Your Parents and Doctor Who

[Pip Madeley]

This story in today's Manchester Evening News made me smile:



Timelord dad's Tardis surprise

FOR THREE months dad Mark Nichols would disappear into the shed to `make book shelves'. But it was really the stuff of science fiction.

One afternoon his sons, Sam, eight, and Kade, five, came home and discovered what he had really been up to - making a full size replica of Doctor Who's Tardis - complete with realistic sound effects. They heard an unearthly wheezing noise coming from their bedroom - and were stunned by what they found. I stepped out from it as the boys came into the room, Sam screamed and fled downstairs."

Now the boys, huge fans of Dr Who, are never out of their very own time machine. Mark used his skill as an aircraft engineer for Thomson Holidays to build an authentic replica of the famous 1950s-style police box, in which the Doctor travels through space and time.

The 7ft 8in-high and 3ft 5in-wide model is made of wood and painted in the correct Oxford Blue - to perfectly match the one in the cult BBC TV series. Mark said: "It all started last year. My wife Sue, and myself were out with the boys and I had just had a short haircut. I had a brown bomber jacket, like the one worn by the Salford-born actor Christopher Eccleston, when he played the Doctor. One of our boys said `Daddy looks like Doctor Who'. I said: "Well I was born in 1963, when Doctor Who started on the TV - I could be Doctor Who'.

"Sam then said, `Well if you are Doctor Who where is your Tardis'? It all started from there and I decided I would make one. I was a great fan of the show when I was a boy and I think my sons have genetically picked up that up - they are crazy about it. Sue urged me to make the Tardis. I started on December 7. It took about four weeks of work - over a several months - and we didn't tell the boys. They didn't have a clue, we kept telling them I was making book shelves. I switched on the materilization sound system as the boys got home when it was finished and their faces were a picture when they saw it for the first time."

Mark, 43, who also has a six-week-old daughter Keira, and lives in Glossop, added: "Sam and Kade go to Dinting Primary School, where they were doing some project about the Second World War. One day they invited a friend called Bobby round to see it and when the sound system came on, he started shouting `let me out, I don't want to back to World War Two!'"

As well as a blue flashing light on top the Tardis has a flat-screen TV and a computer game console fitted inside, plus a seat. Sam said: "I like it because it is special, because my dad made it and it has got a DVD player. Also no one else has got one, only Doctor Who. We play Doctor Who all the time now."

The Tardis, which cost £350 to build, now takes pride of place in the boys' room alongside models they had already bought of a Dalek and K9, the Time Lord's one-time canine sidekick. Mark said: "My next project will be making sonic screwdrivers for the boys - like the one Doctor Who has - and they have also asked for a life-size K9."

So the question is, what is/was your parents opinion on Doctor Who? What have they done for you that made you smile?

My dad once bought me The Tom Baker Years for my 12th birthday. It was one of the rarest videos, and I was over the moon to get it

[Dirk Gently]

My parents never stopped me watching Doctor Who. But they never did any thing for me related to Doctor Who either.
Angela made me a Dalek birthday cake a couple of years after we moved in together.

[Perry Vale]

The 7ft 8in-high and 3ft 5in-wide model is made of wood and painted in the correct Oxford Blue - to perfectly match the one in the cult BBC TV series.

But that one's too wide!


As for the thread's question, my parents never liked the show & used to take the piss out of it. My dad took me to a DW Magazine signing that Tom Baker was doing locally, although the queue was too long (but we caught a glimpse of him leaving out the back), but apart from that they did nothing for me. Watching TFD recently, I remembered how much I wanted them to take me to Longleat.....

[Stephen Morgan]

I think this is a great story, their dad obviously has a pride in what he has done, and the kids are enjoying his work so much, it's proved its worth.


[QUOTE=Perry Vale;96824....apart from that they did nothing for me. Watching TFD recently, I remembered how much I wanted them to take me to Longleat.....[/QUOTE]

My parents were much the same. My gran always said the series was "far fetched" and I would always give her a derisory look.
I too recall asking my father to take me to Longleat in '83, and considering how much we used to go there when my sister and I were kids, he never managed to find the time to take me that year.

[Wayne]

Mum never watched the show, but my Dad always watched it with me when i was growing up.
They did a few things for me over the years. When i was about 11 or 12, we went to original Blackpool Dr Who exhibition, which was tremendously exciting at the time!
They used to get the Dr.Who annual for me at christmas, & things like that. Including one offs like this:



Also my Dad recorded a couple of episodes onto cassette for me using his 'Music Centre'. I remember having episodes of 'Revenge of the Cybermen', 'Terror of the Zygons', & 'The Brain of Morbius'.

[Thasc]

My Dad watched some of the Hartnell/Troughton Seasons and thought some of the stories were ok. He didn't really become a fan until my brother was old enough to watch and enjoy the programme when Jon Pertwee was the Doctor. My Mum isn't really all that bothered about Dr Who but she will watch some of the Pertwee stories as she says he is the best Doctor. She watched and enjoyed the last Christmas Special as well so may be she's mellowing a little bit towards the programme

I had a few Dr Who annuals bought for me for Christmas presents and also got some of the Target Novelisations too

[duncan]

My parents decided the show was finished after episode 1 of Robot. They HATED Tom Baker. But I was always allowed to watch it but they never did anything Who related for me either.

