Timeless Adventures (28 page)

This privileged access to the show’s own past was one of the main benefits of being part of
Doctor Who
fandom: beyond the interminably slow official release of the series to home video by the BBC there was just no way to legitimately see episodes. These same fans would later form the core audience for the home-video and (much later) DVD releases of the series, as well as (in many cases) contributing towards the creation of the value-added ‘extras’ material featured on the DVDs. Fan audio recordings from the 1960s are often the only remaining material from key stories whose videotape recordings had been wiped. These same unauthorised audio recordings of stories like
The Myth Makers or Marco Polo
have been audio restored and polished and officially released on CD by the BBC. Efforts by fans of the show, in cases like this, have resulted in the preservation of material that the BBC would otherwise have wilfully destroyed long ago. As of 2008, however, there were still 106 missing episodes of
Doctor
Who
(all from the show’s earlier black-and-white era), while many of those that have been recovered from foreign broadcasters (to whom they’d been sold for transmission in the 1960s and 1970s) have been found in international searches carried out by dedicated fans.

The problem with this increasing influence of a vocal minority of fans over
Doctor Who
during the 1980s was that it lost its grip on the mass audience. In appealing to vocal fans the programme became more insular (offering more returning monsters and more explorations of the series’ fundamental concepts). The irony was that, by the time of the 1985 hiatus,
Doctor Who
was a television show that most fans no longer seemed to like either, at least as far as the current version went. While Nathan-Turner claimed that ‘the memory cheats’, committed fans actually had contemporary access (through their unofficially circulated VHS videos) to the show’s own past episodes and were thus able to make direct comparisons.

Ian Levine was pictured in the press smashing his TV with a hammer in a publicity stunt to protest against the 1985 hiatus. During
The Trial
of a Time Lord
season in 1986, he appeared on TV review show
Did You See…?
in a segment entitled ‘
Doctor Who
in Decline’. Levine voiced the complaints of many fans when he noted that recent years had seen ‘a very steep decline in the quality of the show’ and that it was now a ‘mockery pantomime version of its former self’. Other professional fans (like
Doctor Who
Magazine
writer J Jeremy Bentham and later
Doctor Who
novelist Peter Anghelides) appeared to join in the criticism of the in-danger-of-cancellation programme.
Doctor Who
didn’t need executive enemies within the BBC – it had ‘fans’.

This tension between loving
Doctor Who
but not liking the currently on-air version was unique to the series at the time, but with a rash of ‘reinventions’ of old formats in recent years, fans of 1970s television series like
Bionic Woman
or
Battlestar Galactica
have found themselves locked into love-hate relationships with the new versions of their old favourites. Production decisions are debated, casting choices bemoaned and alternatives endlessly suggested in Internet forums and chat rooms. This all happened in
Doctor Who
fandom in the 1980s, too, but the media available were the letter columns of fanzines and, eventually, television itself through comment shows like
Did You
See…?
or
Open Air
(which saw a group of fans tackle writers Pip and Jane Baker over the faults in the conclusion of the
Trial of a Time
Lord
season, including teenager Chris Chibnall, later to become key writer on
Doctor Who
spin-off
Torchwood
).

Through their knowledge of the series, gathered from fanzines and publications like
Doctor Who Magazine
and their viewing of older, generally unavailable episodes, as well as (for the select few who were well connected) their actual involvement with the
Doctor Who
production-office personnel,
Doctor Who
fandom collectively developed a sense of ownership of the show. This perceived ownership reached its height during the aftermath of the 1985 hiatus crisis, and would lead to fan fiction writers ‘taking over’ the production of
Doctor
Who
when the show was off air.

