Mopping Up... Or Moping Up...?

Am I just a worthless parasite, leeching off other people’s creativity?

 
It’s a paranoia which does seize me, sometimes. Not often; not all the time. But last night, watching last night’s very enjoyable return of Doctor Who, I was at one point towards the end overcome with that melancholy feeling of knowing I could never, ever do this. I could never do what Russell T Davies does.
 
Now, he’s a genius of course, so it’s true that most people can’t do what he does. So there shouldn’t be any need to feel bad because I don’t have his talent and ability. His insight. And I long ago realised that I would never be involved in actual Doctor Who itself. That it wasn’t something to which I was naturally suited; wasn’t an industry which I had any clue as to how to find any sort of place for myself in.
 
And that’s fine. That’s okay. Doctor Who is my favourite thing in all the world, but just because you love something doesn’t mean you have to be a part of it. Football fans know they will never be a member of the team, no matter how much it means to them, and how deeply embedded it is in their lives.
 
Doctor Who is designed to be watched, and enjoyed. Indeed, that’s its sole reason for existing. The purpose of putting on a show is to get an audience, to paraphrase Eric Maschwitz. And there is something about Doctor Who, as with so many shows whose audiences are so passionate, which fires people up to be creatively engaged. So many of us do so according to our own talents. Whether that be making music inspired by it, or creating art, or writing stories, or making reaction videos, or yes, studying the history and wanting to find out more about how it was made, and sharing that history with others. Sharing that love and enthusiasm.
 
Which you’d think would only be a good thing… But that worry does take hold of me, every now and then. I’m so proud of writing books and articles about this show, making radio pieces about it. Proud that I can be a tiny little part of it in my professional life, be engaged with it and share that engagement. But is it all just worthless? Would I not be better off trying to create and do something of my own? Am I just a laughable figure, building so much of my life around something to which I have made absolutely no contribution whatsoever, and have never had anything to do with?
 
I think part of this latest mood of introspection was brought on by my final radio piece about Doctor Who of the anniversary week. I’d had the idea to do a piece about overseas fans of the show; getting an outside perspective on this thing which is such a part of British popular culture. I pitched the piece to PM on BBC Radio 4, and to my surprise and excitement they liked it and went for it. I worked hard on it, I think I did a pretty good job with it, but eventually it ended up just falling off the bottom of the show at the end of the week.
 
Now, I should make it very clear this is not supposed to be a moan about PM, or anything remotely like that. I am well aware that when you make a light piece for a serious news programme like that, you are always at the mercy of events. That’s the very nature of the beast. I absolutely understand the precarious nature of that, and that there were and are far more important things going on in the world. I’m not for a moment saying they were in any way wrong to drop it. Had I been in the producer’s chair, I’d have done exactly the same.
 
Yes, dropped by Today and by PM in the same week. At least I’m being dropped by the classy programmes!
 
But it made me introspective because it would have meant so much to me, to have had a piece about Doctor Who, that show I have loved so much and for so long, going out on a network programme. To be a little part of the anniversary on one of the national stations. Even after, across the anniversary period, ending up in either live or recorded form, as an interviewee or a package maker, across about 30 other BBC stations.

And it made me wonder… is that really healthy? To be so invested in something so completely outside of my control. To be a middle-aged man so desperate to pick up a few crumbs and scraps from the network table. If you were good enough for this sort of thing, Paul, you’d have been doing it regularly by now. Not just occasionally getting almost-somewhere-close when there happened to be one of the very few subjects you can make something to network standard about.
 
And even stepping back from that moping, I had a hell of a week – the Kennedy piece went out on The World Tonight on Radio 4, and a version of my CNS Doctor Who piece went out on the World Service. That’s not bad going at all.
 
Here is that PM piece by the way, if you fancy a listen. I rather like it, and I was at least able to get it out on several of the BBC Local Radio stations on Saturday, via my colleagues at CNS. So my interviewees did get to go out on the BBC's airwaves, which I was pleased with:

 

But it’s all so dependant on other things. Other people’s decisions. On events, dear boy, events. And all of this – studying Doctor Who’s history, writing about it, making radio pieces about it – can make you feel like a hanger-on. Or a vampire. Feasting on the lifeblood of something created and maintained by others.
 
I once watched an interview with the great Mark Lewisohn, one of the most esteemed and respected chroniclers of British popular culture in the second half of the 20^th century, especially regarding The Beatles. He’s even worked for The Beatles on all sorts of projects, helping to chronicle their history as accurately as possible and preserve for ages the facts rather than the anecdotes. And even he, possibly the most highly-regarded person working in that field, related how he was once told by one member of the band, dismissively: “you weren’t there.”
 
