Ten things you need to know about Dennis Brent
This is a little primer I wrote to bring my bride-to-be up to speed before she reads her first Brenty Four. It might help anyone wondering what the fuss was all about. It's ten things you need to know about Dennis Brent:
1) Dennis is a telehistorian which means he spends all his time researching television production paperwork and writing pointlessly trivial monographs about camera scripts and scheduling. He loves the written records archive and self-publishes books that are even worse than his monographs. Has occasionally been published in the Telehistorical Trajectory, a journal of telehistorical matters.
2) Dennis has a large collection of original Doctor Who props, costumes and documentation. He also has at least two late actors in cryogenic storage in his basement. His collection is not on show and no one but him is allowed to go and stare at it. Dennis will gladly pay enormous sums for the most trivial items as long as their Doctor Who pedigree is sufficiently good.
3) In all other respects Dennis is very mean. He spends as little as possible on food, clothes and hygiene. He shops at Bargainsave and tries wherever possible to get out of date food to save on the bills. He has a large private income and doesn’t need to scrimp but he wants to because he is obsessively frugal.
4) Dennis lives in Brent Towers – a house left to him by his parents. His colleague Francois Devine rents a wing of the house while his own estate is being renovated. They absolutely definitely don’t live together. That would be wrong.
5) Dennis has no friends and doesn’t see the need for them. He has three acquaintances – Francois Devine (fellow senior telehistorian, eats a lot, extremely pompous, matches Dennis for pedantry, the two have a childish relationship), Melba (a junior telehistorian whom Dennis and Francois are training like Jedi masters) and Smasher (who we never meet but hear a lot about – he seems, if it is possible, to be worse than Dennis and Francois). Dennis and Francois often beam at each other when they are pleased and roar when they find something funny. What they find funny is rarely actually funny. He also has a son – Little Dennis Junior – conceived by his dental nurse who extracted material while Dennis was unconscious.
6) Dennis dislikes almost everyone, regularly reporting his neighbours to the police for minor rule infringements. In return, everyone in the village of Bendaton hates him.
7) Dennis has absurd adventures. His is a world of mayhem and intrigue where few people have ever actually grown up. Though all the stories are told by Dennis so it entirely possible that it is only his view of the world that is so immature.
8) “Brenty Four” is a series of adventures that take place over 24 hours in one hour instalments.
9) Dennis generally refers to people by their last name, never by their first name, sometimes by their title and has never been able to work out what to call Francois Devine so they each call each other by their full name. This avoids any unpleasant familiarity or intimacy. Equally, Dennis refers to Doctor Who stories only by their production code. He is not a “fan” and therefore considers story names or character names to be beneath contempt.
10) Dennis is a member of DWAT – the Doctor Who Appreciation Trust – a club that broke away from DWAS (the Dr Who Appreciation Society) after a schism. Dennis has contempt for “the clowns from DWAS” and they in turn bully him whenever possible owing to their superior numbers. Dennis has many fond (if intensely bitter) memories of DWAS and DWAT social events and conventions. Most of the things he thinks were richly comic are actually not.