There were benefits to be had from this obsessive attention to a single TV show. As a result of the attention paid to it,
Doctor Who
is the most studied and chronicled television show of all time, and fandom has produced some meticulous and detail-oriented media researchers, key among them being Andrew Pixley. A whole set of professionals all found their initial inspirations and first experiences within the diverse worlds of
Doctor Who
fandom in the 1980s. In this shared vocabulary and set of references,
Doctor Who
fans found a form of discourse that connected them, educated them and equipped them to take over the production of the continuing unfolding text of
Doctor Who
after the BBC had abandoned it, through novels, audio dramas and in-depth research into the making of the programme. Fans became the custodians of the
Doctor Who
legacy, safeguarding it and expanding it until the time was right for the TV show to reemerge and take its rightful place at the top of the TV ratings.

With the cancellation of the
Doctor Who
TV series in 1989, the range of spin-off novels expanded dramatically beyond the original Target novelisations of television stories. These new
Doctor Who
adventures were largely created by fans who’d cut their fiction-writing teeth on various fanzines, among them new series’ scriptwriter Paul Cornell, script editor Gary Russell and showrunner Russell T Davies.

For much of the run of the original show, starting in the mid-1970s and running beyond the 1989 cancellation, Target (initially a subsidiary of Universal-Tandem, then WH Allen) produced an ongoing series of novelisations of the
Doctor Who
television adventures. Many of these slim volumes were written by Terrance Dicks and aimed at younger readers. In a pre-video age, the Target novels were the only way to relive
Doctor Who
adventures (they allowed repeatability through rereading), with the books and the cover images becoming the defining aspects of certain serials for many fans. It could even be argued that the Target books helped in increasing the literacy of an entire generation. By 1993, when the series of novels adapted from TV episodes finally concluded (four years after the TV series itself had ended, and now published by Virgin), all but a few TV adventures had been novelised (the missing stories were scripts by Douglas Adams and Eric Saward). Spin-offs, like radio serial
Slipback
, TV one-shot
K-9
and Company
and unmade stories (such as stories from the originally planned version of season 23), were also novelised, bringing the Target total to 157 books.

Once the TV adventures had been exhausted, Virgin extended its official licence for
Doctor Who
novels, splitting the range into two series: New Adventures and Missing Adventures. The New Adventures range (from 1991 to 1997, 61 books) continued, and greatly expanded, the adventures of the Seventh Doctor (as portrayed on TV by Sylvester McCoy), while the Missing Adventures (which ran from 1994 to 1997, 33 books) featured stories for ‘past’ Doctors, the First to the Sixth.

The first of these fan-authored books consisted of two trilogies: the
Timewyrm
trilogy and the
Cat’s Cradle
series. Edited by Peter Darvill-Evans (later replaced by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone), the writers included Marc Platt (TV’s
Ghost Light
) and Andrew Cartmel (the McCoy years’ script editor), in addition to Cornell. The series continued with standalone adventures by writers including Mark Gatiss (later a writer for, and actor in, the revived version of
Doctor Who
), Ben Aaronovitch (writer of
Remembrance of the Daleks
), Gareth Roberts (
The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp
), Gary Russell (former
Doctor Who Magazine
editor and later a script editor on
Doctor Who
and spin-off
Torchwood
) and even 1980s Cyber Leader actor David Banks, whose
Iceberg
naturally featured the Cybermen.

Heavily influenced by the ‘cyberpunk’ movement in SF literature, often attributed to William Gibson’s
Neuromancer
trilogy of the early 1980s, the New Adventures series was described by Virgin as featuring ‘adventures too broad and deep for the small screen’. They were more adult in content than the earlier Target range of novels, reflecting the core audience for
Doctor Who
in the 1990s: men in their 20s and 30s who’d grown up with the programme, but had outgrown the work of Terrance Dicks that they’d devoured in childhood. Sex, violence and strong language all featured – elements that would never have appeared on screen (although the debate about violence in
Doctor
Who
had run for as long as the show was on air). The fan authors took their opportunity to develop the character of Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s streetwise 1980s companion, far beyond her origins. Separated from the Doctor for a period of years, she returned to him a somewhat harder and more cynical character than had appeared on TV. This was evidence, along with the harder SF space-opera stories, that the fan writers were using the novel range to produce the kind of
Doctor Who
(heavily influenced by
Star Wars
and the new wave of British space-opera SF authors, including Iain M Banks) they wished they’d seen on TV in the 1980s.

