As the country’s collective anticipation reaches fever pitch celebrations of the Beeb’s favourite millennial man are in full swing. To get into the spirit of it all we have a peek into a couple of personal memories of the Timelord.
Steve Berry’s collection of celebrity recollections of Doctor Who is being republished by Gollancz for the 50th anniversary and there are new contributions from Who alum Bernard Cribbens, Sophia Myles and Ben Aaronovitch. Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and many others feature in the book and there’s a nice range of Whoviana here, from those familiar with the show in its infancy up to the children of the RTD incarnation of Who. One thing which unites them is this: they love the show
100% of the author’s royalties will be going to Alzheimer’s Research UK and you can order the book from the publishers here.
Below we have two excerpts from the book, the second features the moment Rufus Hound falls in love with The Doctor, but we lead off with Al Murray’s Pyramids of Mars moment…
Al Murray
Comedian
’ll get this out of the way: I’m a Tom Baker boy. Some of my hottest memories of telly as a kid are the Fourth Doctor. And the hottest memory of the lot is this: Pyramids of Mars — the mummies, Sutekh, the gothic setting. It’s scarf-wearing, jelly-baby loving, curly-haired Doctor Who in its pomp. But the bit that stuck with me — and this is just how the child in me remembers it, so I might get some of it wrong — is when Sarah Jane said words to the effect of, “Well why bother stopping Sutekh? The world didn’t end. I’m from 1980. Who cares?” So the Doctor starts up the TARDIS and takes her to 1980. They open the doors…
And the world is a barren, blasted wasteland. The Doctor says, “See? We have to do something.” It’s a fabulous moment that, for me, stands alongside the famous “Have I the right?” moment in Genesis of the Daleks. However…
A few summers ago I met Steven Moffat. Ludicrously over-excited, I gushed about how brilliant I thought the show had been under his helm, how I’d got my kids into it, how I hoped they were getting the same kind of hot telly memories as I had all those years ago. And — because, I am sure, he was interested in everything I was telling him — I went on to tell him about my Pyramids of Mars moment. And he said, “Yes, I remember, a great moment, and all the better because it’s all so obviously filler.”
Filler!? I spluttered and gasped. “Yes,” he said, with his masterly writer’s authority. “Filler.”
And yet, who cares? If the filler is that good, what must the content be like?
Rufus Hound
Comedian and presenter
The life of a jobbing comedian is not as glamorous as the legends would have you believe. Sure, earning a living for a daily 20 minutes’ work is lovely, but that 20 minutes usually comes at a cost of several hours driving, possibly a stay overnight, and the long drive back the next day. So it was that I found myself in the Birmingham Holiday Inn, conveniently situated next to the one-way system’s finest 24-hour kebab shop and car stereo test facility. The people of Birmingham are great, but Birmingham itself can be a bit bleak.
In preparation, I’d recorded the two episodes of Doctor Who I’d missed by being on the road. They were Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead. I should point out, I am not one of those Doctor Who fans. I am not hugely familiar with the Whoniverse pre-Eccleston. I cannot draw the Seal of Rassilon from memory, I cannot tell you which part Martin Clunes played (though you’d think I would from the number of “embarrassing clips” shows it’s been on) and I could walk past Patrick Troughton in the street without so much as pausing. A task made all the trickier by his passing away some 22 years ago.But in that boxy, street-noisy hotel room the double bill of Silence/Forest changed everything. My day, my outlook, my emotional integrity. I don’t want to run through the plot, the excellent performances or the moral of the story. You may have seen them (if you’re reading this, I reckon there’s probably a good chance you can quote large sections of it) or you may not have done, but what is true is that these episodes encapsulate everything that is most wonderful about this series.
I hated Steven Moffat and I loved him. So brilliantly clever, so horribly cruel, so incredibly redeemed. That the Doctor should be forced to recognise his soul mate, then be responsible for her ascent to digital heaven is to fully exploit the unique opportunities that writing for Doctor Who affords you. It is no lie that the Doctor’s last minute dash to immortalise River Song was accompanied in that Birmingham hotel room by a sobbing moustachioed man-child shouting “Run! F***ing run!” at a glowing laptop screen, unafraid and unashamed of who might hear.
There in a soulless Holiday Inn I sat, with tears streaming down my face, weeping inconsolably. On that day, in that place, I cried for every lost child of Gallifrey. As the story ended, I felt rattled, euphoric and spent. There are a few things that a man alone in a hotel room can do to induce these feelings, but none of them should be done while crying. And none of them will ever make you feel that every switch in your head and heart has been jammed on and cranked up. None of them will make you want to write a letter to Moffat that simply reads, “You bastard. You beautiful bastard.”
And none of them will make you want to call your own wife just to tell her that you love her and miss her and if she ever kills herself to save you, you’ll upload her to heaven.
