"I HATE Doctor Who" (2005)

I hated Doctor Who in 2005. 

The BBC brought it back with Christopher Eccleston and I thought it was rubbish.

Eccleston clearly couldn't 'do' comedy. He'd been intense and brilliant in Our Friends In The North and Cracker but his attempts at being funny were a bit uncomfortable to watch. And he had short hair! The Doctor never had short hair - and he definitely didn't wear a leather jacket!

They'd also cast a well-known pop-star/celebrity wife as the companion! Sacrilege!

And what the hell had they done to the TARDIS? The Police Box was twice the size it used to be, and the console room was completely the wrong colour!

What was the point of bringing back Doctor Who just to make it into a completely different programme?

And OK, Billie Piper proved she could act - but she was saddled with a typical BBC 'working class' character (meaning she had a dead-end shop job and liked chips). What's worse, they kept dragging the companion's family into the stories - turning Doctor Who into a soap opera with the occasional alien invasion. 

And they didn't go to any alien planets in 2005 - they just kept hopping off to bloody space stations. 

I'd lived through the sad, slow decline of Doctor Who in the 1980s. But even then - when Bonnie Langford was screaming at blokes in tubby rubber bat costumes and Sylvester McCoy was playing the spoons - I'd always loved Doctor Who. It was a comfort blanket of a TV show. It was cheaply made (and it looked it) and the fact that nobody else liked it didn't bother me, it just made it all the more special. It was like being in a secret club.

The 21st Century version seemed to have been made for readers of Heat Magazine. Why were they so desperate to please an audience that had never liked Doctor Who? They didn't deserve it.

I hated the 'emotional scenes' with The Doctor crying over Gallifrey and Rose whining about her Dad - that's not what Doctor Who was about!

And what the hell were they doing setting a story in the Big Brother house?

 

Of course, it got huge ratings and it won awards and everybody else loved it, but it didn't feel like the same programme I'd grown up with.

At this point, I was still a teacher. As well as the usual National Curriculum wall-charts and lists of key-words my wife laminated the covers of some old Doctor Who Magazines so I could put them on the wall above my desk. Some of the kids started asking me about them - they'd only seen the new adventures so they didn't have a clue who Tom Baker was. 

 

One kid was desperate to see what all the fuss was about - but his folks wouldn't let him watch Doctor Who on Saturday nights (they were Ant & Dec fans) so I ended up showing the latest episodes on Monday lunchtimes. I would sit and mark exercise books while a few kids watched The Long Game or Father's Day. 

As word got round, I ended up with a classroom full of Doctor Who fans. I thought it would be a group of nerdy boys who didn't want to be on the school yard during lunch time - the type of kids who didn't have many friends or were likely to get bullied (just like me at that age) but there were just as many girls as boys.

They all loved Christopher Eccleston - they thought he was funny and heroic and they completely believed in him as The Doctor. And they were really upset that he was leaving.

It slowly dawned on me that I was a miserable old fart.

I was expecting to love the new episodes just as much as I'd loved The Invisible Enemy when I was 4 or Resurrection of the Daleks when I was 10 - and that was never going to happen. It's a show about time travel but it doesn't let you do time travel. Christopher Eccleston was inspiring the same level of devotion that Tom Baker had inspired in me. 

Some of the kids started pestering me about the old series and which Doctors I could remember (they thought I was ancient). I thought I'd show them some 'real' Doctor Who in the hope that they'd get fed up and leave me alone but we ended up having two lunchtime clubs.

Monday was for new series episodes and Thursday was for the classics. I even showed them the very first episode; I never thought they'd stomach black and white TV from 1963, but 22 kids sat through it in complete silence. Maybe they just wanted to sit in a nice warm classroom instead of standing on a cold rainy school yard but loads of them kept turning up to watch Tomb of the Cybermen and Genesis of the Daleks (not quite as many as turned up for Bad Wolf but it was close).

After the Eccleston episodes finished the kids kept showing up on Monday lunchtimes - asking questions, coming up with ideas for monsters or stories and showing off any Doctor Who books or magazines they'd been buying.

I started photocopying factsheets, crosswords and wordsearches to try and distract them. 

One of the kids organised a 'design a monster' competition and I ended up buying prizes for the winners.

I didn't get much marking done. 

And it continued into 2006. They immediately fell in love with David Tennant (just like the rest of the world) and we had tears in the classroom when Rose got stuck in a parallel universe. 

I enjoyed watching the new generation of fans falling in love with Doctor Who more than I enjoyed watching the new series itself. I tried to see it through their eyes - but I suppose I was like one of those people who won't accept that anybody could ever be a better James Bond than Sean Connery or that David Bowie really lost the plot when he killed off Ziggy Stardust.

Nowadays I get nostalgic about Doctor Who lunchtime club more than I do about those new episodes. 

When I was a kid, watching any kind of sci-fi was a pretty solitary pursuit. None of my friends gave a stuff about Peter Davison regenerating into Colin Baker but in 2005 I had a classroom full of kids excitedly talking about the first teaser trailers for The Christmas Invasion. 

It's strange to think that this was all nearly 16 years ago - some of the Doctor Who club kids will be nearly 30 and have kids of their own.

I wonder if they're still watching?