I have no real idea why this title sequence still gives me the creeps to this day. Is it the sinister, faintly out-of-key, oddly muffled steel drums music? Is it the sinister, out of focus, oddly rotating at an unpleasant speed box thing? Is it Alan Rothwell and his sinister and most probably sweaty palms in the continuity studio in Quay Street because Granada was too cheap to build him an actual set? Perhaps it just it reminds me of pretending to be ill to avoid school and then finding that staying home watching daytime TV in the early 1980s was no laughing matter either.
I'm an Air Force brat - both my parents were in the RAF when they met, although my mum left to have me. This meant I moved house somewhere between every two and every three years between being born and leaving home at 16.
The main result of this merry dance (known as "being posted") was I grew up with a fine understanding of the regional nature of British television before Mrs Thatcher wrecked it. Every time we moved, more or less, there was a new local news programme from the BBC and a new ITV logo to see. Roughly, this works out as Tyne Tees, Yorkshire, Anglia, Yorkshire, Central and back to Tyne Tees (not including HTV back home in Ebbw Vale). That's not the whole picture: RAF stations are generally in flat places in the middle of nowhere - flat for the runways, in the middle of nowhere for the Russians - and flat places in the middle of nowhere have a habit of being in the famed overlap areas for transmitters. Oh, the joy of this in the days of three-channel television, when each ITV region could differ markedly in its schedule, even in peak time. Living in an overlap area gave you a use for the ITV-2 button on your set, a channel of hiss in other people's houses but in ours the slightly-further-away region would be tuned in. Suddenly, you had FOUR CHANNELS. It was like Christmas. My regions therefore were actually TTT/YTV, YTV/ATV, Anglia on its own alas alas, YTV on its own, Central/YTV/Anglia and back to TTT/YTV (not including HTV/ATV back home in Ebbw Vale). Many of these were actually quite poorly receivable, so I was the only one watching the alternate option; and it was made harder in the period between Channel 4 launching (and taking the ITV-2 button) and my parents getting a TV with more than four buttons. Damn Decca and their everlasting wooden television sets. One of the things that I noticed early on - and I mean very early on, in the late 70s before I was even at primary school - was that the poorer reception ITV channel was often completely invisible in the winter but better quality than the 'main' region on unseasonable stiflingly hot days in the late spring and early autumn. Yes, I'm such a geek that I independently discovered "atmospherics" when I was about 4. I dimly recall a change of aerial in our house in the very early 1980s making the old, incompatible with the transmitter, aerial surplus to requirements. For fun, my dad wired a plug on to the trailing cable and plugged it into the crappy Chinese portable monochrome TV I'd got for my best-ever birthday present. It didn't make much difference to picture quality, but what it did reveal was a silent, very hazy Yorkshire Television picture visible with a slight turn to the right of the tuning knob from BBC-1 East. When we next moved, the reverse became true - with the big aerial, hiding to the right of BBC-1 North was to be found a wavering Anglia. This is, of course, the most exciting thing ever ever ever. Flash forward to 1991. That summer was a hot and listless one. I was about to leave home to go live somewhere - anywhere - where chicken shit and crop rotation weren't deemed interesting subjects by the locals, discover I wasn't nearly as grown up as I thought I was and come back again 5 months later. I had finagled a portable aerial into something a bit more useful in order to escape Tyne Tees and watch the slightly-but-only-slightly more cosmopolitan Yorkshire. I was in my room watching said Yorkshire. The picture got better and better and better as the afternoon wore on; then it started to get dramatically worse and was soon surreally overlaid by the same programme a millisecond or so out of sync. This new programme soon took over entirely and I was delighted beyond measure when, at the end, up came an ident for Central. Good golly gosh! I didn't go to bed that night. I got to watch an episode of Prisoner Cell Block H on Central South, then something else on TSW and finished with a bit of TVS. Then I watched a bit of BRTN (Belgian-Flemish) before finishing the spell around dawn looking at test cards from Switzerland. Then the atmospherics blew themselves out and this event has never happened to me again. For shame. The closest I've got is sometimes being able to see, but not hear, TV3's output from Ireland on similar days; but analogue switch off locally means I rarely remember to bother to surf between Channels 21 and 69 looking for stations when there's nothing at all there 99.995% of the time. What I do instead is periodically knock my Freesat box into a "discover" mode and let it play across the transponders it picks up blind without Freesat's EPG as a guide. As a rule, I find nothing of interest to anybody. Sometimes I get stuff that looks interesting - is that Sky Atlantic unencrypted?! No, it's a promo for Sky Atlantic that happens to be unencrypted - but usually, it's nothing in particular. Which fairly well describes the (BBC) test transmission above, which is nothing in particular at all but does have a curious hypnotic quality. DX television also has that curious hypnotic quality. Unlike the test transmission, however, DXing is - or was - actually exciting.
