This is the story of how I joined a Doctor Who club, even
though I had never seen an episode of Doctor Who in my life.
I’m sure this story will be of limited interest to most
people, but I promised to type it up for one of my former students, and this is
really the best place to do it.
So where to start?
Let’s go with college.
In college, I met a guy named Bob. He met and fell in love with someone in my
hometown, and ended up moving to Wisconsin. (Eventually, I was as an usher in his
wedding, but that isn’t really important to this story.)
After moving to the state, Bob and his wife-to-be invited us
to a game night with a bunch of people we didn’t know. One of those people was named Sue. (She’s also great, but unmarried, which is
not important to this story.)
Sue worked at a local hotel, with a woman named Brenda. (My wife and I sang at her wedding, and I
played piano in her wedding. This is
maybe semi-important.)
Now.
Across the street from the hotel was a used DVD/Video
Game place, and that IS important.
This is probably close to 10 years ago. I’ve been trying to figure out the exact
date, but I don’t recall what it was. I
even tried to look for our old Yahoo group (I know, right? A Yahoo group! Why didn’t we just send stone tablets through
snail mail?). But the group is gone now,
a victim of email spam.
As a DVD consumer who
also happens to be on a budget, I was deeply in love with any and all used DVD
places I encountered. I still am today,
but all the stores I used to frequent are gone now, victims of the economy and
the end of the DVD boom.
The point is, I probably went to the DVD
place on a weekly basis. I’d drop by for
a few minutes after work, see what was new, maybe grab something I’d been
wanting to get, but didn’t want to pay full price for. Among other things, my copies of The Exorcist
and Children of the Corn III came from
there.
As human beings go, I tend to think of myself as
forgettable. I base this on nothing,
really, except for the fact that I have, on a small handful of occasions,
bumped into people who I went to high school with, and sat in classrooms with,
but who have no idea who I am. Maybe
it’s the beard.
Okay, now things get a little tricky to explain.
There was a fellow who worked at the DVD
place. He had long hair, glasses, and a
jovial attitude. I probably saw him
there once every two weeks or so, alternating with other people who worked at
the store.
One day, I was hanging out with Sue and a few other mutual
friends, and Sue said, “You know that DVD
place across the street from the hotel I work at?”
“Yeah.”
“I work with this woman, Brenda. Her boyfriend works there. Glasses, long hair?”
I nodded in recognition, and the subject just kind of faded.
What I didn’t know is that she’d had a similar conversation
with Brenda and her boyfriend, which went, “My friend Josh goes to your video
store all the time. Beard? Glasses?”
So the next time I went into the store, the guy behind the
counter introduced himself. Actually,
what he said was, “You’re Sue’s friend, right?”
“Yeah. You’re her
co-worker’s boyfriend, right?”
“George.”
“Josh.”
And then I felt a little awkward, because honestly I don’t
know what the social obligation is to your friend’s co-worker’s boyfriend.
Of course, I feel a little awkward pretty much all the
time.
I may have an event or two shuffled here, but I do recall
that I went back a few times after that, and George (Who was, and still is,
incredibly jovial. Seriously, he’s
pretty much the nicest guy ever.) and I would exchange commentary about the
movies I was thinking about buying.
Then one day, not long after we introduced ourselves, he
gave me a flyer and told me that he was starting a Doctor Who fan club. I kind of shrugged, and admitted that I had
never really seen the show.
This was about 99.99 percent true. Once, in college, I was hanging out with a
couple of friends, and a friend of theirs was trying to find an episode of The
Simpsons on a videotape, and instead he found the last two minutes of a Doctor
Who episode. One of my friends said,
“Doctor Who! I used to watch this all
the time as a kid!”
Also in college, there was a brief attempt to relaunch
Doctor Who with a TV movie. I saw about
30 seconds of that playing on a large TV in a dorm lounge.
That was my entire exposure to the show.
I told George I would think about attending his group. The fact is, I was curious, mostly because I
knew the show existed, I knew it was kind of a geeky thing, and from little I
knew about George we had some similar interests, namely stuff like Buffy the
Vampire Slayer.
What finally convinced me to try it was that Sue got in
touch with me and asked if I was going, and I figured if we both went we could
kind of see how the land was lying and go from there.
When I got to the first meeting, it was me, and George and
Sue, and a handful of other people I would come to think of as “the
regulars.” There was some food. And a quick, “Welcome to the first meeting,”
talk, and then we watched the first two episodes of the show.
