Love & Monsters

BADWAS, ours was called. Brighton Area Doctor Who Appreciation Society. Not, I admit, as snappy as LINDA, but also not as feminine so I think on the whole I probably prefer ours, even if it does lack originality. You canВ’t blame me for that though В– they started up in 1983, before I was even born. TheyВ’re still going, down there in Sussex, although since I moved away I obviously donВ’t get to the meetings as much any more.

No women in our group. Well, aside from the occasional mother or girlfriend reluctantly hanging around the home of whoever happened to be hosting it that month, or perhaps dragged along to the annual summer barbecue. Yes, we did barbecues. And Christmas parties. Even hosted a couple of mini-conventions, one with Mary Tamm and one with Elisabeth Sladen. Nice ladies. Neither of them flashed their knickers at us.

What I perhaps never realised until last night was quite how archetypal the whole Doctor Who local fan group thing is / was. Yes, we even had a member who travelled a ridiculously long distance В– from Northampton, I think В– down to the south coast to see us each month. Phil Collinson was, I believe, a member of a local group in Leeds, and I wouldnВ’t put it past Russell T Davies himself to have been a member of some Swansea local group in his youth, given how accurately and affectionately the whole thing was sent up in Love & Monsters.

Which is I think why I enjoyed the episode so much В– because it was an affectionate look at a type of people and a type of group I have fond memories of myself, written by somebody who you know really understands fandom. I have no idea how new fandom will have taken to it В– now that you donВ’t ever have to leave your house to have an active social life engaging with other fans via the interweb, does the idea of a local fan group have any meaning or appeal for them? I donВ’t know. But for us old-timers, there was surely a feeing that this was written for, and a little celebration of, us and out world.

Obviously most of us who identified with the episode would have seen ourselves in the Elton Pope role, played excellently by Marc Warren. (Who was an uncredited extra in Battlefield, dontchaknow). Yes, heВ’s a much better-looking and rather romanticised version of your average Doctor Who fan, but I certainly saw a degree of myself in him and surely I canВ’t have been alone in this? Even the musical obsession with a certain band was spot-on, although in my case it was Queen I was heavily into as a teenager and used to dance around my bedroom listening to.

But itВ’s more than that, though. The central tragedy of EltonВ’s life is that he had this image of the Doctor seared into his memory from one night so many years ago, one moment he is desperate to get back to and have explained. ThatВ’s why heВ’s so desperate to see the Doctor again, and becomes so nostalgic when he hears the sound of the TARDIS engines. ItВ’s a metaphor for the tragedy of the fan existence В– in some ways, we keep watching this show purely because we want to get back and recapture that first moment of magic, when we were four or five or however old and this mysterious, scary old show grabbed us and terrified us and drew us in and burned those formative memories into our own minds. So we keep watching, keep searching for the Doctor and for all those years hoped heВ’d come back because we thought it would take us back to how we were and how we felt then, that perfect time in our memories.

But, as has been well-documented through the ages, you can never go back. As The IdiotВ’s Lantern pointed out, thatВ’s the tragedy of the human condition, and itВ’s what makes Elton such a sad and lonely figure, even if he does finally end up with a happy ending of sorts.

So as an excuse to hang this treatise of fandom and the fan condition upon В– which really in the end is just another facet of the overall human condition В– the episode didnВ’t really need much of a plot as an excuse to go through it all. It still had one though, and a rather nice little one with a great villain В– say what you like about stunt casting and what have you, but I thought Peter Kay was excellent, probably more so as the Abzorbaloff than as his human alter-ego, Victor Kennedy.

The Abzorbaloff itself is a frightening concept, and you can see why it was picked as the winner of the Blue Peter design-a-monster competition. The idea of being dragged into and absorbed by this creature, still being alive and slowly digested as your face sticks out of its foul body, is a genuinely creepy and disturbing one, and I can easily imagine that it gave some of the younger members of the audience some sleepless nights.

The most upsetting part of the whole Abzorbaloff business was seeing poor old Ursula sucked inside. Shirley Henderson closely matched Peter Kay and Marc Warren in the В‘best guest star of the episodeВ’ stakes, and doubtless instantly became the image of the Doctor Who fanВ’s ideal fantasy girlfriend, if youВ’re into that sort of thing. Before she became a paving slab, of course. This was one aspect of the episode that I didnВ’t quite take to В– I thought the fact that the Doctor was able to resurrect her with his В‘magic wandВ’ as Elton put it rather cheated the whole drama and tragedy of the piece, and even though she seemed quite happy with her lot IВ’m not really sure an eternity of being a head on a paving slab is anything much to look forward to.

I know some peopleВ’s blood would probably have boiled if told that there was an episode of Doctor Who coming in which the most prominent of the regular or semi-regular characters would be not the Doctor, or Rose, nor even Mickey, but the Powell EstateВ’s own Jackie Tyler. IВ’m not the worldВ’s biggest fan of Jackie myself by any means, but I donВ’t dislike her as much as some and she was pretty good here when given a rare chance to step into centre stage. It was interesting to see a little of what goes on in her life when sheВ’s not with the Doctor and Rose or being caught up in the midst of the latest alien invasion, and her rather sad and pathetic little flirtation with Elton, added to some steel when she found out what he was actually up to, was a nice opportunity to highlight the depth her character isnВ’t often allowed to show. Given that it was announced this week that Rose is leaving at the end of the season, we could well not see Jackie again beyond series two either, so I was glad she got a chance to step into the limelight and shine before we possibly say goodbye. Strange that after only two years a whole era of the show that began back in March 2005 appears to be coming to an end.

Doctor Who, however, will never come to an end in all of its many and varied forms, no matter what happens to the television series itself. It survives because it has people like Elton, people like Russell T Davies and people like us keeping it alive and loved, and we love it not simply for the memories it gives us but for the life and the friends it introduces us to that we might not otherwise have had. WeВ’ve had celebrations of all kinds of aspects of Doctor Who, old and new, in the new series to date, so it was rather charming and touching that we got an episode that was basically a celebration of fandom.

As I think IВ’ve said before about other episodes that went in other directions В– which perhaps goes to show how wonderfully varied this series has been В– you wouldnВ’t want Doctor Who to be like this every week. But as a one-off I thought it more than earned its place in the run, and justified its existence, as if it ever needed to. Long live the В‘infinitely variable formatВ’ we so love and also apparently despise. Long live us!