Below: Christmas 2002 at the Mitre, Oxford

Below: Andrew's 'Doctor Who Times' fanzine.

This revolutionary fanzine employed a unique graphic stance amongst fanzines and an almost post punk style of writing; the artwork below speaks for itself but an example of the writing can be found in a quote from a review for 'The Twin Dilemma' (issue two) which states: "I did not like Mestor at all - he looked like a big fat Humpty Dumpty."

Note that, many years before publications such as The Radio Times and Doctor Who Magazine got in on the act, Andrew had already come up with the concept of multi covers, as per the variants of issue 1 below.

Below: Letter from Colin Baker to Andrew O'Day regarding an interview for Andrew's 'Doctor Who Times' fanzine. The interview eventually appeared in issue four.

Links to 1980s interviews from 'Doctor Who Times' and 'SFT'.

Colin Baker     Patrick Troughton Page 1, 2, 3

John Leeson     David Banks     Matthew Robinson     Dick Mills     Deborah Watling Page 1, 2, 3, 4causes of impotence and cures     Erectile Dysfunction    

Michael E. Briant Page 1, 2, 3     Janet Fielding Page 1, 2, 3

“Back in 1984 I launched my own fanzine Doctor Who Times (in A4) which soon became Sci-Fi Times (SFT in A5). Before this I had tinkered around making Blue Peter magazines with photographs cut out of the Radio Times but these were never available to the public. The thing about DWT and SFT is that they are pretty darned bad, although looking back I can see a big improvement between the first issue of Doctor Who Times and the last issue of SFT (in both production values and writing). It’s one of those things you sometimes wish you’d never done and hope there isn’t a historical record of out there (in other words, that no one else has kept their entire copies!) but at the same time is one of those things you’re so glad you did because it was part of growing up as a fan (it was a not-to-be missed experience). Those were the days we used to play with Lettraset, choosing different fonts, but which I could never position properly on a straight line. Those were the days that showed I was never destined to become an artist or a writer of fiction. Those were the days that I even got my poor Mum to write the odd book review (cited of course). And those were the days we used to interview Doctor Who cast members. For example, it was doing Doctor Who Times that led me to the Children’s Bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford to interview Patrick Troughton (and don’t I wish now that I had a photographic record of that meeting!). Granted it was a very bad interview, done by hand rather than on tape, and consisting of Yes or No answers by Troughton, rather than discussion, and made for very bad reading (humorously bad in fact). It’s the kind of interview that an 11 year old would have done. But then I was 11! It was doing SFT that led me to interview Debbie Watling and Michael E. Briant on tape in the hotel lounge at the Leisure Hive conventions in Swindon, and to interview Janet Fielding at another convention. And those were the days when I used to do a shameless rip off of the layout of Time Screen which would teach me of the need to find my own distinctive style in my academic work later in life. And those were the days of getting a fanzine table at conventions. And would I erase all that? You bet I wouldn’t.”

“Back then, when I got fanzine tables at conventions to sell SFT, I would take them out of the big box they had come back to me in from Pronta Print in Oxford. It was as much as a buzz then to see them like that in pristine condition as it was the first time Jonathan Bignell showed me the box of copies of Terry Nation when he arrived for the launch party in Oxford. SFT had taught me about the technical side of fanzine production – the difference between non-wraparound covers and wraparound ones, between A4 and A5, and the difficult process involved in getting photographs reproduced properly. And the fanzine of the 1980s was not only sold at conventions but was advertised in the pages of CT and DWB which involved designing adverts (however bad) to a specified size. The pages of CT and DWB thus made for even more fascinating reading as I could see all the other fanzine ads.”