[Si Hunt]

He really must be a time traveller if he was born in 1963 and is still only 43.

Si.

[Pip Madeley]

Maybe he was born on February 29th?

[Si Hunt]

Quiet you.

Si.

[Captain Tancredi]

Christmas 1981, and I decide to appropriate my grandma's long brown tweedy coat and go to the school Christmas party as the Fourth Doctor.

I wake up on the morning of the party to find that not only has Grandma knitted up all her scraps of wool into a suitably long scarf, but Dad has spent several hours the previous night cutting and sticking bits of cardboard and a roll of Bacofoil to make me a K9.

Apart from the usual bits and pieces being bought over the years, the most notable one would have been Grandma (again) going into Liverpool and getting me a copy of 'The Pertwee Years' signed by the man himself when he did a signing at Smiths.

[Carol Baynes]

I was put in front of the television set in 1977 and that basically set a precedent! My parents also used to occasionally buy me the Dr. Who annual (I got the 1978, 1981, 1982 ones anyway). I also had dolls of Tom Baker, Leela and K9. I also got taken to the Blackpool exhibition at one point, so it was a reasonably Dr. Who-friendly childhood really!

[Captain Tancredi]

I probably ought to add that from the age of about 5 onwards my folks had tried to encourage me to watch Who, but with my low fear threshold (which is with me to this day) I didn't really like it (although I must have seen 'Androids of Tara' - 'Creature from the Pit' at the very least) and didn't catch on until the age of 9. That's one of the reasons why Tom will probably never be my favourite Doctor, in much the same way that I found Tommy Cooper too grotesque when I was little to really enjoy his act now.

[Stuart Wallis]

Mum would leave the telly on at the right time, but never said what she thought of the programme herself. Whereas Dad got me most of the Target books and DWW/DWM til I could get it myself, and insisted on watching it with me until I got fed up with his talking through it and asking why so-and-so did that every ten minutes, which he would've known if he'd been listening rather than talking.

[chalkie]

being a parent myself, (three boys, 6,5 & 2) it has given me great pride that when we sat down to watch season 3 dvd DW together, when the end credits to "smith & jones" came on, my middle son said " is the globe theatre one coming on" bless him. not that my boys are obsessed ( yet) .start the way you mean to go on, that's what i say *grin*

[Stuart Wallis]

Catch the buggers early, I say!

[chalkie]

Catch the buggers early, I say!

hoo-aaaaaaahhh! what's the saying ? teach a child b4 they're 7 and they'll think the same way as you forever

[Stephen Morgan]

I've been thinking about this some more and remembering stuff from years ago.
I recall my gran doing the ironing one evening during an episode of Colony in Space, and waving a sheet in front of the screen at the most crucial point, the Doctor being menaced by the IM robot. To this day I can't stand seeing the ironing board in the living room. Viv says I'm paranoid.

[Stuart Wallis]

hoo-aaaaaaahhh! what's the saying ? teach a child b4 they're 7 and they'll think the same way as you forever

Do you think it's wise teaching a load of four-year-olds to think like me though? Could be dangerous...

[Antony Cox]

I think we had a thread like the on the old PS.

I don’t recall my parents (or specifically my Mum, as my Dad was out of the picture 30 years ago) ever really talking about DW back in the early days when I started watching it as a kid (late 70’s). When I first became friends with Andrew (Ian Lethbridge-Stewart) around 1987, my Mum became far more exposed to the series through us often watching the BBC Videos of the time and constantly listening to the theme music in all it guises. The only thing I ever recall her voluntarily commenting about at the time was that she thought Tom Baker had far more presence than Sylvester McCoy, something I don’t think anyone could or can argue with.

One incident of that period springs to mind – Andrew and I were obsessed with the DW title sequence in all its forms and decided one day to assemble all the different versions (bar the Hartnell and Season 18 versions which neither of us had a copy of at the time) sequentially onto a videotape so we could watch them all as often as we liked without having to faff around with each individual BBC or off-air videotape. As neither of our families had two video recorders, I decided to take ours round to Andrew’s parents house where we would then use one to play the individual tapes and one to copy all the title sequences, then repeating the process so we both had a same-generation copy. Unfortunately I neglected to ask my Mum’s permission to temporarily take the VCR away, and thus when she got home from work that day and discovered it was missing she thought we’d been burgled and panicked like mad. When I eventually returned home with the VCR she went ballistic, and her final comment - after rightly lecturing me about having put her through a lot of stress for nothing – was that she “….never wanted to hear that f*cking Doctor Who theme in this flat again!” Whoops.

That event notwithstanding, she never actually had a problem with me being a fan of the show, and indeed she was wholly enthusiastic that it had brought Andrew and I together as such good friends (she always had a soft spot for Andrew and his endearing personality, often referring to him in the third person as ‘Android’, though this was entirely good-natured in intention). She always enjoyed watching our fan-made video story The Tamaras Crisis, though I admit she did used to laugh like a drain at it all the way through, though again we both new her amusement was good-natured.

