Doctor Who: Growing up during the Wilderness Years

While I was born years after his era, Jon Pertwee was essentially my introduction into Doctor Who, during the dark times of the Wilderness Years… (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Between 1989 and 2005, there was a long gap without a full series of Doctor Who broadcast. Here’s a personal perspective of growing up as a Whovian during that time.

Growing up as a Doctor Who fan during the Nineties was a strange time. Particularly as there was hardly anything new of the series to actually watch during that time. So how did kids like me still discover it in the first place?

Well for one thing, even when it was off the air, it was still the longest science-fiction show ever broadcast in the UK, and so still had some air of iconic power. Not exactly respect, perhaps. Those days were long gone. But you could still get glimpses of it, here and there.

One particularly significant glimpse was during the show’s thirtieth anniversary year, as well as the years surrounding it. Between 1992 and 1994, several stories were repeated on BBC2. For this particular fan, the stories that stuck out most were those featuring the Third Doctor, as played by Jon Pertwee.

There were two things that I loved about watching these classic Doctor Who episodes. One was the theme tune, which was amazing and unlike anything I had ever seen. The other was the Third Doctor. With his shock of white hair, flowing cape and cool gadgets, he looked like a cross between a mad scientist and a super hero. I had never seen anything like him before.

It would be a couple of years before I saw anything like it again. Brand new, at least…

Becoming a fan for life

I remember not watching the series for a couple of years (a significant span of time when you’re that young). However, when I heard that it was coming back for one night only in 1996, I was super excited. Especially when I heard that distinctive theme tune in the trailer for it! It was very different – this time played by a full orchestra instead of sounding like pure, glorious weirdness – but it was still there.

I’ve written before about how the movie made me a fan, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But I will mention one key point: before I watched the movie, I got The Doctor Who Movie Special. This one-off magazine, designed to celebrate the broadcast of the first Doctor Who story in seven years, was actually instrumental in making me a fan.

You see, before, I had known about different Doctors. But it wasn’t until I read this magazine that I found out that all the different Doctors were the same character. And that there was a reason in the TV series why they changed, it wasn’t just ignored like with James Bond. That concept, along with the movie itself, made me want to know more about the Doctor. Much more.

I collected every video I could. It didn’t matter about what order I got them in – especially since the stories were released in random order anyway. Over time, I not only built up a decent sized collection, but I gained more and more of an idea of what each Doctor was like. What eras I did and didn’t enjoy. Which eras got noticeably better over time. (I think it says a lot about Sylvester McCoy’s debut story Time and the Rani in that it was several years before I got another story featuring his Doctor. It probably says a lot about me as a fan that I still watched Time semi-regularly.)

Too young for the series?

This may sound like an odd question now, considering how important children have been to Doctor Who‘s audience. But during the Nineties, so much of the expanded universe was aimed at a distinctly older audience.

The Virgin books and the BBC books were the biggest sign of that. There was a lot of mature content in those novels that the TV series would never have gotten away with. I tried dipping in and out of those novels, and I enjoyed many of them greatly. But it did take me a long time to ease my way into them. Being an exceptionally slow reader, it was also difficult to keep up with them, quite honestly.

One novel that stood out in particular was Rags. When I read that during my early teenage years, I was probably the perfect age for that controversial Third Doctor novel. It wasn’t exactly great, but it was extremely violent, and, like many of Tom Baker’s early stories, helped to establish my love of horror.

However, while I wasn’t able to afford them on a regular basis, the audios made by Big Finish definitely helped. Especially when they started making audios with Paul McGann as the “current” Doctor. This was a major step, (as I covered in more detail in this article,) and was the closest thing I had to Doctor Who for a long time. Until 2005, of course…

When it came back

During this time, by the general public, Doctor Who was seen as a bit of a joke. An old show with terrible special effects that should be left in the past, nothing more. That was my experience of it, anyway.

So when, on September 26th 2003, a friend at school told me that it was coming back, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, seriously, I couldn’t believe it. I felt sure he was referring to the upcoming animation Scream of the Shalka with Richard E. Grant as the Doctor, and had to “correct” him when he told me it was live-action. (Because yes, I really was that much of a know-it-all idiot back then.)

More from Winter is Coming

So when I later went onto the Doctor Who website to discover that actually, it really was coming back, I didn’t know what to think. I was excited about its return, frightened it would suck, (not to mention embarrassed to find out how wrong I was). In a strange way, I was a little saddened that it hadn’t happened sooner, and that my childhood had just missed out on having an era of my own. But mostly, I was happy.

Cut to over a year and a half later. Rose, the first actual episode of Doctor Who in almost nine years, was about to be broadcast. I was feeling the same mixture of emotions that I had felt when I first read that press release, multiplied by ten. But most of all, I felt like a kid again. Exactly as I did when I first watched the TV movie. Especially when I heard that theme tune.

The next day, when I heard that the first episode had reached over ten million viewers, I couldn’t have been happier. Everyone was talking about Doctor Who. Not with skepticism, but with excitement. Finally, after years of growing up in the Wilderness, Doctor Who was finally cool in my lifetime. And that was absolutely amazing.

Did you grow up during “the Wilderness Years”? What was your experience of being a Doctor Who fan during that time? What was it that brought you to the series? Let us know in the comments below.