Five Alive

THE PETER DAVISON ERA SAW DOCTOR WHO FANDOM EXPLODE. STEVE O’BRIEN STAPLES TOGETHER HIS MEMORIES

“It was Doctor Who fandom’s woodstock,” the writer Paul Cornell once said about 1983’s 20th anniversary celebration at Longleat. Records are fuzzy as to how many fans turned up that spring weekend, but it was definitely more than BBC Enterprises had counted on. Many of those punters would doubtlessly have passed a rickety table advertising the existence of the Doctor Who appreciation society, which, for the price of a modest membership fee, would get you a monthly newsletter in the form of the crudely photocopied but lovingly assembled celestial toyroom.

though the Dwas, as it was more casually known, had formed in 1976, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Doctor Who fandom properly flowered. the arrival of a newly regenerated Doctor (Peter Davison debuted in March 1981) always provides an easy jumping-on point for fresh fans and with BBC two’s Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season that autumn giving curious newbies a crash course in Who history, being a fan suddenly seemed less a bland description and more a vocation.

the 1980s saw a detonation of creative activity in Who fandom. Fanzines, conventions, audio-zines (think podcasts before podcasts), audio plays, local groups, fiction clubs, all sprang from the creative loins of fandom’s more dynamic brains. a sizable number of current Who scribes (Chris Chibnall, we’re looking at you), not to mention a few current SFX-ers, began their artistic life in ’80s fandom and any celestial toyroom from the time was littered with Letraset-aided ads for fanzines (“please enclose a postal order for £1 and a stamped addressed envelope”). some, like DWB or Skaro or the Frame, wowed with their lustrous professionalism. Others, like Peter ware’s chronic hysteresis, Gary Russell’s Shada or yours truly’s Peladon, were as raw and unpretentious as a two-minute punk number.

Fanzines, alas, now seem as fusty and antiquated as a Hoagy Carmichael 78. their place has been taken by slick-tongued podcasts and breathlessly excited Youtube videos. But then Doctor Who fandom itself is barely recognisable from its 1980s incarnation. Look at pictures from any UK Who con of the time and there are barely any women, just a bunch of spoddy little shavers desperately trying to avoid eye contact with one another. Okay, Doctor Who fandom in 2018 is more diverse, more self-assured and generally more pleasing to the eye, but for those who were there for the Peter Davison era, the fandom of the 1980s was the absolute making of us.