Man vs Relative Dimensions in Space

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blue Box)

Let me start by talking a bit about my earliest memories.  I must have had a menagerie of stuffed animals, including Papa Bear, Baby Bear, and Stacey the elephant.  (I think I also wanted to call my new baby sister Stacey, but as I was a young'un of three-and-a-bit years, I was outvoted.)  I also became aware of television.  In particular, two specific images.  One of them sad, and one scary.

I'm pretty sure I saw a news report about John Lennon's death.  It sounds weird now that I put it to words, but I have a vague memory of seeing a news anchor talking with a picture of a man and the word "LENNON" in a banner somewhere.  (A quick search of the YouTube gives me an idea of what I might have seen, but I won't post it here.  I'm not going to dwell.)  I'm pretty sure I didn't understand what it meant.  Maybe I felt sad.  I'd like to think I did.

The other memory I had of television was this: a man gets green slime on his hand that slowly turns him into a monster while he freaks out about his crazy green monster hand.  Yes, my parents got me to watch Doctor Who.  And I haven't been the same since.  Okay, so I didn't really get into watching it until a few years down the line, but those early memories sparked my interest in it.  It was scary, it was fun, but most importantly, it was weird.  Much has been said by others about the idea that American TV was like small-scale movies, while British TV was like large-scale plays.  Maybe that was part of the "weird" aesthetic of Doctor Who and the other occasional British shows I caught glimpses of here and there (see also: Fawlty Towers).  Also, though I couldn't properly express it, I was always baffled by the use of film for exterior shots and videotape for interior shots (a practice that Doctor Who used more-or-less continually until 1986.)

The Dallas PBS station showed it on late Saturday nights, that weird netherspace where they didn't have any official PBS programming and so just threw whatever they could get their hands on at the wall.  They also aired each story in "movie" format, with the occasional bad edit to reveal the serialized nature for those paying attention.  This had the advantage of being like a new sci-fi feature film every week, but combined with the late night time slot, it meant that I would have to stay up until midnight or later to see the story through.  And if it was a six-parter, forget about it.  (There's plenty of Jon Pertwee stories I never saw the end of, and I still don't know how I managed to keep it together during "Talons of Weng-Chiang".)  Oh, but when I got to the end, that "electronic scream" that to most viewers meant "scary cliffhanger" was, to me, one of the best sounds ever.  Even though it was the end of an adventure, what an adventure it was!  And Tom Baker, the guy with the scarf (because in those early days it was always "the guy with the scarf", even when it may have been Jon Pertwee) would show off that big toothy grin, promising even more next week.

I didn't always get to watch it, of course.  Later, when we were older, my sister would want to watch Saturday Night Live.  I did my rebellious older brother duty by calling it "Saturday Night Lame" and getting into arguments about it.  And even before that, there were times when I wasn't as obsessed just plain forgot it was on.  It was after one of these gaps that I stumbled upon it again, or, rather, something that seemed like it. The music style had changed, I didn't recognize any of the cast, and who was this blond fella with the celery in his lapel, and why were they calling him Doctor?  My mind would soon be blown, but more on that another time.

(And to tie it all together and make it relevant to the day of posting, Howard da Silva, who gave recap narrations on the episodic US broadcasts in the '70s also played Benjamin Franklin in the film version of 1776.  Truly, the cosmos works in mysterious ways.)