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…
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