Doctor Who Magazine #351

Doctor Who's fandom has gone through some interesting growing pains over the last decade or so. Today's fans are a bit wary of being labelled as such, and some of them actively rebel against the attitudes they perceive others as expecting of them. DWM#351 seems to positively delight in this.


The main article this month a big interview with Paul McGann and Daphne Ashbrook about their memories of making the last episode to date back in 1996. In this interview, the editorial actually seems extremely pleased at McGann's assertion that, had he been offered the title role again in the new series, he would have turned it down! Scandal!

However the fan mentality is positively celebrated in Gareth Roberts' hilarious article Strange Love, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Embarrassing And / Or Rubbish Bits Of Doctor Who! In it, he lays into all the worst aspects of Doctor Who's original 26-year run, and while I would obviously take him to task on a few pertinent issues, it's six pages of joyous laughing at oneself.

My all-time 'behind the sofa' moment in Doctor Who isn't a Dalek emerging from the Thames, or a giant maggot bursting out of an egg and creeping up on Jo, and it isn't even the shocking revelation that Kalid was the Master all along. It's in Part One of Ghost Light, where Ace reveals of her friend Manisha's flat that "white kids firebombed it". I don't think there was a sofa in the world big enough for me to hide behind when she said that. Because in the middle of this typically hyperactive, incomprehensible, silly, noisy Doctor Who story, they were trying to be relevant, to 'get down wiv ver kidz' with the 'message' that 'Hey, racism is wrong'. Well slap me down with a feather, I'd never thought of that.

It makes the approaching new series sound dull by comparison.