. And so, my friend and I got this lovely overview of the show’s entire history, picking out big mythology titles like Remembrance of the Daleks, Tomb of the Cybermen (only recently having been returned) and The Five Doctors. This overview had drawbacks, however, and I distinctly remember being disappointed that the shadowy figure at the end of An Unearthly Child was a RADA trained caveman rather than an Ice Warrior.

Eventually, my sister and I had managed to convince our parents to get cable television (our building was listed, and we weren’t allowed a satellite dish). I think we wanted it to watch The Simpsons because we’d seen all the BBC1 ones when we rented them from Global Video. More excitingly, it meant that I could watch all the new Star Trek shows with my Dad and even more exciting than that was that every Saturday and Sunday morning they showed old Doctor Who – in order – on UKTV Gold. For those who don’t know the channel, it was basically Britbox on a dial-up modem.

I would religiously tape all these stories, then excitedly hand them on to my friend. It allowed us to finally see stuff that had the dreaded DELETED entry on that black and green screen. It also even allowed us to see stuff that wasn’t even available to buy yet!

It’s perhaps a little bit ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ but I honestly feel like all of this hard work and commitment to the show paid off. Looking back, it feels like it was somehow more valuable to me than if I’d discovered the show post-2005. I formed that strong bond with the history and mythos of Doctor Who that I think you can only form in childhood. The 26 years of the show never seemed daunting to me and all of this home taping and saving up pocket money for videos and sticking The E-Space Trilogy on my Christmas list was like compiling some exorbitantly expensive Panini sticker album. I often wonder if our weirdly apt ‘timey wimey’ approach to discovering Doctor Who has been lost in an age of Netflix and BritBox.

I feel like slogging through the whole of the series from 1963 to the present has become some kind of gruelling endurance test, a badge of honour to show off to other fans. Have we lost that pick n mix approach to the show’s history or do streaming services make it easier than ever to dip in and out of 57 years of history? I’m not sure, but I know that whilst I love being able to have beautifully restored Pertwee era stories, brand-new Target novelisations of new stories and another series of Paul McGann audio adventures available to me at the click of a button, I also pine for a time when you had to properly hunt for Doctor Who things. A time where you could find a scruffy Dapol Dalek in a church car park or find a copy of Castrovalva in an Oxfam shop on the West Coast of Scotland.

I wonder if this nostalgia for my own passionate, obsessive introduction to the show is in response to my current cooling towards the most recent series and my disinterest in the upcoming eight episodes later this year. Perhaps I’ve become a bit like Whizzkid after all. I know it’s not as good as it used to be, but I’m still terribly interested.