You Were Expecting Someone Else 9 (Longleat, Doctor Who Monthly, the Peter Davison Comics)
Longleat, by any measure, is an archeology project. Certainly I have nothing that could accurately be called a memory of it, having been one and not there. But grasping about for equivalencies proves oddly unsatisfying. It was a major convention in 1983, yes. In this regard, it was a known quantity. But analogy is terribly unhelpful here. To compare it to the 2012 “official convention” in Cardiff – an event I just escaped from a few hours ago at time of writing – is pointless. The Cardiff convention was a slickly professional affair and, more to the point, was executed by a BBC that had full mastery of the concept of fandom and its relationship with Doctor Who. Its slickness was in most regards cover for the real key fact, which is that it was an official convention in every sense of the word – a convention that actively promoted an official narrative of what the series was and how it was loved.
Longleat, by and large, was the opposite. If anything it marked the point where it became possible to talk about alternatives to the official narrative in a meaningful sense. But to understand this we need to move over and look at Doctor Who Magazine, at this stage called Doctor Who Monthly. We talked a bit about the rise of the fan industrial complex towards the end of the Graham Williams era, but by late 1983 it was in full effect. Starting with Season Nineteen the magazine offered a thoroughly familiar and reliable structure. First it would leak scattered tidbits of information about a story in its Gallifrey Guardian column, which offered a smattering of Doctor Who news items. Then, in the last issue that would hit the stands prior to a story’s transmission, a one page preview spelling out much of the premise would be released. Finally, usually about two issues later, the magazine would run a review of the story, typically positive and never flamingly negative. Some months thereafter would come things like the end of season poll and the periodic John Nathan-Turner interview that would further cement the official “end consensus” on a story.
What’s important to stress about this structure, though, is that the information was carefully tuned to regulate and shape how the stories were watched and remembered. This is most obvious with a story like Earthshock, where, of course, Nathan-Turner’s insistence on keeping the return of the Cybermen a secret required that the story be previewed in a manner almost but not entirely unrelated to what the story was actually about.
In other words, Doctor Who Magazine had become a major part of formulating a paratext of Doctor Who that resulted in a highly complex structure for interaction with the series. This contextualizing of the current series was reinforced by an active effort to historicize the past of the series, with features not only covering the plots of long-lost Hrtnell and Troughton stories but also including interviews with writers and directors of past stories that served to educate the reader about the material reality of television production.…
