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Doctor Who fandom

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Fans line up for autographs at the 2006 Gallifrey One convention. Guests, left to right at table: Noel Clarke, Nicholas Briggs, Rob Shearman, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.

The long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who has developed a large fan base over the years.

Doctor Who fans are sometimes referred to as Whovians, most often by the press. The usage was more common among fans in the United States during the 1980s, when the Doctor Who Fan Club of America (pronounced by members as Dwifca - now defunct) published the Whovian Times as its newsletter.

The earliest known use of 'Whovian', outside of the 'Whovian Times', is from Flaming Carrot Comics issue number 19 (circa 1988), when Flaming Carrot leads a combined group of Trekkies and Dr. Whovians into rebellion - note the now deprecated usage of 'Dr.'.

Fan organisations

Doctor Who fans have had a formally recognised organisation — the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (or DWAS) — since the late 70s. It has thousands of members and enjoyed an ongoing relationship with the classic series and later with BBC Worldwide.

The Doctor Who Club of Australia was founded in the mid-1970s to galvanise resistance to the decision of the Australian Broadcasting Commission to cease broadcasting the programme (and was ultimately successful in having the decision overturned). In the 1980s, some US fans staged "Save Doctor Who" publicity campaigns, trying to urge their local television stations to keep airing the show.

The North American Doctor Who Appreciation Society was founded in the 1980s and served as an umbrella organization for dozens of local fan groups throughout the country. Its demise in the early 1980s led to the foundation of the Doctor Who Fan Club of America, and later the Friends of Doctor Who. FDW ended unceremoniously in the mid 1990s, and since then, American Doctor Who fandom has been served mostly through local fan clubs. Major established organizations that continue to this day include the Prydonians of Princeton (New Jersey), Time Meddlers of Los Angeles (California), Doctor Who New York and the Gallifreyan Embassy of Long Island (New York), and the Guardians of Gallifrey (Florida). Other prominent fan groups have included the Unearthly Children (Pennsylvania), Friends of the Time Lord and UNIT (Massachusetts), T.A.R.D.I.S. (Arizona), the Legion of Rassilon (Northern California), Emerald City Androgums (Washington state), Motor City TARDIS (Michigan), the St. Louis CIA (Missouri), Space City Time Lords and the International House of Daleks (Texas) and the Chronicles of Who (Illinois).

The Doctor Who Information Network (DWIN) was founded in Canada in 1980 and continues to serve fans in North America. It was one of the first Doctor Who clubs in North America, and is the longest running Doctor Who club on the continent. DWIN supports the monthly Toronto Tavern fan gatherings. DWIN also sponsored several local chapters throughout Canada.

The New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club (NZDWFC) was founded in 1988 and continues to remain the country's major fan support group. They publish a fanzine, Time Space Visualiser (TSV), twice-yearly.

Conventions

At Doctor Who conventions, some fans dress up as their favourite Doctor Who characters. Here, a fan at the 2006 Gallifrey One convention is dressed as the Fourth Doctor.

Many Doctor Who conventions are held worldwide. In the United Kingdom, the long-running (though occasional) Panopticon convention has been held to great fanfare, including marking the series' fortieth anniversary. Other popular conventions of the past include the Manchester-based Manopticon. More recently, the company 10th Planet has held conventions such as Bad Wolf, Dimensions and Invasion. Wales-based Regenerations has had great success of late, as have other signing events held on the Strand by London-based Scificollector.

North America's first events were based in Los Angeles in 1979 and 1980 with Who One (featuring Tom Baker). Soon followed an enormous convention heyday during the 1980s in the Chicago area with the Spirit of Light events, which attracted many thousands of fans due to the show's popularity on public television. In the late 1980s other events such as Omnicon and Megacon showcased the classic series. The 1990s saw a decline in major events, though Chicago featured the relatively large-sized Visions events throughout the decade, and the popular Gallifrey One convention began in Los Angeles. As of 2008, Gallifrey One and the ChicagoTARDIS convention (Visions' successor) continue, with the annual Sci Fi Sea Cruise featuring Doctor Who guests departing from different ports each year. In addition, Massachusetts' New England Fan Experience (formerly United Fan Con) hosts guests from the series; and startup events exist in the form of Georgia's TimeGate Atlanta (begun 2008) and Florida's Hurricane Who (begins 2009).

Fanzines

Perhaps the first form of organised fan activity was around fanzines - unofficial, homemade magazines celebrating the series. Generally these were typed, with hand-drawn illustrations, with the occasional photograph, and were usually photocopied or duplicated in small quantities. One of the first "'zines" was TARDIS, around which the DWAS was organised. Other zines from the first decade of fandom included Gallifrey, Oracle, Skaro, Shada and Frontier Worlds.