As if that makes any study conducted by him somehow invalid.
 
No, he wasn’t there, and would never claim to have been. If you’re writing history you can’t pretend to know precisely how the particular people involved thought and felt. But you can try your best to relate what happened, often with a far wider overview of the situation and with far more information available to you than anybody involved would have had at the time.
 
Russel T Davies once wrote in Doctor Who Magazine that the problem with telling stories of working on Doctor Who, and this probably holds true for people’s involvement with any kind of popular endeavour, is that as time goes past you start to remember and tell the tale of the anecdote rather than what happened. To go back to The Beatles example, we saw the reassessment of their late era which took place when a much wider selection of the footage shot for Let It Be was made available in Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Ringo Starr himself was surprised, remarking that for years he’d been remembering the film of Let It Be rather than what actually happened.
 
The same is true in Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, when he started giving interviews about the creation of the show in the 1980s, would tell the story of how he was asked to come up with something more appealing that fusty old Dickens adaptations, the ‘classic serial’, for Saturday teatimes.
 
Except that isn’t true.

There’d been no classic serials on Saturdays for years by the point that Newman arrived. They were already well-established on Sundays, where they remained for many years afterwards. It was true that he didn’t like them, but they proved too popular for him to kill off and obviously 20 years later he confused his memory of disliking the classic serials with the start of Doctor Who, and had the one related to the other in his memory.

 
Does pointing this out mean I like or respect the work of Newman any the less? Of course not. Does it diminish him in anybody’s eyes? Not a jot. I think it’s far more interesting, though, and revealing, to know what actually happened. For the record, we don’t actually know why Stuart Hood and Donald Baverstock decided they wanted a new type of children’s serial for the Saturday teatime slot, but looking at what was actually there shows us it was often a rag-tag assortment – film import westerns like The Lone Ranger and The Range Rider; US cartoons such as Top Cat and Deputy Dawg; home-made comedies like Just William and Mr Pastry; and short-run BBC-made serials, most popularly the returning adventure of Garry Halliday.
 
I can’t tell you what Newman, Hood or Baverstock thought of these. But I can tell you what happened – they were abandoned and replaced with Doctor Who.
 
And there are people out there who enjoy reading this kind of history. I know, I have been one of them for decades. I know because I’ve had lots of lovely reviews and kind comments for my work. So it’s not as if there isn’t an audience for this. That there aren’t people who enjoy it…
 
But I still have that doubt. That nag. That paranoia. That those who can do, and those who can’t write about it. About whether it’s a worthwhile pastime. Or whether I am, as I say, just a parasite, feeding off the success and the creativity of others.
 
Do people who write about other areas of non-fiction worry about this, I wonder? Do people who write military history find themselves seized with guilt at building their work on the misery, the suffering, the death of so many people? Do sports writers worry they can never truly know how it feels to be on the pitch, and that they are laughed at by those who do? Do authors of true crime histories feel they take advantage of the fate of their subjects?
 
I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. But is it worse when you’re writing about something creative? Often, writing about writers?
 
I enjoy doing it, don’t get me wrong. I do it because I enjoy it. This isn’t a feeling which occupies me constantly. But it does nag at me, every now and then. Especially when watching something like last night’s Doctor Who, knowing that’s something I could never, ever do. That I could never be involved with.
 
Oh, there was one more online piece, by the way, from my local BBC News Online colleagues, based on my Radio Norfolk Doctor Who piece from Thursday. They put it up yesterday with a co-byline for me, although that’s just a courtesy thing out of kindness – you couldn’t really say I wrote much of this. But it is funny that it has Martin’s name on it too, as that’s what ended up happening with a Doctor Who piece he made from my radio material ten year ago as well.
 
The more things change…

Merry Who-mas!

Earlier this year, I was asked by BBC History if I would write their official Doctor Who 60^th anniversary article. This was, of course, extremely flattering, and one of the things I am most proud of in my BBC career and in my writing career, given how much Doctor Who means to me, and how much it means to the BBC.

 
But, obviously, it was also quite a task. Sixty years of history. How to try and sum up what that means, and why it is such a special thing to so many people?
 
You can’t cover everything, of course. Or even a lot of things. So, guided by some of what BBC History wanted to include, I tried to write something simple and clean and clear which, hopefully, attempts to show some of the power of the series.
 
Here’s what I came up with:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/doctor-who-60/feature/
 
Today is the 23^rd of November – the anniversary of Doctor Who. Sixty years old this year. I suspect it’s probably not uncommon for Doctor Who fans to take stock on this date; to reflect on the passing of the years and where they’ve been in their lives when this anniversary has rolled around at different stages, in the same way that you might do for birthdays or Christmases. So, where have anniversaries past found me…?
 