Many elements featured in the spin-offs novels would heavily influence the series when it returned to TV. Throughout the New Adventures novels there is a ‘lonely Doctor’ motif, a portrayal of the Doctor as alien to human emotions and condemned to remain alone in the universe, despite a series of temporary companions. Pop-culture references abounded within the novels, and would feature heavily in the revived TV show, with the Doctor seemingly very aware of elements of British pop culture (like
EastEnders
, referred to in
The Satan Pit
). Russell T Davies drew on several elements of the New Adventures when formulating the new series, not least of which was his own
Damaged Goods
, set on a grim housing estate. Paul Cornell’s
Human Nature
was adapted directly for TV, changing the Seventh Doctor to the Tenth (in
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
in 2007). The novels had an obsession with continuity, inherited from the John Nathan-Turner years, although the novel authors had more justification for this approach as the books were aimed squarely at committed fans, rather than a larger, more mainstream casual audience. A deepening of continuity led to a desire to wrap up loose ends left over from the TV show or blend together previously disparate elements of the series. This process became known as ‘fanwank’ (a term coined by one-time DWAS co-ordinator and
Doctor Who
novelist Craig Hinton) and was especially visible in the work of Hinton and Gary Russell. New series showrunner Russell T Davies would be accused of ‘fanwank’ himself, first when he faced off the Cybermen and the Daleks (a long-held fan dream) in
Doomsday
in 2006 and then when he reunited many elements of his own Tenth Doctor continuity in
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
in 2008 (see chapter seven).

During his time on the show, script editor Andrew Cartmel had developed a vague notion of making the Doctor ‘more than a Time Lord’ – as revealed in dialogue from a cut scene that didn’t see transmission. Fandom developed this into a full-blown ‘masterplan’ after the series’ conclusion. Building on this, the New Adventures continued the Seventh Doctor’s manipulative nature, dubbing him ‘Time’s Champion’. With Cartmel, Platt and Aaronovitch all writing New Adventures novels, there was an obvious temptation to continue to develop the ideas they had envisaged for the TV series in its final days, including making the Doctor more mysterious (and throwing doubt on the few ‘facts’ the TV series had established about him). The ongoing book series also removed the Time Lords. Russell T Davies built upon these two elements in his version of the revived TV series. As well as exploring the Doctor’s character and motivations in the novels, the TARDIS was also expanded with elements such as an alternate console room made of stone. New companions were invented solely for the novels, resulting in characters the like of which would never have been seen in the TV series, as were new monsters and villains, including the Gallifreyan ‘gods’. The New Adventures series climaxed with Marc Platt’s novel
Lungbarrow
, which explored the Doctor’s mysterious origins (linking him to the founding of Time Lord society). The novel explained the Time Lords’ non-sexual reproductive system using genetic ‘looms’. The final novel,
The Dying Days
, acted as a coda to the range and featured Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor.

The parallel Missing Adventures, written by many of the same professional and fan writers, were freer to draw on the
Doctor Who
canon, providing sequels to several TV stories. Among these were fan favourites
Pyramids of Mars
(which resulted in
The Sands of Time
),
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
(
The Shadow of Weng-Chiang
) and
The Web Planet
(
Twilight of the Gods
). Various characters and monsters were explored in more depth by the Missing Adventures novels, including the Master (
The Dark Path
), the Cybermen (
Killing Ground
), Silurians (
The Scales of Injustice
) and Sontarans (
Lords of the Storm
), among others. Notably absent were the Daleks, due to difficulties in negotiating with the Nation estate. The Missing Adventures could not make the sweeping changes to characters and continuity offered by the New Adventures as they were intended (in theory) to fit into narrative gaps between TV adventures.