Doctor Who fandom

The long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who has developed a large fan base over the years.

Doctor Who fans are sometimes referred to as Whovians, most often by the press; the term is not commonly used by fans themselves. The usage was more common among fans in the United States during the 1980s, when the Doctor Who Fan Club of America (now defunct) published the Whovian Times as its newsletter.

The earliest known use of 'Whovian' is from Flaming Carrot Comics issue number 19, when Flaming Carrot leads a combined group of Trekkies and Dr. Whovians into rebellion - note the now depreciated usage of 'Dr.'.

Fans line up for autographs at the 2006 Gallifrey One convention. Guests, left to right at table: Noel Clarke, Nicholas Briggs, Rob Shearman, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.

Fan organisations

Doctor Who fans have had a formally recognised organisation — the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (or DWAS) — since the late 70s. It has thousands of members.

File:Absorb1.jpg

William Grantham's original drawing for Abzorbaloff.

Many Doctor Who conventions are held worldwide. For many years, the largest was Panopticon, run by Dominitemporal Services. The first Panopticon was held in 1977, and the last in 2003. More recently, the Regenerations convention in Wales has had great success. In North America, the largest Doctor Who convention is Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, run by Shaun Lyon of Outpost Gallifrey. Another popular American convention is ChicagoTARDIS.

The Doctor Who Club of Australia was founded in the mid-1970s to galvanise resistance to the decision of the Australian Broadcasting Commission to cease broadcasting the programme (and was ultimately successful in having the decision overturned). In the 1980s, some US fans staged "Save Doctor Who" publicity campaigns, trying to urge their local television stations to keep airing the show.

Canada's Doctor Who Information Network (DWIN) is North America's oldest run Doctor Who fan club clocking in at 27 years as of 2007. Currently run out of Toronto, Ontario this not-for-profit organization is devoted to the celebration and promotion of 'Doctor Who' and its Fandom.

The Doctor Who Information Network (DWIN) was founded in 1980 and continues to serve fans in Canada, the USA and other countries around the world. It was one of the first Doctor Who clubs in North America, and is the longest running Doctor Who club on the continent. DWIN publishes an award winning bimonthly fanzine entitled Enlightenment, organized fan events and conventions, and supports the monthly Toronto Tavern fan gatherings.

The New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club (NZDWFC) was founded in 1988. They publish a fanzine, Time Space Visualiser (TSV), twice-yearly.

Fanzines

Perhaps the first form of organised fan activity was around fanzines - unofficial, homemade magazines celebrating the series. Generally these were typed, with hand-drawn illustrations, with the occasional photograph, and were usually photocopied or duplicated in small quantities. One of the first "'zines" was Tardis, around which the DWAS was organised. Other zines from the first decade of fandom included Gallifrey, Oracle, Skaro, Shada and Frontier Worlds.

When video recording was in its infancy, much of the content of the first fanzines was devoted to documenting plots and characters. The success of Marvel's Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine - DWM), providing a professional source of reference, meant that fanzines began to move to concentrate more on opinion - fan reviews of stories, debate, and letters. In these pre-internet times, most fanzines had active letters pages, which were the main conduit for debate around Doctor Who, especially with geographical spread of so many fans. The need to find new, original content meant that fanzines began to look closer at the series, subjecting stories and characters to ever-deeper analysis. Nerdish to some, for many this was one of the key aspects of fanzines, providing detail and discussion unavailable through more "official" channels.

As technology developed, so did fanzines. A move from photocopying to offset litho printing in the early 1980s allowed the bigger selling fanzines to improve print quality, although lower-circulation titles continued to use photocopying for many years after this. Bath-based Skaro was one of the first fanzines to be professionally typeset, but by 1990 desktop publishing allowed most editors to do their own typsetting, with some achieving professional results.

