Doctor Who Fans


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    As the longest running Speculative Fiction show in the world, Doctor Who has acquired a massive fan base and one that is multi-generational, especially with the revival. It is also a textbook case of the fans Running the Asylum.

    Conventions and Cosplay were happening long before many such shows even began production, for a start. There have been many fanzines and Podcast stuff has emerged more recently. Fan Work was also a major feature, a number of official Big Finish audio plays having their origins as works from the fan AudioVisuals plays. Many of the professional writers and other production people involved in the series and its spin-offs started out in fandom. Nicholas Briggs has, in the past done everything you can imagine in spin-off media, among other things running Audio Visuals and playing the Doctor in those self-same productions. He now voices the Daleks and currently runs Big Finish. The nearly as prolific Gary Russell used to run Big Finish and script-edited The Sarah Jane Adventures. Paul Cornell, Robert Shearman, Matt Jones and classic series writer Marc Platt contributed Fanfic and/or nonfiction work to Fanzines before they worked on the actual series. Mark Gatiss and a number of the above have also worked on semi-pro audio and visuals, not quite official and intended for a niche market, yet intended to make a profit. (Big Finish originated as a production company for such works.) Pore through older issues of Doctor Who Magazine and you will see many familiar names in the letters columns and on the by-lines of articles and comics. This includes Matthew Waterhouse, who would a couple of years later go on to play Adric, a much-derided example of The Scrappy.

    The fans are interested in the Missing Episode area, with many such episodes being recovered from fan video (or audio) recordings. The show lacks an official fan club now and no longer has an official forum, although The Doctor Who Forum came close enough to get newspaper mentions.

    Fans had to go through the 16-year hiatus until 2005, resulting in a large amount of creative work during this time and licenced Spin-Off media. Probably the key Spin-Off material that held the Expanded Universe - and the fans - together for so long, however, and certainly the longest-running of all of them, were the official spin-off novels produced by Virgin Publishing. The Virgin New Adventures series continued the adventures of the Seventh Doctor, the Doctor at the time of cancellation, and the Missing Adventures covered the previous six. Following the 1996 TV Movie, the BBC's own in-house publishing division took over (with two lines split between the adventures of the Eighth Doctor and the adventures of his predecessors). Themselves a progression from the widely-read and loved novelisations of the TV series, the novel ranges clearly took the Doctor into more adult waters as the writers, who were nearly all fans, thus making the lines in many ways examples of Officially Published Fan Fiction, began to explore him and his universe more closely. At best, they did indeed take the Doctor into a universe 'deeper and broader' than that seen on the screen; at worst, they were a bit too Darker and Edgier, with unnecessarily convoluted and Fan Wank-ridden storylines, cloying Wangst and a slightly adolescent idea of what 'adult' actually is. Many of the writers of the new series, including Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss and Russell T. Davies, who eventually brought it back, wrote novels for the range.

    The revival, long-hoped for by fans who had been subject to earlier disappointment, is widely loved by fans, although there are some exceptions. It also brought something new - Shippers. Like the new series itself, some have found this new element of the fandom difficult to get used to.

    General characteristics of the fandom

    • Due to the show's abundant Parent Service, often prone to fanboy or fangirl-like behaviour, with frequent polls on "sexiest companion" and innuendo.
    • Certain elements display a tendency to get a bit paranoid about the possibility of anything, whether elements of the series itself or the fan / public reaction to it, that might lead possibly lead to the intimation that there might be any suggestion of cancellation, possibly because of the numerous elements and gradual sense of decay which led to the program's eventual hiatus in 1989 and the agonising 16 year wait for someone to determine the show worthy of bringing back on a regular basis as opposed to being a creaky, camp old relic. This tends to lead to great overreactions whenever any missteps (or anything the over-reactor merely perceives as a misstep) occurs, however minor in nature.
    • Likewise, owing to the show's widely-held appeal to children, some fans may get a bit defensive (or confrontational) about any suggestion that the show is 'just for children'. This arguably led to the Darker and Edgier nature of the novels and other Spin-Off material produced between shows, and lengthy, somewhat pedantic debates about whether the show can be classified as a 'children's' show or a 'family' show are not unheard of.
    • Don't call the main character 'Doctor Who' in front of one of them. Just... don't. Others really don't like the term "Whovian", which originated from the 1980s Doctor Who Fan Club of America.
    • Likely to have parents or children (sometimes both) who are fans as well; Long Runner status and all.
    • Tend to be Britons, Australians or New Zealanders- the show was and is far more mainstream there. American and Canadian fans are not unheard of, but due to the series' traditionally limited exposure in North America they tend to be something of a minority (although the new series seems to be gaining wider, if still limited, exposure there than the classic series managed). Tends to have received minimal-to-no exposure outside of these areas.
    • Due to its sheer size and the diversity of opinion present, has a reputation for being incredibly fractious and unappeasable; anything that one fan loves is guaranteed to be detested with a white-hot passion by another, and no matter what the producers of any medium do, someone somewhere is guaranteed to start whining about it. This makes fan interaction... interesting.
    • Due to the nature of the Expanded Universe and its Long Runner status, the subject of what is or is not canon is particularly tricky in this fandom. It's usually (but not universally) accepted that everything that has been made for television is canon; beyond that the argument rages, but the general moderate approach is that canon beyond this is a matter of personal choice.

    Specific terms used

    • Casual viewer: See not-we.
    • Indefinable magic: Whatever makes Doctor Who special. As the term implies, no one can explain it.
    • Not-we: Non-fans, a term taken from the Doctor Who story "Kinda".
    • New Who: The post-2005 revival. Alternately, nuWho.
    • Classic Who: The 1963-89 series. Generally also includes the 1996 made-for-TV movie, despite it being made by an American production company independent of the BBC.
    • Pure historical: A story set in the past that features no science fictional elements other than the Doctor's presence. These are very rare, and the last one to date was 1982's Black Orchid.
    • Pseudo-historical: A story set in the past that does feature science fictional elements—often, an alien in disguise is responsible for mayhem and the Doctor must stop him.
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