1993
The first Doctor Who anniversary of which I was aware, at the age of nine. I was already a dedicated and enthusiastic fan of the series by this stage, so very interested in everything that was going on. I remember being very excited by the “Look Who’s Back – in 3D!” Radio Times cover, promoting what turned out to be a bit of a disappointing mini-return in aid of Children in Need with Dimensions in Time. The Radio Times issue itself was great, though, and I kept it and pored over the articles inside – I think my copy is probably still up in the box of my things in my parents’ attic.

The actual anniversary itself was on a Tuesday, and I watched a VHS of The Five Doctors borrowed from my friend Alex, who was the only person I knew at the time who was also interested in the show. He grew out of it, I never did! It was only ten years old then, but felt very old, very archive. Probably not surprising when that was longer than I'd been alive for. I'd love to know if something from ten years ago feels like archive material to a child of nine now.

I had seen it before, round Alex’s house, which was probably fortunate as I clearly recall my viewing being interrupted by my sister throwing a deflated whoopee cushion at me – don’t ask! – and knocking over a cup of tea I had next to me onto the sofa. This caused my dad to angrily take said whoopee cushion out to his shed and cut it up with a Stanley knife. The things which stick in the memory!

 
What I do remember particularly strongly are the documentaries – 30 Years in the TARDIS shown on BBC1 on the Monday after the anniversary, the 29^th, but especially the Radio 2 documentary Doctor Who – 30 Years, which had gone out the Saturday before the anniversary, the 20^th. Which I was surprised at when I looked it up – it was so clearly lodged in my mind as a Sunday when we sat in the living room and listened to it. The memory does indeed cheat.
 
Anyway, I recorded it onto cassette tape – having to turn it over partway through! – and listened to it repeatedly over the following years. So much of that documentary is deeply etched onto my brain, and I can see echoes of it, and deliberate references to it, in so much of my own radio work, both in my documentaries and in some of my shorter features. It opened with that dramatic clip of Jimmy Kingsbury announcing that President Kennedy had been shot, with which I opened by own piece about the BBC’s coverage of that event which I mentioned in yesterday’s entry – it’s the obvious piece of archive to use, but of course that connection was on my mind when I did it.
 
Speaking of which, do you remember how I said I was sad that my Kennedy piece was dropped by Today? Well, I discovered today that a slightly cut-down version of it did actually get a network airing on BBC Radio 4, last night. It went out as the final item on yesterday’s The World Tonight – so, for a few minutes, I was indeed at the helm of HMS BBC for a bit after all!
 
2003
Ten years on, and as a 19-year-old student I was in my second year studying English Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and of course still very much a Doctor Who fan, even with everything else which might have changed about me over the intervening decade.

This was the first time I had the opportunity and the inclination to try and do something for the anniversary myself, in terms of a creative endeavour. One of the things I’d become involved with as a teenager was the Brighton Area Doctor Who Appreciation Society, although obviously from the time I’d left to go away to university the previous year this association was from a distance.

 
I’d edited their newsletter, and although I’d handed over the reins when I left, from Norwich I put together a special edition of it for the anniversary, which my friend Tim printed and distributed – to all of the dozen or so members! – back in Sussex. I also ended up writing most of the content, but had great fun doing so!
 
It was a slightly strange time, as the recommissioning of the show had been announced in September but its arrival, and even its production, was still a long way off. We had the online animated version Scream of the Shalka and I bought the CD of the Big Finish Productions anniversary story Zagreus, which I found confusing and disappointing. The announcement of the return had sparked me into becoming a bit more involved with online fandom, and I had begun to become a bit of a regular amateur ‘stringer’, of sorts, for the much-loved Doctor Who News Page run by Shaun Lyon on Outpost Gallifrey, scouring online sources for any news to pass on.
 
On the anniversary itself, a Sunday this time around, I actually re-watched the first serial on a VHS borrowed from Norwich library! My tape of the serial was boxed up back home in Sussex, it wasn’t out on DVD yet, and online streaming didn’t yet really exist. This may have been one of the last times I watched a Doctor Who story on a commercial VHS release.
 
2013
Still in Norwich, now aged 29 and working as a full-time member of staff for the BBC. Working for the BBC! I never could have imagined such a thing twenty years earlier. I would have been very excited to have known that it would one day happen, though – and even more so to know that it would mean I would be able to have some sort of professional involvement with the series I loved so much.

