April 19th, 2013 9 comments

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Fifty Years in Time and Space A Short History of Dr Who

Fifty Years in Time and Space: A Short History of Doctor Who

Available from www.stmarkspress.com

Doctor Who has been a television institution for fifty years and is the longest running science fiction series in the world.

Beginning as a filler between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury, it was only expected to last for thirteen episodes. It soon became a national and international smash hit and is now the BBC’s flagship drama programme.

Fifty Years in Time and Space tells the story of Doctor Who from 1963 to 2013, covering the action on screen and behind the scenes.

Whether you’re a serious fan or new to the series, travel with the Doctor through half a century of change in British culture. Battle the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, and the Weeping Angels! Find out about the Doctor’s name; regeneration; the series’ representations of the Second World War and the Cold War; the cancellation crises of 1985 and 1989; the TV movie; the Dalek films of the 1960s and Doctor Who’s triumphant resurrection in 2005.

Board the TARDIS and relive fifty years of a television legend!

The author: Frank Danes studied English and American Literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Victorian Literature: Teachers’ Resource (Cambridge University Press) and is Head of English at King’s Ely in Cambridgeshire. His favourite Doctors are Patrick Troughton, Matt Smith and Tom Baker.

Frank writes:

This book aims to be a guide to fifty years of the series for those who like Doctor Who and want to learn more about it. It aims to be of interest to readers who enjoy the post 2005 revival and want to know more about the original series. I also hope it will be of interest to the die hard, knowledgeable fans who, perhaps lifelong fans like me, devour anything about Doctor Who that they can get their hands on. It is inevitably a personal reading of the series and is coloured by my own critical preferences: any book about the programme which doesn’t demonstrate the author’s own views would, I think, be very dull.

I was born in 1965 – on a Saturday, in fact, and just in time to watch ‘Galaxy Four’ episode two. Some of my earliest memories are of watching the series. I must have seen ‘Seeds of Death’ (1968) and ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967), although I have no memory of them, as I thought the Silurians in ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ (1970) were Ice Warriors and I was not only able to remember the Daleks when they reappeared in ‘Day of the Daleks’ (1972) but was able to correct a nursery worker at my pre-school when she erroneously called the Marx toy Dalek, which graced our playgroup, ‘a robot’. My brother and I went down the road to watch the programme in colour in the early seventies, at a time when a colour television cost something in the region of £2000 in today’s money; we would return to tell our father, who watched in black and white, what colour the monsters were (usually green). I co-edited a fanzine in the 1980s, did some professional writing, got a degree in English and American Literature and became a secondary school English teacher. I’ve always been a Doctor Who fan even as I have become (in script editor Terrance Dicks’ words) older, fatter, greyer, but not noticeably wiser.

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