Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (13 page)

In 1995, I had a life changing experience I needed to share with Sue.

I admit most of the online conversations I had when I first discovered the internet were banal at best. The pattern was always the same: small talk about the weather followed by a discussion about the time difference – everyone I talked to seemed to be American back then. But it didn’t really matter because I was making the impossible happen. I was
communicating with someone on a different continent with real-time text. It didn’t get much more sci-fi than that in 1995.

This didn’t concern me in the slightest. The idea that on the internet you could be anybody you wanted to be – younger, older, sexier, wiser, even a different gender – intrigued me but it also seemed like an awful lot of effort; I couldn’t be bothered.

One of my first one-to-one online chats was with a law student from Ohio. We were discussing capital punishment when the name Jeremy Bentham came up. Several minutes later, I realised that we were chatting at cross-purposes: he was referring to the renowned eighteenth-century English philosopher while I was talking about the co-founder of the
Doctor Who Appreciation Society
. In fact, Bentham the Younger is a descendent of Bentham the Elder; and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the feeding pool of internet early adopters, the American law student had been through this rigmarole before. And that’s how he came to give me the directions to a special place on the internet where I could
discuss
Doctor Who
to my heart’s content. It was here – in the
rec.arts.drwho
newsgroup – that I finally found true fandom.

I knew that other
Doctor Who
fans existed before this, of course. I was aware there was a Doctor Who Appreciation Society, though I had never joined it; and I knew that there were conventions and local clubs, but I never had the guts to go to either, mainly because I suspected that most of the people who went to them were nutcases.
*

But
rec.arts.drwho
was the perfect compromise. I had stumbled into the world’s largest room of like-minded people but I could leave whenever I wanted. I didn’t even have to say anything – I could just eavesdrop at the back of the room on the virtual conversations that were already under way without anyone giving me so much as a funny look (or
emoticon). Many of these conversations were bewildering at first: debates about Sylvester McCoy’s Scottish accent, fiery arguments over the U.N.I.T. Dating Controversy, whatever that was, and endless exegeses about which Dalek story was the best one. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked.

After several weeks of lurking, I finally summoned up enough courage to post something myself:

It doesn’t surprise me that my first internet post was about
Doctor Who
. What does surprise me is just how bitchy it was. I was being unkind to ‘Carnival of Monsters’, the first
Doctor Who
story I ever saw and the source of my first
childhood
memory.

Wow. That was a bit harsh. And just for the record, she did. Regularly.

There are two possible excuses for my behaviour. The first is that I genuinely felt upset when I wrote those words. My post coincides with the release of ‘Carnival of Monsters’ on
VHS, and it would have been the first time that I’d seen this particular story since the ‘Five Faces’ repeat in 1981. I was still in a period of adjustment – old stories rarely measure up to your childhood memories of them and ‘Carnival of
Monsters
’ had looked somewhat
cheaper
than I remembered. The second possibility is that I’d convinced myself that the best way to make an impression on this newsgroup was to wade in with a bold, opinionated statement, featuring plenty of exclamation marks, sarcasm and cynicism. And that’s because my earliest memories of
rec.arts.drwho
is as a place where everyone was a little on the grumpy side.

I sat back and waited for the debate to begin. But nobody replied to my first post. After that disappointment, I didn’t contribute to the newsgroup again for quite some time – the language labs were locked over the Easter holidays. However, when I returned in May I dove right back in and, soon enough, I was swimming with the grumpy sharks, trading cynical, sarcastic jibes with the best and worst of them. The smiliest smiley cannot express how much I loved it.

It was in the
rec.arts.drwho
newsgroup that I learned which directors were OK to like and which ones I should dismiss out of hand; which authors to praise and which ones to scorn; which actors to follow and which ones to avoid at all costs, especially if you ran into them at a convention bar. It was here that I learned how to use words like ‘rad’ and ‘trad’ without blushing, where I tried to make sense of something called the Cartmel Master Plan, and where I took my side in the infernal Pertwee versus McCoy flame war. It was also in this newsgroup that I learned about the Tavern, a pub in Fitzrovia where a powerful cabal of fans would gather
on the first Thursday of every month to plan for the day when they would control the programme themselves and, on a good night, fight each other in the street to decide who would get first dibs on being producer; the T in Russell T. Davies stands for Toughnut.

But newsgroups and chatrooms were just the beginning. There were also FTP archives, where you could download images of Leela in her loincloth or TARDIS dematerialisation sound effects (whatever floated your boat), and there was the World Wide Web, where I found
Doctor Who
episode guides, fan-fiction and some TARDIS-based pornography that I’d rather not discuss. I spent so much time in the university language labs between 1995 and 1996 that Sue finally decided it would be for the best if we bought our own PC so we could connect to the internet at home. That way, at least she’d get to spend some time with me, even if she was staring at the back of my head while I argued with some moron from Montreal about the merits – merits! – of
The TV Movie.

I tried to convince my bosses at the university that we should be teaching the internet to our students but they seemed to think it was just a passing fad. I didn’t listen to them; instead I spent every spare hour I could learning how to build webpages by hand, with raw HTML code at first and then with increasingly sophisticated software. It took me several years and countless sleepless nights but in the end I got to grips with it. I soon became master of my own domain, which I bought for £1.50 from supernames.co.uk.

In 2001, the university finally saw the light. They asked me to design an undergraduate syllabus that would cover
both the theory of the internet as well as the practical side of building websites. Coincidentally, this was also the year I won
rec.arts.drwho’
s coveted Rookie of the Year Award (I neglected to remind them that I’d been hanging around the place for five). NB I didn’t win this award because I had anything particularly interesting to say about
Doctor Who
. I won this award because of all the websites I’d devoted to it.

