My Dad, the Doctor, and Me

“I’ve been watching since I was seven,” is what I always say when my love for Doctor Who comes up in conversation. “My dad got me into it.”

It’s possible I wasn’t seven. I didn’t make a note of it or anything. But that’s the age that’s stuck in my memory, and I’ve said it aloud enough times that it may as well be true. Seven years old, so it could have been late 1979, but I’m pretty sure it was 1980.

My father had been trying to get me to watch for ages, insisting I’d love it, but on WGBH, Boston’s public television station, Doctor Who aired weekdays at 7pm, and that was prime playing-outside time.

But one night, for whatever reason – maybe it was raining, maybe none of the other kids on the street were around, or maybe my dad was just particularly insistent – I sat down in the back room of our house, a small room at the end of the hall that served as my dad’s TV room (mom’s was the living room). The back room had a couch and a chair, both of which he ignored, preferring to sit on the floor, eye level with the television, which was housed in a low cabinet. And sitting on the floor together, my father and I watched the third episode of “The Hand of Fear,” a Tom Baker story, the last to feature Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.

I thought it was fine, I guess?

It probably didn’t help that I had no idea what was going on. I’m not sure I came back for the fourth and final episode.

A little detective work now. The website broadwcast.org features an encyclopedic listing of international air dates for Doctor Who. A quick perusing of the page for WGBH gives a couple of possible days on which this underwhelming start to my journeys with the Doctor might have begun.

The only possible air date where I’m 7 is Tuesday, September 16, 1980, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me. The next story they showed was an out-of-sequence “The Robots of Death,” and I’m sure that “The Deadly Assassin” was shown in its rightful place after “The Hand of Fear” when I watched. I know because I remember thinking I was just intrigued enough by what I had seen, and, probably subconsciously, enjoying the idea of a show my father and I could watch together, that I gave it another try, and was even more baffled by the cryptic political nightmarescapes of “Assassin.” It’s a great story, but perhaps not the best introduction to the show for a 7-year-old.

December 19 is the next possible date. But that doesn’t sound right, either, and not just because I’d have turned 8 by then. I remember being torn between watching and playing because it was nice outside. Not that I didn’t play outside in winter, but my memory tells me it was sunny when the show aired. My memory lies to me constantly, but it’s all I have to go on.

That brings me to the following spring – Monday, May 11. So it was 1981, not 1980, and I was 8, not 7.

I don’t know why that makes me a little sad. It doesn’t change anything, except one small detail about the story I tell whenever I have reason to talk about how long I’ve been a fan.

Anyway, this date feels right because “The Deadly Assassin” aired next, followed by “The Face of Evil.” Despite “Assassin” failing to catch my interest, I gave the show a third and final chance by watching the first episode of “Face,” and that’s where it got me. I came in at the start of a new story, a story introducing a new character who had as much to learn about the Doctor as I did, and the show no longer felt confusing or unwelcoming.

If Tom Baker was my Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela was my companion. My father was a Leela fan too, and watching her run of stories with him fixed my attachment to the show. He had seen them all before and was eager for me to appreciate them, and happy that his certainty that I’d love them was proving correct. We watched “The Talons of Weng-Chiang,” a favorite of my father’s due to the similarities to his greater love, Sherlock Holmes. I remember sitting at his side transfixed by the creepiness of “Horror of Fang Rock.” He knew I’d love K-9, the robot dog introduced in “The Invisible Enemy” (and what 8-year-old wouldn’t?). Dad explained Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, to me when we got there in “The Invasion of Time,” Leela’s final story.

The next episode to air was the first part of “Robot,” Tom Baker’s debut story, as WGBH had run out of new episodes. I got to meet Sarah Jane properly this time. Watching “The Hand of Fear” from the beginning, with the approaching-encyclopedic knowledge of any child with a new obsession, I couldn’t believe I’d been so dismissive of it the first time around. As for “The Deadly Assassin” – well, it would take a couple more years to really get that one. (Honestly, I’m still not sure I do.) And then Leela was back, and I watched her stories the second time as eagerly as I’d watched them the first.

My father, however, slowly lost interest as the limited episodes available for the US to license got repeated, and repeated, and repeated again. Whenever the opening titles revealed that we had once again looped back to the first episode of “Robot” he would express his disappointment, and before long I was watching without him, on one of the other TVs in the house. I’m not sure exactly when that happened. I know we were still watching together when WGBH finally moved past Leela in October of 1982. I think we finished out that first airing of Tom Baker’s final seasons, his departure happening in January of 1983. But after the last episode of “Logopolis” it was back to the first episode of “Robot,” and I can almost hear my father crying out in annoyance at yet another rerun. So that was probably it. Maybe we watched another story or two here or there after that but certainly by July of 1984, when the popularity of the show in the US had grown enough that PBS began showing the newest episodes, starring Peter Davison, Dad was done.

Which was fine, really. My brother and my cousin had long since joined me in my fandom, so I still had someone to talk to about it, to pick up issues of Doctor Who Magazine for me, to introduce me to the burgeoning Doctor Who convention scene. (I met Tom Baker in person! I was too stunned to speak but he grinned at me and said something nice I can no longer remember.)

My love for the Doctor has only deepened over the years since my dad introduced us. I stayed with it through the final years of its original run, through the end of the 80s, when I had to watch on my sisters’ TV, for some reason the only set in the house that could pick up the New Hampshire PBS station showing Sylvester McCoy’s episodes. I stayed faithful through the wilderness years of the 90s, through the disappointment of the Fox TV-movie, through the show’s renewal and reemergence into the popular consciousness in 2005. And I’m still very much faithful to it today.

I’ve tried to get my father back into it, here and there. I gave him a bootleg VHS copy of “The Curse of Fatal Death,” a 1999 parody starring Rowan Atkinson, whom I knew he liked. He watched it once, politely, but the tape eventually made its way in with my own, and now sits in my closet. I thought the new show would interest him, but it wasn’t much to his taste. He watched an episode or two, but he doesn’t care for the ongoing arcs and deeper characterization of modern science fiction. Most recently, I tried to get him to watch “Legend of the Sea Devils” with me. It was the Easter 2022 special, and it sounded like it would be a fun one-off action piece. (And it was!) I was staying with him and my mom for a few weeks at the time. When I brought it up that morning he was interested, but by the time it aired that night, bed held more appeal. He’s over 90 now, I can hardly blame him.

So my dad’s relationship with the Doctor ended a long time ago, and that’s okay. Dad’s done a lot for me over the years, but making me sit down and watch Doctor Who with him all those decades ago is still the best gift he ever gave me. And even though we’ll probably never watch another episode together, it’ll always be something we share.

I’ve been watching Doctor Who since I was eight years old. My dad got me into it.