When video recording was in its infancy, much of the content of the first fanzines was devoted to documenting plots and characters. The success of Marvel's Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine - DWM), providing a professional source of reference, meant that fanzines began to move to concentrate more on opinion - fan reviews of stories, debate, and letters. In these pre-internet times, most fanzines had active letters pages, which were the main conduit for debate around Doctor Who, especially with geographical spread of so many fans. The need to find new, original content meant that fanzines began to look closer at the series, subjecting stories and characters to ever-deeper analysis. Nerdish to some, for many this was one of the key aspects of fanzines, providing detail and discussion unavailable through more "official" channels.

As technology developed, so did fanzines. A move from photocopying to offset litho printing in the early 1980s allowed the bigger selling fanzines to improve print quality, although lower-circulation titles continued to use photocopying for many years after this. Bath-based Skaro was one of the first fanzines to be professionally typeset, but by 1990 desktop publishing allowed most editors to do their own typesetting, with some achieving professional results.

The mid 1980s has been described by some fans as "the golden age of A5 fanzines", as this period saw an explosion of activity, particularly in the UK. Although the enthusiasm of some editors could not be matched by their resources and many fanzines failed to see a second issue, some of the most popular zines appeared then, including Queen Bat, Star Begotten, Paradise Lost, Spectrox, the Black and White Guardian, Cygnus Alpha, Five Hundred Eyes, Eye Of Horus (in print between 1983-85 and online since 2004) and Purple Haze (edited by Steve O'Brien, later of SFX Magazine).

Format seemed to play a disproportionate role in how a fanzine was perceived, with divisions appearing between the cheaper-looking A5 fanzines and the glossier, more professional A4 "pro-zines" such as The Frame and Private Who. The news-zine DWB (later Dreamwatch) managed to straddle this divide, sometimes controversially, combining a professional A4 magazine format with some of the anarchism and disrespect for authority of the underground.

To a large extent, today fanzines have been replaced by websites, podcasts and discussion boards, but a few do still exist. Many of them are published by fan clubs including the DWAS zine Celestial Toyroom, (which is the latest version of a number of DWAS fanzines which began with the fanzine TARDIS in the 1970s), the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club zine Time-Space Visualiser (TSV) which has been in existence since 1987, and the DWIN fanzine Enlightenment which has been published six times a year since 1983. Other individuals and groups still produce fanzines as well such as the highly popular, British-based, Black Scrolls Magazine, which has the distinction of being professionally printed and entirely in colour. Black Scrolls was the first prozine to offer a multimedia CDROM on its cover in 2005, featuring interviews with actors, Who-related art, a back issue archive and an alternative voice-over commentary for one of the episodes. Many fanzines still take the time-honoured route of printing and distributing their zine by mail, but many now distribute their fanzine as downloadable and printable PDFs - finally removing what was often the main cause for a fanzine's closure, the cost of printing and distribution.

Many professional Doctor Who writers, for both the current TV series and the books, began their careers writing for fanzines, including Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, Matt Jones, Marc Platt, Gareth Roberts, Clayton Hickman, David Howe and Stephen James Walker.

Fan productions

Like other genre which has developed a large following (Star Trek, Star Wars, Blake's 7 just to name a few), Doctor Who also has groups of fans developing their own productions based on the show. Like other fan productions, though, the legality of such unofficial productions is highly questionable. But this has not stopped fans from making their own brand of Doctor Who.

Unlike productions based on other genre, Doctor Who fandom create not only video, but also audio drama as well, audio drama being much more mainstream in the UK where Doctor Who is made by the BBC.

One of the most significant fan groups producing dramatised stories were Audio Visuals, who distributed their works on audio cassettes during the 1980s. Many involved in this group would later form the commercial company Big Finish and be licenced by the BBC to produce official Doctor Who stories for a retail market on audio CD. Several of these productions were later broadcast by BBC Radio.

Many fans put a huge amount of work and effort varying from animation to live action films. A lot of them use villains from the real show, like Cybermen and Daleks, and attempt to remain within continuity.

In 2008, a milestone among fan productions was reached when The Doctor Who Audio Dramas started their 27th continuous year of production[1], making them the world's longest running, continuous production of Doctor Who, even beating out the BBC which ran for only 26 consecutive years.

Celebrity fans

The series has a devoted global following of people from a range of backgrounds.