“While most fanzines of that day were magazine type wraparounds, there were exceptions to the rule. One of my favourite ‘zines of the 1980s was actually Sonic Waves, an audio ‘zine. While part of the attraction of ‘zines was their very un-professional nature, Sonic Waves seemed to be so expertly done. So I would sit on my bed and listen to the clear and seducing voices reviewing Season 22 (1985) over background music, with their being a smooth transition into ‘examples’, audio clips from the different narratives. So, for example, there would be a transition from the review into the dramatic music accompanying the Doctor and rebels fleeing from guards in part one of “Vengeance on Varos”. So ‘zines of the day made use of different technological forms. Part of being a fan involves listening: listening to the audios of missing episodes wiped from the BBC Archives (which I did not do much), and listening to Big Finish licensed audio dramas featuring the original Doctors and companions which especially filled the gap prior to 2005 when Doctor Who was off-air.”

“What I lamented about fandom in the late 1990s was the scarcity of the fanzine. While on these pages, I have traced the shift from a mass convention such as Longleat 1983, advertised on BBC Television and where people without tickets turned up on the day to be turned away due to lack of space, to more intimate conventions, advertised mainly in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, the fanzine had largely been replaced by Internet News Pages, by author’s blogs (many of whom started out producing fanzines) and by other sites. As a result, at conventions of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I noted a distinct lack of fanzine tables, with instead tables devoted to the BBC licensed Big Finish Productions and the selling of merchandise, ranging from autographed photos, collectors cards, to videotapes (and later DVD’s), with the prominent ‘magazines’ for sale being the official Doctor Who Magazine and the In-Vision series. At the smaller Doctor Who conventions after Longleat ’83, one could experience the joy of moving from table to table at conventions, browsing through the different ‘zines (their affectionate names), and meeting people, whatever they may have thought of me. Producing fanzines were also a way of doing exactly that: meeting people. People who would produce artwork for the ‘zine. People who would provide news for the ‘zine. People who would write articles for the ‘zine. And all done not for profit (the cover prices barely covered the cost of production) but for fun.”

“However, there are still examples of fanzine activity related to Doctor Who, both from the 1990s and the 2000s. 2010 has been described as bringing a ‘fanzine renaissance’ and this renaissance includes Blue Box, Rassilon’s Rod, Panic Moon and the light-hearted Fish Fingers and Custard, with an art-work cover. Now these ‘zines can be advertised on the Internet too, such as on the Doctor Who News Page (http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-07-19T10%3A05%3A00%2B01%3A00&max-results=15 ) and Following the precedent set by on-line ‘zines such as Eyepiece, The Shooty Dog Thing, The Terrible Zodin, and the Canadian ‘zine Whotopia Fish Fingers and Custard is, for example, available as both a printed copy (like the older fanzines) or available as a PDF download, showing how newer technologies are making the fanzine available. These fanzines still bind people together and are evidence that the fanzine has not completely disappeared.”

“Earthbound Timelords: The Doctor Who Fanzine Preservation Project has as its ‘goal…to collect and archive Doctor Who print materials (especially fan and semi-professionally produced works) for the purpose of academic preservation…(due to their documentation of the series' fiction and production, as well as public/fan reaction or opinion)’(http://homepages.bw.edu/~jcurtis/dwfpp.htm ). While this is a worthwhile goal, my purpose here has been to place my own fanzine in the context of Cultural Studies and Fandom rather than to look at the significance of any type of content.”