He's back... and it's about time. The new series of Doctor Who starts tonight and I am unreasonably excited, as I have been for nearly every new series since about 1981. My earliest memory of watching Doctor Who is accidentally stumbling upon Warriors' Gate in 1981. I must've come in part way through an episode part way through the adventure, but I was instantly and irredeemably hooked. Then, a couple of months later, the Doctor fell from Jodrell Bank and turned into a completely different person. From that moment, I ceased to be hooked and became obsessed.
I think this works the same for all fans of Doctor Who. They enjoy the series until their first regeneration, at which point they become addicted to it. I remained addicted all through Peter Davison's tenure, despite the BBC moving the series to somewhere harder to find in the schedules. I even gave up a club I went to on Monday evenings with my best friend of the time in favour of watching the show.
I stuck with the series through Colin Baker's time, although by this point the series was beginning to flag, even for me. No fault of Colin Baker - a fine actor to this day - but the series was clearly unloved by the BBC and needed a rest and a change of production management. In the BBC of the day, only the pause was possible, and the series disappeared in 1985 for a year and a half, but sadly returned with a smaller budget and the same tired executives in place. I stuck with it.
The Doctor regenerated again, and Sylvester McCoy, a truly great Doctor, appeared. The series was freshened up and really started to catch fire again. So the BBC cancelled it.
Seven years passed and I moved on to other interests - Star Trek: The Next Generation launched and I got obsessed with that instead. The BBC tried again with a one-off backdoor pilot for a new Doctor Who, made in Canada, but it relied on (a) money from Fox that wasn't forthcoming and (b) intimate knowledge of the show's backstory mixed with the ability to ignore the places where they had changed that same story. So that wasn't going to work.
Time passes, and in 2004 the BBC announced that the show was coming back. It didn't sound hopeful: it was to be made in south Wales, of all places, written by a guy best known for comedy and children's TV, and starring a teenypop girly singer known as "Billie". Still, I'll watch it, I thought, if only for the nostalgia.
In the run-up to it going out for the first time, I had actually started to get excited, even while doubting that it could be as good as I remembered (if you go back and watch episodes of stuff you enjoyed as a kid, it is often surprisingly dull). On Saturday 26 March 2005 I popped to my doctor to have a blood test, with plans to nip to Sainsbury's to buy booze and snackfood to consume in front of the TV that night.
At 7pm on that Saturday, I was lying in a hospital bed, having 4 pints of blood put into me. Something had gone terribly wrong. I hurriedly paid for the terrible Patientline service to get BBC-1. I was foiled: during the title sequence, the junior doctor arrived, and having heard me say how I'd been waiting for this moment for 9 years, announced that this was the only time she had available to perform some tests. These tests involved looking up bum, which made watching TV difficult, and it would've been nice if she'd bothered to close the curtain around the bed, but when you're ill, the NHS makes you better in return for your dignity. (I later learnt that the hospital had decided that, since I was bleeding to death internally and would ultimately need a large, murderously-inclined part of my bowel removing, it was obviously my own fault because I was a filthy queer - hence the, er, less-than-caring attitude of the staff. Once I was well, I had to take action against them. I won)
Still, I watched the rest of the series as my life ebbed away. The new series was brilliant. Wales is a great place to make television, it turns out, with some of the most talented production crews in the entire world - that shouldn't surprise a Welshman like me, but there we are. Russell T Davies, that comedy and children's writer, had also written Queer as Folk, the series that directly brought about a change in society's attitudes to homosexuality and relaunched serial drama as a television phenomena. The series was more than safe in his hands: it was in perfect hands. And Billie, teenybopper, was actually Billie Piper, award-winning actress of real talent.
Time passed, I was cured, and I kept watching as the 'new' Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, regenerated into the newer David Tennant (I cried), then through Tennant's years in the role, falling deeply in love with his Doctor. And then he regenerated (I cried for days and still do if I see the regeneration scene) and Matt Smith took over, after - correcting the injustices of the past - a decent break that built expectations and a change in production management that kept the format fresh (and brought another comedy/children's writer to the helm, the equally brilliant Steven Moffat).
Tonight is the second series of Matt Smith's Doctor Who. I'm not in love with the 11th Doctor in the sexually-perverted way I was with the 10th (although I'm nursing a crush that could squash him) but I'm just as excited as I was in 2005, and in 1981. That is effectively forever in television terms, which shows the true power of a format invented back in 1963 by Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert. For the ball-and-chain, who saw the first ever episode go out the day after JFK was assassinated and was also instantly hooked, the excitement is no different, even almost 50 years later.
So tonight, I'm buying the booze, he's buying the Chinese takeaway and we're sitting down in front of BBC One HD at 6pm.