The mid 1980s has been described by some fans as "the golden age of A5 fanzines", as this period saw an explosion of activity, particularly in the UK. Although the enthusiasm of some editors could not be matched by their resources and many fanzines failed to see a second issue, some of the most popular zines appeared then, including Queen Bat, Star Begotten, Paradise Lost, Spectrox, the Black and White Guardian, Cygnus Alpha, Five Hundred Eyes, Eye Of Horus (in print between 1983-85 and online since 2004) and Purple Haze.

Format seemed to play a disproportionate role in how a fanzine was perceived, with divisions appearing between the cheaper-looking A5 fanzines and the glossier, more professional A4 "pro-zines" such as The Frame and Private Who. The news-zine DWB (later Dreamwatch) managed to straddle this divide, sometimes controversially, combining a professional A4 magazine format with some of the anarchism and disrespect for authority of the underground.

To a large extent, today fanzines have been replaced by websites and discussion boards, but a few do still exist. Many of them are published by fan clubs including the DWAS zine Celestial Toyroom, (which is the latest version of a number of DWAS fanzines which began with the fanzine TARDIS in the 1970s), the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club zine Time-Space Visualiser (TSV) which has been in existence since 1987, and the DWIN fanzine Enlightenment which has been published six times a year since 1983. Other individuals and groups still produce fanzines as well such as the highly popular, British-based, Black Scrolls Magazine, which has the distinction of being professionally printed and entirely in colour. Black Scrolls was the first prozine to offer a multimedia CDROM on its cover in 2005, featuring interviews with actors, Who-related art, a back issue archive and an alternative voice-over commentary for one of the episodes. Many fanzines still take the time-honoured route of printing and distributing their zine by mail, but many now distribute their fanzine as downloadable and printable PDFs - finally removing what was often the main cause for a fanzine's closure, the cost of printing and distribution. Fanzines have often been described as a magazine produced for love, not money. Now only love for the subject is needed ...

Many professional Doctor Who writers, for both the current TV series and the books, began their careers writing for fanzines, including Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, Matt Jones, Marc Platt, Gareth Roberts, Clayton Hickman, David Howe and Stephen James Walker.

Celebrity fans

The series has a devoted global following of people from a range of backgrounds.

Some fans have ended up working creatively on the television series. One of the most prominent examples is the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams, who wrote or co-wrote several television scripts (The Pirate Planet, City of Death and Shada) and was script editor of the original series' seventeenth season. Adams had been a fan since the first season, and made two attempts to pitch a script for Doctor Who in the early 1970s before his first serial was commissioned.

Other celebrity fans have donated to the show in alternative ways. For example, the Panini publication The Complete Seventh Doctor (p47) lists singer Bob Dylan as a "great fan", such that he permitted his music to be used in the opening moments of season twenty-five without royalty. (Although Dylan's music was not in the event used). William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times newspaper from 1967 until 1981, publicly declared his enjoyment of Doctor Who on an edition of the BBC's current affairs series Panorama in 1980. Prompted by this, the actor and dramatist Emlyn Williams admitted in the pages of The Times that he too was a keen follower of the series.

Celebrity fans include Queen Elizabeth, comedians Jon Culshaw, David Walliams, Mitch Benn, Peter Kay, Mark Gatiss, Stewart Lee, Matt Lucas,Toby Hadoke and Wil Anderson; actors David Hewlett, Eric McCormack, and Elizabeth Hurley; Simpsons creator Matt Groening, science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, graphic novelist and fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, horror novelist Brian Keene, and science-fiction writer and critic Harlan Ellison.

From the world of sport, cricketers Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch, footballer David Beckham, and from the music industry US heavy metal band Slipknot, Omar & Cedric of At the Drive-In/The Mars Volta, Jamie Lenman of UK band Reuben, Welsh hip-hop band Goldie Lookin Chain, Jon Spencer of the US garage rock group Blues Explosion, Paul & Phil Hartnoll of UK techno duo Orbital, singer and actress Toyah Willcox, and singer Meat Loaf.

See also

• Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who
• Doctor Who in America
• Doctor Who in Australia

External links

• The Web Guide to Doctor Who — includes links to many fan sites