Some fans have ended up working creatively on the television series. One of the most prominent examples is the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams, who wrote or co-wrote several television scripts (The Pirate Planet, City of Death and Shada) and was script editor of the original series' seventeenth season. Adams had been a fan since the first season, and made two attempts to pitch a script for Doctor Who in the early 1970s before his first serial was commissioned.[2]. Other celebrity fans have donated to the show in alternative ways. For example, the Panini publication The Complete Seventh Doctor (p47) lists singer Bob Dylan as a "great fan", such that he permitted his music to be used in the opening moments of season twenty-five without royalty. (Although Dylan's music was not in the event used). William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times newspaper from 1967 until 1981, publicly declared his enjoyment of Doctor Who on an edition of the BBC's current affairs series Panorama in 1980.[3] Prompted by this, the actor and dramatist Emlyn Williams admitted in the pages of The Times that he too was a keen follower of the series.[3]

Celebrity fans include Queen Elizabeth[4], comedians Jon Culshaw, David Walliams[5], Mitch Benn, Peter Kay, Mark Gatiss, Stewart Lee, Matt Lucas, Toby Hadoke, Wil Anderson; actors David Hewlett[6], Stephen Fry[7], David Duchovny[8], Eric McCormack[9], Simon Pegg, Anthony Stewart Head, singer/songwriter Marc Almond and Elizabeth Hurley; Simpsons creator Matt Groening, science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, horror writer Stephen King, Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, graphic novelist and fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, horror novelist Brian Keene, Star Trek star Patrick Stewart [3] and critic Harlan Ellison. Tenth Doctor David Tennant has repeatedly said that he has wanted to play the Doctor since he was a little boy, and has appeared in numerous Big Finish audio plays.

Peter Jackson is a fan of the franchise [10], George Lucas is a fan of the franchise [11] and while Moffatt claims Steven Speilberg merely knows and admires the show [12], Lucas claims Speilberg merely knows and admires the 2005 series. Lucas states Speilberg is a fan of the original series and believes there's a lot of things missing to the new series that made the old one so great. [13]

From the world of sport, cricketers Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch, footballer David Beckham, and from the music industry US heavy metal band Slipknot, Omar & Cedric of At the Drive-In/The Mars Volta, Jamie Lenman of UK band Reuben, Matthew Bellamy of the UK band Muse, Welsh hip-hop band Goldie Lookin Chain[14], Jon Spencer of the US garage rock group Blues Explosion[15], Paul & Phil Hartnoll of UK techno duo Orbital, singer and actress Toyah Willcox, singer Meat Loaf[16]. South Park co-creator Trey Parker who has put several references to the show in several South Park episodes. Jazz pianist Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, who has also written about the show.

Podcasts

Another way fans voice their opinions on the show is through regular podcasts. Popular examples of this include DWO Whocast and Podshock

References

  1. ^ http://www.dwad.net
  2. ^ Simpson, M. J. (2003). Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams (First U.S. Edition ed.). Justin Charles & Co. pp. Page 100. ISBN 1-932112-17-0. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  3. ^ a b Williams, Emlyn (1980-11-22). "Personal Choice". The Times. p. 9. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ Nathan, Yates (2007-07-26). "EXCLUSIVE: QUEEN IS DOCTOR WHO FAN". Retrieved 2007-01-23.
  5. ^ "Doctor Who". davidwalliams.com. Retrieved 2006-12-20.
  6. ^ Hewlett, David (October 6, 2006). "Stargate SG-1 Information Archive - David Hewlett Interview - 10/6/06 - PART 1" (Q & A) (Audio/Website Interview). Interviewed by Linz. {{cite interview}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |cointerviwers= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |subjectlink= ignored (|subject-link= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ Moab is my Washpot. Stephen Fry. p224-225. 2004 Arrow Books reissue.
  8. ^ Now Magazine
  9. ^ Sean, Neil (2006-09-13). "War on Terror: In It to Win It?" (near bottom of page). Fox & Friends. Fox News. Retrieved 2006-09-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ^ [1]
  11. ^ [[George Lucas, B105 FM on August 141 2008 (speaking on what science fiction franchises he loves apart from Star Wars
  12. ^ [2]
  13. ^ [[George Lucas, B105 FM on August 141 2008
  14. ^ Seaborne, Gillane (Series Producer), & Page, Adam (Producer) (2006-06-17). Doctor Who Confidential (Television series). Cardiff: BBC Wales.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
  15. ^ Spencer, Jon (July 2005). "Tour Diary". Stool Pigeon. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ "MEAT LOAF TO HIT THE TARDIS?". contactmusic.com. 2006-08-13. Retrieved 2006-08-16.

See also

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