Shit! It's a Doctor Who post.

 I'm a fan of Doctor Who. But I'm not part of the fandom. I like horror movies, but I'm not a horror movie expert. Because I've seen the experts, seen the fans. And I'm not like them. 

I watched Doctor Who occasionally as a child. I just about remember the thrill of The Leisure Hive being filmed on the shingle of Brighton beach. The Doctor and Romana, two miles away from my actual house! I recognised where they were. The only other people who felt like this lived in quarries. Stig of the Dump would have been made up. 

But I wasn't a massive fan. It didn't fire my imagination the way Robin of Sherwood or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did. Even Richard O'Sullivan, as Dick Turpin, was more my sort of thing. Dickie O'Sullivan, all five foot eight of him, last seen sauteing onions in a bistro with a one-armed dishwasher, was more relatable in his tricorn hat and knee-boots (I was a big Adam Ant fan), than goggle-eyed Tom Baker, his grin like a busted zip, his scarf a tripping hazard in any galaxy. My friend, David, was a super fan, and at the time I thought there was something distasteful about it. His mum made him Doctor Who jumpers. He went to Who Conventions. He had a Tardis. Not a real one. On one level, I was probably jealous of the sheer amount of money he had at his disposal - I had barely enough to get a 9p 2000AD each week - but equally, I think I knew it was not cool. This solitary hobbyism - collecting figurines, having Target books of episodes you'd never seen and, worst of all, keeping your comics in pristine plastic bags and not reading them - was not likely to endear you to girls. It was stunted and childish and something else I couldn't quite put my finger on, something I feared might be catching. 

When the show came back in 2005 I was ready for it. I wanted to write things by then, and this seemed to be right in my zone of interest: fast, clever, populist, difficult, easy, scary, full of proper acting and big ideas, and with a massive demographic reach. Christopher Eccleston wasn't like the job-lot of bootleg Flying Pickets the previous doctors had been, he was a proper thesp. He had a crew-cut and a donkey jacket and looked like he might turn nasty after a couple of pints. Billie Piper, previously from a Smash Hits advert ("Pop") and some knock-off Spice Girl b-sides, was a revelation. She was brilliant, grounding the show so the space bits became more spacey, more alien. Kitchen sink sci-fi - clever boy, Russell. I've stuck with it since, and I now adore the older Whos too (though mainly the Pertwee/ Baker ones). It's all glorious stuff. 

Except when it isn't. Doctor Who is often shit. It's been going sixty years and it's been many different things and some of those things have not been very good. And, as a fan, I reserve the right to bitch about it. If your fave band made a duff record, you'd go "Well that's not very good, is it?" But you'd hope the next one was better. It's the same thing. There's never been an iteration of the doctor I didn't think was viable. I don't love them all equally, but I don't dismiss any of them. Colin Baker was hamstrung from the start. Sylvester McCoy, got better once he stopped being a knock off Paddy Troughton (they're all knock off Paddy Troughtons, really). Jodie had that cumbersome "fam" to weigh her down, but still managed episodes that bear re-watching. 

I'm loving Ncuti Gatwa's doctor, even while I'm not loving what Rusty Davies is having him do. This too shall pass, though - unless poor returns mean Disney grind the show into the dirt - the Doctor will endure. The Doctor abides, man. 

Unless the fans have their way, of course. 

I've dipped my toes into the pool of horror-fandom and nearly lost my anklet. There are gurus, there are gatekeepers, there are tireless collectors, there are self-appointed experts, and there are literally endless hot takes, a sea of "can I just shock yous" and "here's why you're wrongs" and all argued forever on every iteration of social media. It's a full time job and they seem imbued with diabolical energy. And they're not a patch on the Doctor Who fans. 

The Doctor Who fans are an oroborous, continually feeding off, glutting on, bad-feeling, resentment, entitlement, one-up-manship, intellectual posturing, pedantry, more entitlement, and good old fashioned sexism and racism. Homophobia is not as prevalent for some reason*. But it's there too. 