The previous year, all of the BBC Local Radio stations had done something called “My Beatles Story” – marking the 50^th anniversary of the release of their first single. The idea was to find people living in the area you covered who had some interesting story about, passion for or connection to The Beatles, and record features of them telling their tales to run on the chosen day.

 
I’d already started by this stage to get myself a little bit of a reputation within the station for an ability for documentary and feature work, and I’d been chosen – admittedly probably because few others would have been either interested or had the time – to be the person in charge of the BBC Radio Norfolk “My Beatles Story” pieces. I’d managed to do quite a few rather nice pieces for the day itself, and had put a compilation of them together for Christmas 2012.
 
The following year, then, when I heard whispers that we’d be following this up across BBC Local Radio with “My Doctor Who Story”, I was desperate to be the one to do it. In truth, I probably once again didn’t really have much in the way of competition, but I was very relieved to once again be the one asked to do it.
 
Ten years on, I still think that 13 features I managed to put together for “Norfolk’s Doctor Who Stories” are some of the best pieces I have made in my radio career. I think they had the right combination of knowing enough about the subject to ensure that they were conveying what the interviewee was saying and what they remembered in an accurate and insightful way, but I had enough radio craft by then to be able to make them engaging and accessible for a general listenership. I was and remain very proud of them, and was particularly pleased that more than one colleague of mine who had no particular interest in Doctor Who told me how good they thought they had been.
 
It was also, of course, a great thrill to be doing actual Doctor Who-related work for the BBC. So much of the reason why I have ended up working for the BBC, and why I am so proud to do so, is because of the interest in broadcasting and its history which was sparked by reading about and becoming interested in Doctor Who and its history. The material I came up with in 2013 even got a plug on the BBC Doctor Who website, which pleased me no end.
 
They were important pieces for my career outside of radio, too. One of them was with the writer David Fisher, and I came up with the idea of fashioning the interview into a piece for Doctor Who Magazine, which they accepted the following year and eventually published in early 2015. This led on to eventually doings all sorts of other bits and pieces for them, which has in turn helped to lead on to even more other things.

The anniversary itself was a Saturday, and I actually took time off work that weekend so I could travel down to Sussex and watch the special, The Day of the Doctor, in the same living room in which I’d fallen in love with the show all those years ago. Although I think the absolute highlight of the anniversary for me had probably come earlier in the month, when I’d had the chance to attend the premiere of An Adventure in Space and Time at the British Film Institute in London, which was a very moving experience.

 
2023
Still in Norwich, still at the BBC, and now at the age of 39 becoming a middle-aged man, recently switched to being a newsreader rather than a producer, too. There wasn’t really any concerted effort to do any BBC Local Radio-wide celebration of the anniversary this time around. Perhaps partly because a 60^th doesn’t seem quite the same landmark as a 50^th, perhaps partly because fashions and trends change for such things, perhaps purely because there are different demands and requirements of the service now.
 
But it has to be said I have not been short of work or excitement for this one!

I only did one piece for Norfolk this time around – I really wasn’t sure what else I could do after all those pieces a decade ago. But I was able to tell some new stories, particularly focusing on Patrick Troughton’s time serving in the Royal Navy in Great Yarmouth during the Second World War, for which I was able to interview his son Michael.
 
Having learned while researching Pull to Open that Sydney Newman had once lived in Durrington, and having known that William Hartnell once lived in Worthing, I was able to pitch to Radio Sussex the idea of a bespoke piece for them based around that, which they kindly accepted. So I was able to do a BBC piece about Doctor Who which opens in my parents’ living room! That may be taking the idea of ‘local radio’ to extremes, I know, but it was a good piece – I promise!
 
BBC History had recommended me as a Doctor Who ‘expert’ to the Central News Service, CNS, the part of the BBC which provides the Local Radio stations with material related to national news stories, and general feature items. They asked me to do a Doctor Who piece which the stations could run today, and thanks to BBC Radiophonic Workshop archivist Mark Ayres I was even able to include in it a little treasure not broadcast for 60 years – a recording of the actual continuity announcement into the very first episode of the show. An edit of this piece even ended up going out on the BBC World Service this evening - hello world!
 
CNS also offered me up to stations for two-ways to talk about the anniversary and the show, so I spent two hours this morning in our little broom cupboard studio in Norwich speaking to presenters across the country. Which was actually really good fun, and by the end I was a bit sad there weren’t still more to go! Having been on the other end of that process so many times over the past 15 years, it was fascinating to experience it from that perspective, too. I think I gave good value, and overall today I ended up appearing, in either recorded or live interview form, on I think 24 stations, from Radio Cornwall all the way up to Radio Scotland, who aren’t served by CNS but separately asked me if I’d have a chat this lunchtime!
 