“The description of fandom that I have given (before I gained the academic qualification of PhD) mostly relates to one British telefantasy programme, Doctor Who. But, as Matt Hills notes, “Certainly fandoms can be 'tangled' up with and between an intertextual range of objects; fans may follow the different work of certain showrunners, writers, or performers.   So to even nominate a fandom as "belonging" to one show or individual can sometimes be problematic” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t.html ). So, for example, in the late 1990s, I attended a convention called Infinity in Cardiff which was structured along genre-lines and devoted to science fiction generally and, more recently, the 10^th Planet Store in Barking has (professionally) run not only Doctor Who themed conventions but also Blake’s 7 ones (named Star One after one of that programme’s episodes), and some of the same ‘fans’ including myself have attended both. The arrival of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures will also have changed Doctor Who fandom today. The description of fandom offered here has also looked at a specific area of fandom - conventions - as opposed to what Matt Hills calls “'lone fans', or fans operating outside of what…tends to be a more narrow - or specific - strata of fandom” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t.html ). Hills writes that taking into account these ‘lone fans’ presents “a more inclusive model of fandom - not accepting that the 'real' fans…were necessarily always to be found in more visible, subcultural spaces” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t.html ). These ‘subcultural spaces’ I have described are ‘commercial conventions’, often held in hotels, where the celebrities are paid to attend either for one day or a whole weekend, and where one pays an admission fee, where one may pay for photographs of celebrities to be autographed by them, where one may pay to have professional photographs taken of one with a celebrity (though there is the opportunity to have free photographs taken with one’s own camera), and where one may pay to have dinner with a celebrity or celebrities. These ‘commercial conventions’, however, are not as rigorously policed as Longleat 1983, with its soldiers. But within these ‘visible subcultural places’, there are important observations to be made. Hills, for instance, writes that “some of the…work in fan studies has been too quick to use ‘community’ as a starting point for scholarship without interrogating the limits and blindspots associated with the very concept, or without trying to think it through more rigorously” and he notes “I’m still finding and reading new books on fandom which seem to start and end with positive assertions of fan ‘community’ support, and to be honest it frustrates me more than a little” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t.html ). There are two observations to be made here. Firstly, the mass nature of the Longleat 1983 convention meant that a sense of ‘community’ was not so evident and that it built over time. Secondly, my own experiences in fandom, even in the smaller conventions of the 1980s, as well as personal experience and observation even in the 1990s and 2000s, backs up Hills’ assertion. So while the network of conventions and sharing fanzines and videos did provide a way of meeting people, there are still problems with the ‘community support’ model. For ‘visible fandom’ is not made up by a mass but, as in the world in general, is composed of people of different ages, genders, sexualities, races, personalities, and abilities, and, in the case of ‘visible fandom’, ‘professionalized fans’ and ‘non-professionalized fans’ and fans who engage in different practices (for example, dressing up in costume at conventions). And my pages on fandom here reveal another important topic in Fan Studies, largely dealt with by scholars like Brigid Cherry: the growth of the Internet, as well as the rise of other media which has changed fandom. While I have noted negative aspects of the rise of the Internet, most notably the decline of the fanzine of the 1980s, Internet discussion groups provide almost a community of their own, and it is the Internet that productively allows Misfits Productions (Tim and James) to share their drama videos with others, from this site and others such as myspace and youtube. This is the context of Web 2.0, not a physical site but a concept which involves involvement and sharing files on the Internet.”

“There is something that is also important to consider in these pages which give an overview of Doctor Who fandom and its development: that the experiences given are of one fan (myself) who continued with fandom after Longleat 1983, both by going to further conventions and by being in a Local Group of about 8 or 9 people, and that for a fully rounded picture it would be necessary to chart the experiences and feelings of a large cross-section of fans. The stories that they too would tell (which would include not only people of different ages, gender, race, sexuality, class, and personalities, but would also include convention organizers and stewards, local group leaders, and those who had never become so actively involved in fandom so as to produce a fanzine or interview the various celebrities and production staff) are just as important. I am trying to redress this balance in a chapter for a forthcoming edited collection. Furthermore, as I have noted, these experiences are of someone who has just attended ‘commercial conventions’, and the experiences of people who have attended, say, non-commercial science fiction conventions, will be different and those who have attended both will be able to draw a different set of comparisons. The description given here is also of British conventions and experiences of American conventions would be different. Furthermore, fandom can not be described so easily through words as it involves experiences: as well as experiences I have already noted, the buzz of staying in a hotel environment, of looking around merchandise rooms at a plethora of goodies, and so on, all have to have been lived.”