What happened to Doctor Who fans? I can't even blame the internet for this one - and I usually blame the internet for everything - they've always been like this. There's the famous footage of a gimlet-eyed teenage Chris Chibnall, in a Ben Elton suit and lemon tie, rounding on the hapless Pip and Jane Baker, who seem to be unable to process the fact that self-professed fans of the show aren't genuflecting before them and, in fact, seem to think they're a bit shit and they could do a much better job. Chibnall got his chance, and he proved every bit as popular as Pip and Jane Baker. 

Doctor Who fans hate Doctor Who. There's a platonic solid version of the program out there in some alternative universe - probably starring them - that might just satisfy them, but nothing anyone could do in this world will meet their exacting demands. It does nobody any good. Russell T Davies at first ignored them to avoid being pulled in a million different directions. Now he actively goads them, to the potential detriment of the show. He doesn't want to give them anything they want even if it means throwing a lot of babies - space babies! - out with the bath water. Some of the fans want it to be 2006. Some of them want it to be 1976. A lot of them hated a woman being the Doctor and don't mind saying it. A lot of them are not quite saying they hate the doctor being black and queer, because they know they can't get away with racism and homophobia, but sexism is somehow still vaguely acceptable in the fandom. 

Russell T seems to have gone on quite a journey with his ideas for Doctor Who. When he first brought the series back the Doctor was battle-scarred, guilt ridden, angry and grieving. He was the last of his race - which was great because that got rid of loads of historical baggage - he was just this lonely man, drifting through the universe, looking for trouble and finding it. Now it looks like he's shaping up to be God. 

He's fighting a pantheon of villains with cosmic powers. He doesn't know where he's from, he's no longer a Time Lord, and he just breathed life into a butterfly, like Yaweh into Biblical Adam. And to hear Davies and Moffat talk about the Doctor, and how they have to keep raising the stakes because he's an alien super-genius who can easily out-think every situation, seems utterly wrong-headed to me. The Doctor should be small. They should not be taken seriously. They should be subversive. They should never reveal their hand. They should bleed and falter and be fallible. The Doctor should be dead a thousand times. He relies on people making heroic sacrifices to save him, even when it doesn't make sense ("Midnight"). They should be guilty, they have a lot of blood on their hands. Their charisma draws people to them, but it should be human-sized charisma - the coolest person you've ever met. Make them any bigger and they become a monster. I don't want The Doctor to become all-powerful. The last time Davies was handing out the super powers he gave them to Rose. Very wise. 

Also, it might be good to write an actual story, Russell. It's all very well having lots of fun ideas, but you need a spine to hang them on. Both Space Babies and The Devil's Chord were just so much stuff, flung at a wall. Moffat's Boom had a story. It had tension. It had cause and effect. It required, as usual, a human being to intercede on The Doctor's behalf. It had the healing power of love, like that episode where James Corden stops becoming a Cyberman because he loves his little boy, or something. (Sad look out for ever other Cyberman ever, though.) It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty bloody good. The Doctor defenseless, working out ways for other people to help him, but relying on those people to come through. Classic Doctor. Gold star. (No longer kills Cybermen).   

I've written a very long essay about Doctor Who. Like some sort of fan. But I'm not a fan. I'm interested in Doctor Who - it's a sci-fi show full of weird ideas and is a barometer for change over the sixty years its run. That is, at least, interesting. But I'm not bothered about arguing beneath the line on Den of Geek with some anonymous troll. I'm not interested in head-canon. I don't know what head-canon is. I don't have a favourite episode, or even a favourite Doctor, really. And if I picked a few it would be exactly the ones you'd think I'd like.** And while I get annoyed by people going it's "for nerds" and "it's a kid's show isn't it?" (it isn't, really, and it hasn't been one since about 1972) I'm also not going to side with people who spend their lives dedicated to it and who really believe if people listened to them they could save Doctor Who. From what? It's still here and it's looking spritely for a pensioner. You want it to be like it was when you were a kid, and that's not the show's fault. You just got old. A clone of Tom Baker in question mark collars fighting a roll of bubble-wrap isn't going to change that. 

*I'm being disingenuous, obviously. 

**Fine. Pertwee, Baker 1, Eccleston, Smith, Capaldi. Happy?