This was first published in 2005 in Look Magazine.

The Nature of the Infection: Some Thoughts on Doctor Who

I wrote this a few years before the brilliant Russell T. Davies and his cohorts brought the Doctor back onto our screens and into our lives.

The years pass, and the arguments go back and forth over whether watched fiction actually has an effect on the reader or the viewer. Does violent fiction make a reader violent? Does frightening fiction create a watcher who is frightened, or desensitized to fear?

It’s not a yes, or a no. It’s a yes but.

The complaint about Doctor Who from adults was always, when I was small, that it was too frightening. This missed, I think, the much more dangerous effect of Doctor Who: that it was viral.

Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched the good bits from behind the sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the cliffhanger in the final moments. But that had, as far as I can tell, no effect on me at all, as I grew, the fear. The real complaint, the thing that the adults should have been afraid of and complaining about, was what it did to the inside of my head. How it painted my interior landscape. When I was three, making Daleks out of the little school milk bottles, with the rest of the kids at Mrs. Pepper’s Nursery School, I was in trouble and I didn’t know it. The virus was already at work.

Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest. But I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea-time serial.

For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away. And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.

And that was only the start of it. The books helped with the infection—the Dalek World one, and the various hardcovered Doctor Who annuals. They contained the first written SF stories I had encountered. They left me wondering if there was anything else like that out there . . .

But the greatest damage was still to come.

It’s this: the shape of reality—the way I perceive the world—exists only because of Doctor Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.

This is what remains to me of The War Games as I look back on it, over three decades after I saw it: The Doctor and his assistants find themselves in a place where armies fight: an interminable World War One battlefield, in which armies from the whole of time have been stolen from their original spatio-temporal location and made to fight each other. Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones. Travel between the time zones is possible, using a boxlike structure approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or Mons or Waterloo. Only you don’t come out in Waterloo, as you’re really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the mists of time.