Cue list.

My first website was dedicated to the American science-fiction series
Babylon 5
. The site used such cutting-edge technologies as framed navigation, blinking text and animated GIFs. However, what it lacked in aesthetics it more than made up for in content. Because I couldn’t be bothered to review every single episode of the space opera myself, I recruited like-minded fans from the internet to write them for me. This collaborative approach not only saved me time and effort, it also resulted in the formation of a close
community
of virtual friends – virtual friends being the best kind, i.e. ones you never have to meet.

My old school pal Jonathan Grove and I were running our very own online social network long before Facebook came along and ‘stole’ our idea. Jon, who was as obsessed with the internet as I was, had invested some money in his own private server and he wanted to experiment with some virtual
community
software that he’d bought. However, while Jon had the technical know-how, he didn’t have a ready-made community to test it on, and that’s where I came in. I convinced my
Babylon 5
friends to join the new network, which they then used to swap intimate details about their private lives. Sadly, unlike Facebook, the Eclipse Café peaked at nineteen
members, the intimate details of a group of
Babylon 5
fans proving to be not merely a hermetically closed circle but one with nothing very interesting in the middle of it.

Tachyon TV was supposed to be like The Onion for science-fiction fans. It was basically a monthly website with a single page of topical spoof news stories but with a telefantasy twist.
DOCTOR WHO
LOGO DESIGNERS FOUND HIDING IN FALLUJAH was one hilarious headline; IS SADDAM HUSSEIN SECRETLY BUILDING IMPERIAL AT-AT WALKERS? was another. It hasn’t aged very well, mostly because it was pretty old to begin with.

Despite Tachyon TV’s shameless derivativeness, the site built up a small but loyal audience, until one day it caught the attention of a TV production company. They invited me to a meeting in their offices to discuss a Top Secret project with them, so I bought a new suit and caught the first train to London. The brief they gave me was, well, brief: watch the news on television for a whole week and then write some funny jokes about it. The week I was assigned to watch the news was the week of the Soham murders. On the Friday night, I submitted five pages of gags to the production company. I never heard from them again.

It was a valuable learning experience. Nowadays, I could easily sell that material to Frankie Boyle.

I took up blogging because I figured if I wrote something new every day, I’d eventually get better at it. I didn’t really
care if anyone read what I had to say or not, and not a lot of people did, but the routine I set myself – to write at least five hundred words about a TV programme I’d seen the night before – felt like it might lead somewhere eventually. Occasionally I would post something other than a review – usually a rant about living in a caravan, building a house or my never-ending battles with BT’s Customer Complaints Department – but most of the time I just published
withering
commentaries about the latest series of
Big Brother
or that week’s
EastEnders
. And then one day, I posted a review of a documentary about the art of parkouring, or as I put it:

I was lucky if any of my blog posts attracted a couple of comments at most, but this particular review ended up with ninety-one responses. The parkouring community was furious with me. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have described them as ‘demented baboons in hoodies’. I tried to shrug off their virtual vitriol, but there was one comment that really got under my skin:

The commentator then imagined what would happen if I ever attempted to parkour myself:

Something in me snapped. I persuaded Sue to photograph me jumping through our building site. I leapt from beams, hurdled over tractors and rolled through dried-up cow dung. This would show those parkouring baboons! I ended up on the roof of our caravan where, as I was waiting for Sue to bring me a stepladder so I could get back down again, I tripped over some loose felt and plummeted to the ground, breaking both ankles. I cried like a motherfucking tard and was crippled for months but I still posted the photos. And no one has ever called me Fat Boy again.

I was still blogging when
Doctor Who
returned to television in 2005, so it felt natural to combine my two interests. Once again, I recruited like-minded souls from across the internet to help share the workload, and this allowed me to stagger reviews of a single episode over a whole week, which meant that people kept coming back for more. In fact Behind the Sofa became so popular it made numerous recommended lists on TV websites, and when one of the new series writers, Steven Moffat, left a very nice comment on a review, I remember thinking that blogging couldn’t get any better than this.

One of Behind the Sofa’s most prolific contributors was a man named Damon Querry, and because he lived just a few miles away from me, and because he didn’t sound like
he was a total nutter, I suggested that we meet each other face-to-face. We chose a local
Doctor Who
convention in Stockton-on-Tees as neutral territory and Damon brought a friend along with him for moral support. This man’s name was John Williams. Not only was John an expert on soap operas set in the north of England – he still insists on calling
Emmerdale, Emmerdale Farm
– he was, and remains, the funniest man I have ever met. The three of us decided to join forces and re-launch Tachyon TV as a weekly series of irreverent
Doctor Who
-themed podcasts, the hot new medium. If we could make each other laugh, maybe we could make other fans laugh too.

When we ran out of amusing things to say about classic episodes of
Doctor Who
, we branched out into interviewing celebrities instead – though this might be pushing the term ‘celebrities’ past its breaking point. One Thursday at the Tavern in Fitzrovia, we plied Bentham the Younger with lemonade until he admitted – on the record, no less – that
Torchwood
was ‘a mistake’. Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein! And we chatted to actors and producers and writers from the classic era and the new series and no one called anyone a motherfucking tard, at least not when the mic was on.

I loved working on Tachyon TV but, as with all my
previous
online projects, I started getting restless after a while. There are only so many times someone who knows
everything
about
Doctor Who
can ask someone else who knows everything about
Doctor Who
a question fans who know everything about
Doctor Who
already know the answer to.

I needed a new challenge, a new domain to conquer and legally register. It was time for the Adventure to begin …