There may also be one more radio piece to come – I will keep you posted…
 
BBC History also helped to make the anniversary even more special for me by inviting me to be on a panel of speakers they assembled for an internal BBC event held yesterday at Broadcasting House to help mark the anniversary. I was of course delighted to be asked, although I did feel slightly out of place, given all the other speakers were actual, proper people who are really involved with the programme and its associated activities in one way or another!

But it was a lovely event to be a part of, and once again it felt very pleasing indeed to be a part of the BBC’s own celebrations of that show that I love. It was nice to have the chance to visit Broadcasting House again, too – the first time I’d been there for a few years. If you work there every day perhaps you get used to it, but on the few occasions I have been there is always that little thrill. That sense of history; of being a part of that heritage.

 
There have been other bits and pieces, too… Aside from my having written a book about the creation of the show this year, of course! An article today about Flight into Danger’s link to Doctor Who for Sci-Fi Bulletin… Another online piece for the BBC which should appear over the weekend…
 
Oh yes, and the anniversary itself. Well, I watched An Unearthly Child at a quarter past five. How could you now? It would be rude not to!
 
Happy birthday, Doctor Who. And Merry Who­-mas to you all!

"We regret to announce..."

Sixty years ago today, a man was murdered.

There will have been many murders that day, across the world. But this one was heard about all around that world. 

An innocent man was shot to death, next to his wife.

It's worth keeping that in mind, I know, when you discuss the idea of the assassination of President Kennedy as an object of fascination and discussion. I know who he was, the position that he held, meant that his death transcended "mere" murder. Just as everything about his life did, once he held that office, and indeed probably as soon as he ran for it.

But you still need to call it what it was, every so often, just to remind yourself.

I freely admit it's been something which has interested me for years. Not in terms of conspiracy theories or anything like that, but because of the place it occupies in time and culture. The events with which it is indelibly associated. Including, of course, the creation of Doctor Who, which made its debut the very next day.

That place it holds in the cultural sphere is absolutely fascinating, as is how the BBC reacted to the news that evening, November 22, 1963. I dedicated an entire chapter of my new book Pull to Open to it, and even a reviewer who didn't like *all* of the book felt that this was "an emotional chapter, showcasing his ability as a writer." Other people have said it was the best chapter, too, and it was certainly my favourite to write, I think.

So I thought perhaps I could bring some of that story to a wider audience, perhaps even through my day job. I made a radio package about the BBC's coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and submitted it to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. They liked it, and almost ran it today, but alas breaking news meant they had to drop it. That's okay, obviously. I understand that - a news programme ought always to be beholden to the present rather than the past.

A shorter version did go around to the BBC Local Radio stations thanks to my colleagues at the BBC's Central News Service, but as the full version is unlikely ever to see the light of day otherwise, here it is:

As a tie-in, the wonderful people at BBC History have also published an article I have written, going into more detail about the events of that evening from a BBC perspective. It's always nice to be able to have a piece on the BBC website, and I'm very grateful to them for taking it and putting it up there.

Cover Story

I wrote a few weeks ago about how proud I was to have been asked to do a little piece for the 100th anniversary issue of the Radio Times. I hadn't really expected this to be anything other than a one-off, so you can imagine how pleased I was to be approached to do another piece for them - about, you've guessed it, Doctor Who!

This coming Thursday, the 23rd, is the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who - about which a lot more to come on this blog! The Radio Times of course have a long-lasting relationship with the series, and although they aren't publishing their actual Doctor Who anniversary issue until next week - due to their listings starting on a Saturday, and the first of the anniversary specials going out on Saturday the 25th - they still wanted a piece for the issue which covers the anniversary date itself.

So they asked me if I could perhaps write an article looking at that relationship between the magazine and the show, and highlighting a few of the many, many covers they have dedicated to it down the decades. Which, of course, I was only too pleased to do! The issue came out this week, and it was nice to see that my article gained one of the cover lines!

I couldn't resist taking this picture of the magazine out and about "in the wild"!

There should be more Doctor Who items to share this week, in both written and audio form. I'm very fortunate indeed in that, in my own little way, I get to help share in the celebration of this show which means so much to me.

And luckier still of course to have been able to have had another book about that show published this year. I have continued to receive some good notices for Pull to Open, with some very kind reviews on Goodreads, a nice review and interview from AJ Black, and a glowing piece about the book on the Doctor Who Companion website.

It should be an exciting week coming up - and an enjoyable one whatever happens. I'm really pleased that I was able to get Pull to Open written and published in time to be a part of it all.