In the spring of 2019, for reasons I can’t quite recall, I decided to actually do something I’d been considering for years: I would watch Doctor Who, a show I’d been a fan of with varying degrees of secrecy since the early 1990s, as if it were a boxset, starting from its very beginning back in 1963 and pushing through until the present day.
I knew that this was not something I was likely to do again - partly because there are so many other things in the world to watch, partly because there is a lot of this stuff now. And so, to make sure I actually paid attention to some of the less, er, thrilling material, I decided to take notes. Then, since I was doing that anyway, I started to send them to a mailing list I’m on, in the hope of starting discussion and/or fights.
And then, suddenly, it was three years and a global pandemic later, and I realised in a period of my life in which I’ve written one book and co-written another, I have almost certainly written more about Doctor Who than any other subject, for an audience of a dozen nerds who I’ve known for years.
By May 2022, news about the approaching new era meant that a lot of people who’d drifted away were suddenly feeling enthusiastic about the show again. And so, since this stuff exists anyway, and since at least some people on Twitter seemed to be enjoying my tweets about my watchthrough, I decided - well, I really might as well stick it all on the internet somewhere. If nothing else, it’ll start discussions and/or fights on a much bigger scale.
So that’s what this is: a collection of notes written as I watched. I’ve tidied them up, corrected some factual errors and in places removed in-jokes, mostly intended to annoy my friend Jim; and of course I knew all of these stories to a greater or lesser extent going in. But nonetheless, this is what I thought about the show as I watched it in chronological order.
These notes assume at least some familiarity with the material - I’m not going to recount the plot (at least, not unless it’s really bad), or stop to explain who Barry Letts is. The only concession I’m making to having a bigger audience than my original nerd mailing list is by starting in two places at once. In one thread, I’ll begin with An Unearthly Child, the very first episode broadcast back in November 1963; in the other, I’ll start with Rose, the first episode of the revived show under Russell T. Davies from March 2005, on the assumption that there are some people who’ll be interested in the modern show alone.
Other than that, though, we’re going in order. And hopefully, by the time of Doctor Who’s 60th birthday in November 2023, I’ll have published the lot. You can find a list of posts here.
To be continued.
*crash zoom on Colin Baker’s face*
