How Doctor Who went out of his way to mess up my life

This week, I have been amazed and impressed by my brain's ability to repress the unwelcome or the uncool. What am I talking about I hear you ask (or am forced to ask myself, sitting in an empty room, writing on a blog devoid of readers or even the hope of readers)? No, not some dark past of parental neglect and juvenile Heroin addiction... quite the reverse in fact, parental over-indulgence and an addiction to Doctor Who.

It's been bothering me for a while. There's a picture in my Great Aunt's house of me, age 11, dressed in a cravat and cradling in my arms a model Tardis.

No, I was cool! My cerebral cortex inwardly screams: when did this happen? The answer: at home, in private, among consenting... er... well... me.

Talking to a new friend while walking up to one of my lectures last week, I inadvertently dropped the phrase: "predictable as ever", to which he responded in an undertone, "...Doctor!" Let me tell you this is the equivalent of the secret handshake among members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and I had completely forgotten, now I had a lot of explaining to do...

"Yes... er... yes... I did like it but now I... er... I gave it up. No, no, I don't want a hit! I'm over it! No... no... keep that DVD from me!"

You see, the sort of Doctor Who I liked wasn't the cool, contemporary family-viewing on a Saturday evening; the Doctor Who that can be featured on Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. No, mine was the real hardcore shit- the Doctor Who of fan-produced spin-off videos, of little newsletters and endless petitions demanding the show be returned to television. It was a bit like how I imagine it must have felt being in the Labour Party after 1979... you wanted so desperately to get the whole project back on its feet but, when it eventually was resurrected, it was nothing like you imagined... they had made it all glamorous and acceptable. You didn't want any of this!

Before Doctor Who, there was Star Trek (not so well hidden- when I was eleven these guys who were into WWF- itself, not the coolest piece of televisual entertainment- chased a friend and I around the playground, demanding we engage in what they were billing as a 'Battle of the Trekkies'. I think they all got afterschool detentions in the end). To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, I liked anything that had the promise of a laser gun in it somewhere! Science-fiction was my life and I had forgotten (for forgotten, read wilfully repressed) it all up until this week.

Around thirteen I decided to 'get cool' (or, at least, ever-so-slightly cooler... a bit like the Tory Party wanting to get progressive... it'll never really work; ideologically that's not what they do)... It worked for me after a fashion though, at the end of school my contemporaries put me in the yearbook as 'Most likely alcoholic' and also gave me a certificate for 'Clown of the year 2003'- obviously I was now a much better adjusted and more enriched member of society. In so doing, I dropped all the sci-fi nonsense- almost a requirement- but without it I don't think I would be studying literature now! Doctor Who lead on to weird and wacky Doctor Who novels which, in turn, lead me on in search of better science-fiction and fantasy, the works of Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman. Furthermore, I had wrestled, since the age of about nine or ten, with complex theoretical, moral and ethical conceptions, of time-travel or whether or not it was right to give a primitive alien race advanced technology which, along with my Catholic upbringing, contributed to my interest in philosophy...

... So, to conclude, basically, even now, silly science-fiction is still messing up life and making me pursue frivolous subjects like philosophy and literature, instead of getting a real job (or a qualification that might lead to a real job).

Curse you, Doctor!