My First Time # 1

Name: The Mara
Gender: ♀
First Story: Talons of Weng Chiang
Approximate Date: September 1996.
Age: As old as nightmares, or you can do the math yourself.

When the Keeper asked if I would set the ball rolling on submitting guilty confessions of 'My First Time', I have to admit that I had to make sure that, yes, he was talking about losing my Doctor Who virginity and not that other kind. Yet for me there is a clear connection between the two concepts.

Of course for many of you the analogy between sex and Doctor Who does not hold - given you can clearly remember that your first time was at the age of six or seven, if it were sex we were talking about we'd have to have called in Social Services because your parents were clearly abusing you or letting you be abused.

Then again, my mother obviously considered Doctor Who some form of child abuse, as it was banned in my house. She was, and still is, the type of mother who only allowed soft drink and chocolate on your birthday, bought educational presents, and sent you off to school with brown bread sandwiches with grated cheese and sultanas in it. So my early experiences of Doctor Who are exactly like my early experiences of sex; both were reduced in my existence to occasional glances at books or television on the topic, but never knowing what either was really about. I knew there was a Timelord that changed shape and there was a police box involved. I knew that the 'scream' at the beginning of the end credits during the Tom Baker era made me jump, and I have a vague recollection of a yellow vintage car on the edge of a mound of gravel. But I never saw a complete episode, let alone a complete story.

It is probably telling that I lost my Doctor Who virginity a good four years after that other sort. And it still involved sex. Like a social disease, I had Doctor Who 'passed on' to me by my boyfriend. Like any social disease, there was a spectrum of ways he could approach the knowledge of him being a carrier; with the two extremes being that he could have told me at the very beginning and run the risk that I might turn around and say 'I'm sorry, I just don't think my feelings for you are strong enough to overcome the fact you're infected with Doctor Who', or he could have been one of those ones who kept his disease completely hidden. Watch the new BBC remake of Dracula, if you need an example for why that is always a bad idea.

In the end it was somewhere in the middle. He told me early on that he ‘liked Doctor Who'. The evidence that this was an understatement was the complete VHS collection with hand typed labels and extant Target novelisation collection in his bedroom. Oh, and the porcelain TARDIS moneybox and Dapol figurines of the 7th Doctor and a Cyberman. I always stuck these in compromising positions and, I found out later to my mortification, were also always tidied up by his mother.

But the time-coded copies of ‘The Ice Warriors’ were turned off as soon as I arrived. Doctor Who had been partitioned off; it was present, but never really talked about. Until I pressed him about it and he eventually relented, starting my education with the classic of Doctor Who 'The Talons of Weng Chiang'.

Bad Move.

Losing one's virginity often involves a lot of confusion, surprise, disappointment and fear. I was confused by the simultaneous slowness and unfathomable plotting, surprised when I was shown the silly rat (and yes, the sex analogy works very well here), disappointed in that this was supposed to be the highlight of Doctor Who, and fearful that a major part of my partner's life was something I was never going to understand. Like first time sex where expectations have been built up too high, Talons was an utter let down.

But just like sex, one moves past the first time, knowing that it just has to get better. And Doctor Who did get better for me, although not through watching 'classics' or the boyfriend’s personal favourites. For those of you who watched Doctor Who when it was on, even if you did not begin on 23rd November 1963, you did watch stories pretty much in order until you got hooked and decided to go looking for more fixes (like the sex addicts you are). There is a reason this works, and jumping to random stories does not.

So my advice to the experienced that wish to embark on deflowering Old Series Doctor Who virgins of an adult age is to start slow and work with missionary for a while before trying the seventh position of the Perfumed Garden. Use ‘Rose’ and the rest of the new series as foreplay. When the time is right to move to the next base, pick an Old Series story with a natural introductory bit. Start with colour, because it's 'safer' than black and white. In other words, start with ‘Spearhead From Space’.