Whoicide

‘Hobbies are supposed to pass the time, not fill them.’ I may be misquoting Norman Bates as I’ve not seen Psycho in quite a while, but that line has always haunted me. The idea of something one enjoys eventually becoming a measure of how much emptiness is in your life; that’s far more terrifying than merely dressing as your dead mother and murdering anyone who gives you an erection. Actually, my apologies for spoiling the end of Psycho there if you’ve not seen it.

The question is, does your own fandom depress you? Do you ever go to watch The Web Planet only to find the tape still left where you stopped it on the previous attempt some years earlier? Yes, I know it’s on DVD now, but buying it in that format when you never watched the VHS version smacks of obsessive routine rather than a display of genuine love. Maybe I’m being unfair - perhaps you greatly admire The Web Planet, if so then good for you - but in a series as.. erm.. diverse as WHO, there’s bound to be something you hate, a story or even an entire era you don’t regard as merely sloppily made, but so very wrong that it provokes feelings of existential dread in you.

For want of a better example, let’s call this hypothetical bete noir, Trial of Time Lord. Despite the fact that you know you detest it, do you still watch it every so often as it’s the next one in sequence for your chronological viewing schedule? Why do it? Why subject yourself to such a monumental squandering of the senses? Sitting through that story feels like having blood siphoned off at the rate of one pint per hour - wouldn’t your time have been better spent talking to someone, learning to cook some new dish or walking in a park, even if there’s a hail storm kicking off?

But Trial is the absolute nadir of WHO - what about those classics? Have you ever felt profoundly empty after sitting through one of the ‘all-time greats’, suddenly seeing it exposed as just a shoddy piece of old telly? Beyond that, have you ever realised that you’ve watched something you adore past the point when the last drop of enjoyment has been squeezed from it? I must confess that this happens an awful lot with me. It’s probably my own fault as I tend to plough any furrow of pleasure long after it’s stopped being fun, mainly as a displacement activity from getting on with stuff that I should be doing but secretly suspect will be rather hard work.

In this respect WHO for me is frequently like putting all your albums in order so you can delay exam revision. The public view of fans is of course one of just such obsessive lunatics, autistic list-makers who’ve no hope of interacting with real people. If we’re honest there’s clearly a fair bit of this about and if you’re active in fandom then chances are you probably know a few candidates who fit the bill. But stop a second; aren’t you one too? Even if you can justify the pursuit of something designed to be entertaining and magical, is it really normal to be spending so much time and energy- let alone cash- on a television programme?

Something frightening happened to me recently - I’ve been perfectly happy to ignore the whole debate on canon; if a story’s good, then it’s good, if it’s bad then it’s probably an unpardonable stinker. I know that Tides of Time, Voyager and Adventuress of Henrietta Street are unlikely to make it on to the acknowledged lists of stories that have officially ‘happened’ in the WHO universe, and this bothers me not one jot. I think they’re great stories, adhering to what I like my WHO to be doing. Then I discovered that unbeknownst to me, a VHS tape which previously I’d only kept as it contained the greatest ever edition of the game show ‘Catchpharse’, (I began recording five minutes in when I realised that one contestant, a monstrous idiot who couldn’t grasp the show’s concept, was going to carry on giving increasingly surreal answers such as ‘Clever in the box’, ‘Stand-up plant’ and ‘Personality pot’) also contained something else dating from that same year... 1993.

‘Dimensions in Time’ is unforgivably atrocious. To this day I’ve still yet to see its conclusion. The reason it features here is that upon sitting through this mammoth pudding of shit, I found myself thinking, ‘But of course this isn’t actual WHO - it’s just a charity runaround.’ Hold on... why did my brain feel it was important to reach that conclusion? Why the need to remind myself that ‘..it doesn’t count’? I’m writing this mid way through January and hopefully many of us will still have enough new year’s momentum to have stuck with resolutions so far. One I’m adding is that if I ever find myself thinking that way again, then it’s time to back away. This after all is a tv show. It may be entertaining, it may be great to see its triumphant return making such a huge impact, but dating UNIT stories or taking a firm stance on whether Susan truly is the Doctor’s granddaughter is a waste of this short life.

Enjoy it, slag it off when the production’s a disaster, celebrate it on those occasions when the show’s pulled off a corker, but should you ever find yourself watching it for the sake of it, then for Christ’s sake stop. That may sound obvious, patronising even, but let’s face it - everyone’s guilty of it, and not just WHO geeks. How many people sit through endless, unchanging soap operas and sit-coms because it feels traditional and reassuring? Why are so many movies or hit albums bland, formulaic rip-offs of each other? Because audiences are much happier sleepwalking through the comfortably familiar rather than trying the new and unknown - this would mean some risk-taking, even if all that’s required is passing up a retread of something you already know inside out. To this end, the producers of Casino Royale deserve considerable praise for totally recreating James Bond from scratch even when the appalling predecessor, ‘Die Another Day’ provided them with great box-office.

But I’m going off subject, the point is that anything we find pleasurable is likely to develop into a crutch, then a rut and eventually a trap. As I said, this whole ramble may just be for my benefit - for all I know you’re an entirely well-adjusted individual - you may have quite rightly never got past part two of The Time Monster or Underworld, flatly refusing to sit through the whole mess merely for completions sake - but I’d be willing to bet that there are many of you with the same reservations; the odd pang of ‘why?’ every once in a while. Do you really need the same episodes as vanilla disc releases, limited edition box set and standard version, especially when you recorded them all off the telly anyway... even more so if we’re talking about Torchwood rather than Doctor Who itself?

Even though one of the recurring themes of the show has always been to maintain a childlike enthusiasm rather than calcifying into a dreary adult, let’s not forget that this is also a series celebrating a guy who abandoned his comfortable home because his peers were Olympian bores, poring over reams of accrued facts instead of going out and experiencing things first-hand. Bear that in mind next time you spend a weekend in with the curtains drawn, watching The Two Doctors.

On Wednesday I learnt that The Dominators is being released in audio-only format despite the fact that the tv story exists in its entirety. Why? The common excuse for this sort of thing is that many fans enjoy listening to stories while they’re in the car, and as a result, I think I now understand its true purpose; imagine this interminable excrement blaring out from the dashboard stereo, the vehicle itself remaining stationary in a garage, the door sealed down while a length of hose runs from the exhaust and in through the driver’s side window...

Happy times and places!

Written by Piggy Fizz