An odd sort of Doctor Who fan
Mar. 3rd, 2013 09:47 pmOkay, so I've been having tremendous fun archive-binging on Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum site http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.be/ (and by the way, thanks to
nwhyte for linking to this enormous time-sink!), of which more at a later date, but it has made me think about my own Doctor Who fannishness. I'm prone to talking about it as my first fandom (even though that's a term I've only started using recently) and it's the thing that starts me on the road to being an sf fan (The Tomorrow People was also a contributing factor), but looking at it it's amazing how little of the program I actual saw in 'real time' when it was first shown. I've been interrogating my memory, trying to work out a list, and it goes something like this:( Doctor Who episodes I can remember seeing by season )
So in other words the only season in which I can be pretty certain that I saw every episode from the original broadcast is the very last one in 1989! Going into this I would have sworn I'd seen all of at least season 13, until I realised that I hadn't seen The Seeds of Doom all the way through.
Okay, some of this is understandable. There were no video recorders for much of this time so if you didn't catch it on the day you didn't see it at all. If it clashed with something my mum wanted to watch, or if either parent just didn't want you to put the television on at the appropriate time then you missed it. If there were family visits to or from the grandparents then you missed it.
But that doesn't explain periods of time when I didn't watch it at all. The middle period of Tom Baker's time I just wasn't much bothered with (partly because I always found K9 really silly and annoying - even though I was theoretically at exactly the target age group for him), I lost interest in Peter Davison half way through his tenancy, couldn't get on with Colin Baker's stuff and thought McCoy was far too silly until TV Zone magazine started coming out and convinced me that the program was starting to do some interesting things.
But also, I wonder if the way we watch television has changed in other ways? I don't recall that we ever really did 'appointment television.' There was nothing that anyone in the family always watched - not even mum with 'her' soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm - but if you happened to be free you sat down and watched whatever was on. Obviously there were some you made more effort for, but nothing that you sulked about if you missed.
So the question for people of my generation is whether that was a common model or just the way my family did things. Any thoughts?
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So in other words the only season in which I can be pretty certain that I saw every episode from the original broadcast is the very last one in 1989! Going into this I would have sworn I'd seen all of at least season 13, until I realised that I hadn't seen The Seeds of Doom all the way through.
Okay, some of this is understandable. There were no video recorders for much of this time so if you didn't catch it on the day you didn't see it at all. If it clashed with something my mum wanted to watch, or if either parent just didn't want you to put the television on at the appropriate time then you missed it. If there were family visits to or from the grandparents then you missed it.
But that doesn't explain periods of time when I didn't watch it at all. The middle period of Tom Baker's time I just wasn't much bothered with (partly because I always found K9 really silly and annoying - even though I was theoretically at exactly the target age group for him), I lost interest in Peter Davison half way through his tenancy, couldn't get on with Colin Baker's stuff and thought McCoy was far too silly until TV Zone magazine started coming out and convinced me that the program was starting to do some interesting things.
But also, I wonder if the way we watch television has changed in other ways? I don't recall that we ever really did 'appointment television.' There was nothing that anyone in the family always watched - not even mum with 'her' soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm - but if you happened to be free you sat down and watched whatever was on. Obviously there were some you made more effort for, but nothing that you sulked about if you missed.
So the question for people of my generation is whether that was a common model or just the way my family did things. Any thoughts?