An odd sort of Doctor Who fan

[bookzombie]

Okay, 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:

• Season 9 (1972): Maybe one episode of Day of the Daleks - so the first episode I have any memory of seeing at all. Also, some odd minutes of The Sea Devils. I would have been six at the time.


• Season 10 (1972/3): All of The Three Doctors (so the first full story I remember seeing) & The Carnival of Monsters. No memory of Frontier in Space at all. At least the first episode of Planet of the Daleks. At least one episode of The Green Death (the first I think from re-watching)


• Season 11 (1973/4): At least the first episode each of The Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. At least one episode of Death to the Daleks. Not a moment from The Monster of Peladon. Maybe 1 episode of Planet of the Spiders.


• Season 12 (1974/5): The first episode of Robot, one episode of The Ark in Space (I'm pretty sure it's episode 3). All 3 other stories in the season.


• Season 13 (1975/6): Everything right up to the first two episodes of The Seeds of Doom. I almost thought I had a whole season there, but then remembered that I hadn't seen all of that last story.


• Season 14 (1976/7): Another almost winner, but alas I'm pretty sure that I didn't see more than one or two episodes of Robots of Death.


• Season 15 (1977/8): All of The Horror of Fang Rock, maybe all of The Invisible Enemy, but I'm not certain. All of Image of the Fendhal, but only the first episode of The Sun Makers. At least the first episode of Underworld, but definitely not the whole thing. All of The Invasion of Time.


• Season 16 (1978/79): Everything apart from The Pirate Planet, which I'm pretty sure I only saw a couple of episodes from, and The Armageddon Factor, which I only saw the last couple of episodes of.


• Season 17 (1979/80): No memory of seeing anything from The Creature from the Pit, but everything else.


• Season 18 (1980/81): An episode or two from The Leisure Hive, but nothing then until an odd episode of Warrior's Gate. Then everything from The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis.


• Season 19 (1982): All of Castrovalva, nothing of Four to Doomsday, one episode maybe from Kinda, then everything until the end of the season.


• Season 20 (1983): Nothing until an odd episode of Snakedance. All of Mawdryn Undead, none of Terminus, at least one episode of Enlightenment. Nothing from The King's Demons


• Between seasons: The Five Doctors


• Season 21 (1984): Nothing except an odd episode of Frontios, bits of the last episode of Resurrection of the Daleks (I vaguely remember Tegan leaving), the last episode of The Caves of Androzani and the first episode of The Twin Dilemma


• Season 22 (1985): I may have seen odd minutes here and there from Attack of the Cybermen, Mark of the Rani and Revelation of the Daleks. Not a single full episode that I can remember.


• Season 23 (1986): I'm pretty sure I caught an odd minute here and there but no full episodes.


• Season 24 (1987): Nothing, not a single second, though to be fair I was at university now with no access to a television.


• Season 25 (1988/9): Again nothing that I can recall, but again at university so not surprising.


• Season 26 (1989): This is an odd one: I was at university with no TV access at this point, but I'm pretty sure I saw all of the original broadcasts due to getting my mum to record it for me (I remember pennski and I watching the videos in the holidays). So either it's the only season in which I watched every episode or one in which I saw none, depending on how you want to look at it!

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?

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

*chuckles*

This happens. Now, I saw far more of Dr Who than you did, even just counting from when you apparently started watching (I was 14 when An Unearthly Child was first broadcast and, indeed, saw, and was annoyed by, the repeat the following Saturday) but was not and still am not an active fan, and I loathed Tom Baker himself. However, my brother was, and is, a Who fan.

When you are a child you are dependent on your parents and, until the advent of VCRs, family agreement in what you watch. So, while I saw most of The Man From UNCLE (which everyone liked) most of the first season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - the first series I was obsessed by - I only saw the last forty minutes because we were watching The Dakotas or Temple Houston both of which were favourites of my younger brother and which, as cowboy series, my father also liked, and which overlapped.

And, of course, unlike the States, there were few reruns, and if a programme was not repeated in two years, it was not likely to be, for financial reasons.

This does not mean that Who wasn't your first fandom, just that you were constrained by circumstance, as are we all.

[coth.livejournal.com]

Unless you count having a 'Watch with (out) Mother' habit. But once we grew out of that we didn't do 'appointment' television. There were things we all watched, if we were around at the time, mainly comedies: Dad's Army, Andy Williams, Morecombe and Wise, but including Dr Who up to and including Tom Baker. But I fell out of the Who habit when I left home, around 1978, and never really watched it again until we picked it up as family viewing with Ecclestone.

Side anecdote: I remember rowing with my Dad when I was about 15 or 16 because he wanted to teach me to play bridge when I wanted to watch Star Trek. We both lost out: I got neither the tv programme nor the lesson, and he never did get to teach me to play bridge.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

Ha! My equivalent of this was the first season of Blakes 7. I was in the cub scouts at the time which met on Monday nights - the same nights as B7 was shown. So I only saw the first episode and a few others scattered over the course of the season.

It's not like I enjoyed being in the cubs; my parents just wanted me out of the house for a few hours!

[themis1.livejournal.com]

I was sat down in front of Who (daleks invading London) by my mother, who thought I might like it. I have no idea why, as I don't remember her doing anything like this at any other time.

My father only watched BBC; he did't hold with TV with adverts and never bought a copy of the TV times (for young readers, BBC and ITV used to publish their own magazines). He didn't believe in switching the TV on unless there was a specific something someone wanted to watch, and as he went to bed at 11, nobody was allowed to watch TV later than that. We didn't buy a colour TV until some major event my mother thought it might be nice to watch in colour (can't remember what it was, though!).

As a result, I can't cope at all with TV-as-background-noise. If it's on, I have to watch it, and if I visit people who DO use it as background noise, I find it very difficult to ignore.

My mother secretly watched cartoons during the afternoon when my dad was at work; she never told him about this.

I still somehow managed to watch a LOT of TV!!

[pennski.livejournal.com]

We didn't have one growing up, so all my watching was done round at friend's houses. While I have worked very hard to bridge this cultural gap in my life, I too still can't cope with TV as background noise either.