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Oh, the things I’ve seen while time traveling from boyhood into my sixties. But first…
For over 50 years I’ve been watching, when I can, the British Broadcasting Corporation television series Doctor Who, a show so well regarded that recently news about a change to the cast was on the BBC News website top ten stories. The space-and-time machine the doctor uses (found in the BBC props room) which looks just like an innocent “police call box,” (think phone booth) is in the Oxford dictionary! The “Tardis.”
The recent 12th doctor, Peter Capaldi, is my age. He remembers those blue boxes in his native Scotland when he was a boy. Inside would be a phone handset to call the bobbies, and maybe a constable would keep a kettle to have a little cuppa tea. Capaldi and I both own the first ever Doctor Who children’s annual where (or was it the second one) the legend of the Phoenix is used to explain how the doctor can regenerate into a new body. Cool, eh?
In 1963, before colour TV, I found the show on CBC. I caught the last half of the first adventure when they go back to caveman times, and the second one, when they go to the future and find those scary machines known as the Daleks. (“No, it’s not a space show,” they assured the BBC executives, “it’s still a history show, they traveled into the future.” But the Tardis became a time and space machine, and the planet, despite the presence of humans, became Skarro. The cheap phone booth remained)
As a child I found nothing wrong with a booth being a spaceship and a time machine, and “bigger on the inside,” or the hero being a white haired grandfather without a ray gun. Now I chuckle to think of grownups in America who would find such things too outrageous. Screw youth worship—did I tell you Capaldi, with his lined face and grey hair, is my age? The current doctor is—get this—a woman. But not old. How? Easy: That’s what the 12th doctor regenerated into. But what would a conservative boy in 1963 have thought?
I thought of this—I time traveled—watching the lady doctor with her companions trying to “save the world” from an alien spaceship hidden near the shore. Under the sea. In a cavern with breathable air. Too outrageous?
I “traveled” by wondering… Q: what would my six year old self see? A: A female Doctor Who, in a time when there were no women heroes, but I think I would have been OK. The first doctor had three companions, and so does she.
Q: As for one of the companions, older than the first companions, (school teachers) being a bus driver? This when guys on TV, like Dick Van Dyke, all wore ties and worked in offices?
A: I would be OK.
Q: As for his son, younger than the first companions, being a Negro?
A: Fine, nothing wrong with adoption. (I wouldn’t have known the term “blended family”)
Q: As for the third companion being an East Indian lady? Maybe I would think she was a light coloured Negro. In my elementary school, we had one Black family and in my Junior high we had one Black family. My first Indian sighting might have been in my senior high.
A: My six year old self might have assumed having other races was a coincidence, and not from any reason such as an atomic war taking out the British whites… let alone that England had become new, improved and racially integrated. What else? The scientist on the shore was a woman, young, Chinese and without a lab coat. I might have thought the show was being so different just for fun.
Incidentally, I had learned what Chinese looked like two or three years earlier when we parked in the big city. In Chinatown. And as people walked by I kept asking, “Is he Chinese?” The car windows were down. Finally I could discriminate the locals from people I knew, just when my mother warned, “He can hear you.”
I would have been so excited that one of the characters was wearing a spacesuit!—he must have been rescued from his capsule splashing down near shore, or something. At six “it would not compute” when he said “my husband,” but then when he kissed his man friend I would have blanked out, and not said, “Ewww!” Not like for normal “kissy-kissy stuff.”
Years later a young university woman would say to me, “Don’t use that word” preferring to be called “gay,” because the words for special male and female, “homosexual” and “lesbian,” had a stigma. Back at age six, I don’t think I ever heard the word “homo.” Not until late elementary school.
Maybe Yankee grownups in the US deep south would still find the show outrageous. Not me: I think it’s fun, this new space and time of ours…
…
…
Sean Crawford
Northeast of Idaho,
February 2021
History of colour TV footnote: Held back for next week.
Fan footnotes: (All from a fifty-plus year old memory) Peter Capaldi and I refer to the lady as “Doctor Who” because in our day that’s how the ending credits read. As did the title. The word “Who” was first uttered by the male school teacher, to the woman teacher, as new traveling companions. (Along with the doctor’s granddaughter) This during a respite between the first two adventures, right after he marvels at the ham and egg “sandwich” being ham one bite, and egg the next: “Who is he?”
From the first children’s annual I learned the word “prevaricating,” because he tells a lonely earth expedition to Jupiter, needing his help, that he is from earth. The footnote said “he is prevaricating,” without explaining the mystery of where he was from. And here I thought he was human. Perhaps the producers were still making things up. It took me years to plumb the mystery.