Now, you have to understand something. I’m not talking about the more recent show
that started in 2005. This was before
2005. There was no “new” show.
No, we were watching the original, started-in-1963 edition
of Doctor Who.
Which, whoa.
Whoooooooa.
The thing about the show was, it was BBC
back in the day when they’d give you twelve dollars (sorry, “pounds,”) and tell
you to go make a TV show. It was, if memory serves me, designed as a show for
kids, which would hopefully teach them some science, and history, and whatever
else, all with whatever change people could find in the couch that day.
The writing was good.
The sets were laughable. The
acting varied wildly, from quite good to, “I think the director owed that guy a
favor.”
But what kept me going was the camaraderie. Well, that and the fact that I have no self
control.
One of my very favorite TV shows is Mystery Science Theater
3000, which features a guy and two robots making fun of bad movies.
After watching perhaps ten minutes of 1963 era BBC
cheapness, IT WAS ON. Well, not
really. I think something extra-silly
happened, and I made a joke, and everyone laughed.
I won’t sayI evolved the club, but after that, it became
clear that you could like the show, and also be aware that it was more than a
little ridiculous. I can’t think of a
single episode that didn’t get at least some commentary.
So I stayed.
Sue eventually gave up.
In one of my favorite moments of the club, George had us all fill out
forms stating what they liked and disliked about the club, in order to improve
it. She wrote, pretty much word for
word, “I like everything about the meetings but Doctor Who.”
Over time, the club shifted a bit. The new Doctor Who arrived on the BBC,
and even though it wasn’t in the states, we got copies and saw it before most
of the US. Eventually, however, it started broadcasting
here at the same time it was broadcasting overseas, and since the show only met
once every two weeks, the club got behind.
There are other interesting memories of the club as
well. As it turned out, one of the
members didn’t like the fact that some of us didn’t take the show very seriously,
and left the group. That was a little
sad.
One dude kept showing up to see the new episodes, and he
kept begging for tips on how to download illegal copies of the episodes
himself. I guess he eventually figured
it out, because he dropped out as well.
On one kind of fun occasion, we didn’t play Doctor Who at
all, as the group voted to show the movies I had written that evening.
George wrote a Doctor Who radio drama for a fan group, and I
have the privilege of helping him edit it.
Which was fun, until his editor put him through a two sets of revisions
and I had to read the same slightly modified script three times. That was tiring for both of us, I think.
(An aside: I never did develop a favorite Doctor. They all had their good points and their bad
points, and sometimes my dislike of a Doctor had more to do with the variant
writing quality.)
(Of the companions, my favorite was easily Sarah Jane Smith,
probably because she was adorable and spunky and a journalist, not unlike my
wife.)
And then there was the day I left. I was going to be a dad, and I couldn’t stay
in the group because I had to pick my daughter up from day care every
night. The group got me a cake.
A year or two later, the club came to an end. They decided to go out big, and George rented
a movie theater and showed a rare animated Doctor Who on the big screen. He even had the group meet on a weekend, so
guys like myself could attend.
We watched the episodes.
We ate movie theater food. And at
the end of it all, I felt like I’d completed a little Whovian journey.
Over the years, I’ve tried to introduce to show to my
wife. She came with me to one meeting,
where we watched the first episode of the new series. She said she liked it, but after that she had
no interest in watching the show with me.
Even when it became available on regular TV, so we didn’t have to attend
meetings.
My time is limited, and it’s even more limited as my kid
gets older, so finding the time to watch the show without her is probably never
going to happen.
All things considered, George could probably run a
professional Doctor Who club, if such a thing existed and paid money. In a handful of years, meeting only every two
weeks, we still got the chance to see every one of the original Doctors. We saw the TV movie. We watched the long-forgotten (for a good
reason) K-9 and Company, the first Doctor Who spinoff. We watched episodes of Torchwood before the
show made it to the states.
Am I a fan of the show?
I was, after all, in a fan club for several years.
Let’s go with no. If
I really loved the show with all my heart, I’d probably still be scrambling to
watch it. Borrowing DVDs from friends,
setting aside time in the summer to catch up.
I will say that when I was watching it consistently, the
show had a surprising amount of fun to offer.
The newer version of the show was clearly pattered after shows like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer with humor and drama and inside jokes and rewards for
sticking with it. I suspect if I went
back to it, I might love it.
But at the time, what I really loved was the gang of people
watching it. That’s the part I really
miss, and kind of wish I could get back.
But time marches on.
Unless you’re the Doctor, I suppose.