Even up to a few years ago when I asked her for the Ambassadors of Death BBC Video for Christmas, she bought me an additional one (The Curse of Peladon) without me having asked. She just accepted that I was a big fan of the show and, much like when I came out to her (about being gay, not being a DW fan ), was happy as long as I was happy.

I wonder what she would have made of the New Series?

[Jonno]

Lovely post, Ant!

My parents have always been supportive - it helped that we all watched it together as a family from my earliest memory of it in the mid 70s right up to the end of 77 when we emigrated. At that stage, they would get me the Annual every Christmas, along with a couple of board games (including the brilliant War of the Daleks), the odd Target here and there, and bought loads of Weetabix and Typhoo Tea to help me collect the board games and wall chart/stickers respectively!

Once we came back in 1980, they were in a phase of self-employment through most of the 80s so the concept of the shared family time early Saturday evenings had gone on the whole, and I was more of a lone viewer on the whole. Ironically, when they went back to normal weekday employment, I went off to Polytechnic, which lasted the whole of the McCoy era, and I could tell they weren't as keen on it as they had been years before.

3 years ago, they watched it again and soon grew to love it - along with Torchwood and SJA and Confidential, they lap it all up! I've watched End of the World, BoomTown & Lazarus Experiment with them either here or at theirs, and they're visiting on Friday which means we'll be watching the Torchwood finale plus the first two episodes of S4 together!

Back in the early 90s, they'd get the odd video for me for Christmas, such as The Web Planet in 1990, when I didn't have much money for what were then still rather expensive purchases. And for the last few years, they've been effectively buying DWM for me as they send money for Christmas and my subscription gets renewed around November, so I always take it out of their money and it keeps a 30+ year tradition going!

[SiHart]

It's all my Mum's fault if anyone is to blame about how I became fan. Way back in 1979, I was 4, my sister was 2 and she was very demanding of attention and loud (and indeed still is!) and I was often left to get on with much attention from my parents because she was such a handful. Anyway, Mum made the decision that one thing we'd do together was watch Doctor Who. She'd watched it when she was young, and obviously decided it was something we could do together. And we did- it was our time together. I used to sit snuggled with her (or Dad on occasion) and watch the show and I was soon pretty well hooked. Certainly, as I've written before I can remember being really excited when Mum called me in one saturday to see the trailer for The Leisure Hive on the TV!

Anyway, shortly before that they started buying me DWM, issue 44 after a trip to Bristol Zoo, and this went on for the rest of my childhood. That was pretty encouraging. My cousin was a fan too and he lent me a copy of the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation which Mum read to me, setting a pattern that continued for the next couple of years. We moved to Bath to live with my Grandparents for a while, and Mum took me to the library where the librarian laid out all the Doctor Who hardbooks they had and I got to choose one to read, and so we worked our way through them a chapter a night!

While I was young my parents were really good, we went to Longleat, went to Wapping to the original Doctor Who Shop to spend birthday money, and I'd get bought Target books for being good at school or whatever. Dad even once quened up to meet Peter Davison to get a book signed for me for Christmas.
As I got older and more obssessed, I think they both lost paitience with it. Especially so when the video collection began to grow. It must have been very wearing for all my family looking back, but we survived. Dad didn't half complain about how many videos I took to university with me for my first term though.

Anyway, it was soon clear I wasn't going to grow out of it, and I was routinely described as sad by my Dad, but Mum was always a bit more supportive about it, and even one day when she'd just come out of hospital rang me up and asked if I fancied coming over with the video of that one in Paris, which we had a happy afternoon watching.

And now, well both Mum and Dad love the new series and make a point of watching it. They rang after Rose had finished to ask what I thought of it, and we sat down together and watched The End of the World together, which was nice. Last time we watched Doctor Who all together, sadly, as they've split now, so I was pleased we got to do that.

Si xx

[Captain Tancredi]

That reminds me, Si- I think that the TV movie must have been the last time that I sat down with Mum, Dad and Grandma and we all watched the same programme (the absolute last thing I think being England drawing 0-0 with Italy in Rome to reach the 1998 World Cup). September 1996 I moved over this way to start the teacher training, and November 1997 (I think) Grandma had a stroke and subsequently went into a home.

[Andrew Curnow]

It was really my parents that got me & bruv into Doctor Who - they were tremendously irresponsible and let me (a five year old) watch such horrifying terrors as The Deadly Assassin and its stablemates!!!

Not sure about Dad, but Mum watched Doctor Who right from the very start, and although she kind of went off it during the 80s (despite the fact that at that time me & bruv had become HUGE fans - or maybe because of that fact?) she and Dad have fairly avidly followed the new season. I say fairly avidly, because she has been known to doze off mid-episode...

Dad used to watch it with me and bruv during the latter years (seasons 23 onwards) although he wasn't always that impressed. His summing up of part 1 of "Silver Nemesis" was that it seemed to have been made by people who wanted to finish off the show!!!

[Wayne]

Quick random memory:
I can quite clearly remember during the broadcast of 'The Silurians', my Dad doing an impression of the young Silurian saying: "I am the leader now!"