Who memory. That elusive trickster. What is your earliest Who memory? There is folklore in my family that I was born during an episode of Doctor Who. Ignoring the question of why my family wasn’t giving more attention to my arrival, there is one problem with that notion: my year of birth. I was born in 1961, two years before Ms Lambert started her fight to get the programme running.
So my earliest memory is An Unearthly Child? Right. Probably not. I had just turned 2 and the country was about to be gripped by the Big Freeze. And that is wrong too. The Big Freeze was at the other end of the year. I may have been poring over the papers and social media to ascertain what was going on in the world. The deaths of C S Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and someone in Dallas. And that is wrong too. I am a genius, as you may have noticed, but I wasn’t reading at the age of 2. I was probably busy chewing on a Farley Rusk.
That’s the thing about memory: to quote John Nathan-Turner, it cheats. Doctor Who memories are a particularly knotty issue. Do our memories accurately reflect what happened? I remember watching the TARDIS in a scrapyard. But it is from the Five Faces of Doctor Who season in the early ’80s. I have clear memories from The Evil of the Daleks. But is that from its original transmission? And, even if so, was it the 1967 showing or the repeat over the summer break a year later? Or is it from archive material? (Actually, this one is easier for me. I am sure that I have memories from the first showing. I remember that I saw the repeat too. And I remember remembering at the time that I had seen it before. The Evil of the Daleks is my favourite Doctor Who story.)
This is turning into a stroll down memory lane and hoping to avoid it becoming a Cheating Miss Memory Cul-De-Sac.
Because I have two adventures that I know that I saw on the BBC on original transmission.
It’s a dark stormy day (or evening); the scene is the exterior of a barn. It is snowing. The Doctor bites into a hard sweet and howls in pain.
Looking back over nearly 60 years and imagining anyone would be foolish enough to let me anywhere near running the programme, I might have written a story that sends the TARDIS team hastening back to Tombstone to get the Doctor’s tooth fixed. That would have been a bad idea and I am glad no one did it. The memory suggests that The Gunfighters and The Tenth Planet were the same story.
The first story that I am certain I saw at the time (and this is based on a snatch of memory) is The Highlanders. I have a strong, somewhat hazy memory of highlanders at the noose, about to be hanged.
A much clearer recollection is of Ben and Polly (and by extension Jamie and the Doctor) suspended over a pool about to be sacrificed. And then there was a shark!
My earliest Doctor Who memory, then, is the end of Episode One of The Underwater Menace. The garbled memories I have mentioned above hint that I was already watching by then, so that cannot be the story that got me watching. Which is a relief. It would be embarrassing if I got turned into a fan by Professor Zaroff and his Fish People.
Actually that raises a secondary question about the persistence of memory. Do we remember classic favourites because they are great or because we haven’t seen them in an age and the memory really does cheat?
Of course, that is slightly less of a factor now we have access to so much of it. Maybe someone will look into it in the future. Might be worth a look at the stories where the nature of memory is examined…
