About Time, Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles’ masterful six volume (and rising) set of guides to Doctor Who tread a fine line between catty rumour and gossip and academic level analysis. The essay ‘How Important Were the Books?’ from the first volume of the series, is a particularly fine example of the quality of their writing. In the essay they explore how the literature of Doctor Who both informed and intellectually shaped fandom. They convincingly suggest that a particular generation of fans brought up before the availability of videos or DVDs and when repeats were rare to non-existent, relied instead on the Target novelisations of the stories to complete their knowledge of the history of the and mythology of the series. They go further to suggest that unlike fans of Star Wars or Star Trek, fans of Doctor Who were for the most part deprived of toys, making the books even more crucial to the fan in developing an imaginative connection with the series. This literacy, they suggest, is one of the reasons that a good number of Doctor Who fans become academics or creative writers. You can see this when considering how easily the new series has recruited writers, directors, producers and actors from within its own fan-base. Indeed a surprising number of the most esteemed television writers of the last twenty years are self-professed Doctor Who fans and many are, or have been, actively involved in the series itself.

Wood and Miles’ essay chimed particularly with my own experience of growing up with the series. Being a fan of Doctor Who during the 1980s and 1990s has given me the critical ammunition and imagination to achieve three degrees including a doctorate. And here’s how:

The ‘Target’ novelisations were a long running set of adaptations of Doctor Who adventures that ran from the early 1970s until the end of the original series in the late 1980s. Most were direct retellings of the stories based on the scripts and a few photographs and most were extremely simple. As the series reached its end, however, the novels became more complex, the adaptations of stories such as ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ and ‘The Curse of Fenric’, for example, were far richer than had been seen before. Writers such as Ian Briggs, Marc Platt and Ben Aaronovitch enhanced and added to the televised stories, played with different narrative techniques and built up a new mythology for the series that still survives today. As I grew older, the novels grew with me. When the videos began to be released I collected them, but the novels already had me in their grasp.

By the time I was moving through GCSEs and A-Levels, the television series had finished. Oddly, this had a positive effect on the literary side of Doctor Who. As Wood and Miles suggest, the ‘New Adventures’ series of original novels published by Virgin in the 1990s were an indication that the target of Doctor Who merchandise was getting older. Without the television series fandom was getting older so the New Adventures were pitched at the mid-to-late teen market. At the same time, the Doctor Who Magazine became more reflective and more critically dense. As I was preparing to start my first degree the magazine included articles about genre, canonicity, structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Without a current series to preview, review and promote, the writers of the magazine became more ingenious, more inventive with their analyses of Doctor Who. In the mid 1990s this was a useful preparation for an English degree. Although the articles lacked academic rigour, the application of critical theory to a series that I knew back-to-front was both inspiring and informative. At university, Doctor Who and the literature surrounding it in the 1990s and early 2000s became the sweetener that helped the sometimes impenetrable concepts I was struggling with go down more easily.

All this is perhaps analogous to J K Rowling’s approach to her Harry Potter books. As her readership aged, her novels increased in complexity and emotional depth (if not in quality of plot). Likewise my academic development was coincidentally matched by a development in the critical qualities of Doctor Who writing. But with the revival of the television series a curious, but not unexpected thing happened. To cater for the new younger audience, the magazine understandably reverted back to promoting the programme in simple and uncomplicated articles oddly often mimicking the style and language of the show – reading some of the articles I can still detect the stylistic quirks of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. The depth of the novels published by Virgin and BBC Books was replaced with a shorter form, also closer in texture and format to the television episodes.

But the popularity of the series also gave rise to a corresponding area of academic research in Britain and America. Academics such as James Chapman, Matt Hills and Piers Britton have all produced recent analyses of the series that consider Doctor Who in the light of the 2005 revival. To this list I would add Wood and Miles’ guides (particularly the revised editions) – though they are unburdened by the need for academic rigour. Prior to this, Doctor Who had rarely been seen as an academic subject of itself. Aside from the famous and famously impenetrable Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, a study written by Manuel Alvarado and John Tulloch in 1983, the series had mostly been written about as a part of a wider discussion of cult texts, fandom or the history of the BBC. The 2005 series coincided with a growing appreciation of cult television as a subject worthy of a case-by-case analysis, so the materialisation of a sub-discipline entirely devoted to Doctor Who is hardly surprising. Once again, however, for me wrestling with a doctorate, it was a case of the right place at the right time.

When preparing for my doctoral viva on a subject unrelated to Doctor Who I found myself reading these recent academic studies. I found them an extremely useful way of revising some familiar branches of critical theory and of learning entirely new theories. As before, my nerdy, all-encompassing knowledge of the series made reading these critiques much easier than it would have been if they were focussing, for example, on Beowulf or an obscure 17th century witchcraft play. So – fully armed with the now comprehensible critical theory, I was able to approach my own subject with more confidence.

I agree with Wood and Miles’ thesis that Doctor Who is a series that both encouraged and fostered literacy. It didn’t teach me to read – but it taught me to understand the depths and nuances of literature, film and television. Crucially it also made me immune from the opinion that still infects the academic world: that television is somehow a disposable and irrelevant cultural form. Television studies have always been treated with disdain and ignorance by both the general public, the press and by academics in other disciplines. The reaction in the 1980s to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text is a testament to this – although the study was indeed dense and complicated, criticism to it seemed to focus on why such a study should take place of a mere cult television series. But just as the academic study of film has now rightfully become a branch in its own right – the study of television continues to gain a unique identity. The recent surge in ‘Doctor Who studies’ and the success of the work that comes out of it can only support this movement and can only help to continue the tradition of indoctrinating fans into the academic world.