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beamjockeyHere's a puzzle for the Doctor Who scholars.
I had a kind of indirect exposure to The Doctor very, very early in the history of the show. Allow me to explain.
My dad was born in a small town in Scotland. He moved to Rochester, New York when he was about 11. By the Sixties, he was living in Detroit.
Kindly relatives in the Auld Country, when they were finished reading the Sunday tabloids, would bundle them up and mail them across the Atlantic to my grandfather in Rochester. He enjoyed reading about football and other news of Scotland.
When he was finished, Grandpa would bundle up the tabloids and mail them to my father in Detroit.
When my father was finished, I got to read them. I cared nothing for football, then or now, but I loved comic strips.
Thus I became a fan of the comics in the Sunday Post. I understand Oor Wullie still sits on his bucket every Sunday, and The Broons are still going out to the But 'n Ben. Puzzling out the Scots dialect was a challenge for my grade-school reading skills, but Li'l Abner and Pogo had prepared me to succeed.
The Sunday Mail also carried comics; I believe I first encountered Andy Capp there.
There's a memory that's bugging me. I recall that the Mail ran a comic strip, for only a few weeks, that featured a dumpy-looking scientist with unruly black hair, and strange-looking robots. I was intrigued. Eventually I came to understand that this strip was a parody of a TV show called Doctor Who, to which the papers occasionally referred, and that the robots were Daleks. I can't recall whether they were called Daleks in the strip.
Unlike, say, Supercar --to which I was addicted around this time-- Doctor Who was not one of the shows seen in the U.K. that was available on our screens in the U.S. I probably didn't see the real thing until the mid-1970s.
Wikipedia tells me that the Daleks were introduced in December of 1963, and that they became quite popular.
So: What was the parody comic strip I read in the Sunday Mail? Who drew it? When did it appear?
Surely every detail of Doctor Who, and the ephemera surrounding it, has been documented somewhere on the Web. Someone must know the answers to these questions.
I had a kind of indirect exposure to The Doctor very, very early in the history of the show. Allow me to explain.
My dad was born in a small town in Scotland. He moved to Rochester, New York when he was about 11. By the Sixties, he was living in Detroit.
Kindly relatives in the Auld Country, when they were finished reading the Sunday tabloids, would bundle them up and mail them across the Atlantic to my grandfather in Rochester. He enjoyed reading about football and other news of Scotland.
When he was finished, Grandpa would bundle up the tabloids and mail them to my father in Detroit.
When my father was finished, I got to read them. I cared nothing for football, then or now, but I loved comic strips.
Thus I became a fan of the comics in the Sunday Post. I understand Oor Wullie still sits on his bucket every Sunday, and The Broons are still going out to the But 'n Ben. Puzzling out the Scots dialect was a challenge for my grade-school reading skills, but Li'l Abner and Pogo had prepared me to succeed.
The Sunday Mail also carried comics; I believe I first encountered Andy Capp there.
There's a memory that's bugging me. I recall that the Mail ran a comic strip, for only a few weeks, that featured a dumpy-looking scientist with unruly black hair, and strange-looking robots. I was intrigued. Eventually I came to understand that this strip was a parody of a TV show called Doctor Who, to which the papers occasionally referred, and that the robots were Daleks. I can't recall whether they were called Daleks in the strip.
Unlike, say, Supercar --to which I was addicted around this time-- Doctor Who was not one of the shows seen in the U.K. that was available on our screens in the U.S. I probably didn't see the real thing until the mid-1970s.
Wikipedia tells me that the Daleks were introduced in December of 1963, and that they became quite popular.
So: What was the parody comic strip I read in the Sunday Mail? Who drew it? When did it appear?
Surely every detail of Doctor Who, and the ephemera surrounding it, has been documented somewhere on the Web. Someone must know the answers to these questions.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:11 am (UTC)Parody strips are outside my ken, but are you certain the comics you remember weren't about the actual second Doctor and the actual Daleks? Because there were such comics. Well, I'm certain there were 1960s Doctor Who comics; I'm not certain the Daleks were in them, because the Daleks have always been copyrighted separately.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:30 am (UTC)I think it was too jokey to be the real thing, but let's not rule out the idea.
I seem to remember that the character wore an overcoat, or something like it. Does that sound like the second Doctor?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 02:30 am (UTC)https://www.google.com/search?q=second+doctor&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=s5rGUPbxBqzh0wHp7IGgBw&ved=0CEUQsAQ&biw=1440&bih=700
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:32 am (UTC)Is Nicholas Whyte
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 02:08 am (UTC)Tim
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:50 am (UTC)However, I could find no indication either on tardis.wikia.com or en.wikipedia.com that TV Comic was ever bundled with any newspapers, or that any of its strips were separately published in papers. But, it might not be beyond conception that some issues of TV Comic somehow found the way into your grandfather's newspaper shipments.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 02:45 am (UTC)According to Wikipedia, Doctor Who ran in US syndication in the early 1970s with the Jon Pertwee serials, but didn't do well, in part because some stations didn't treat it as a continuing serial and aired episodes in haphazard order. The popular PBS run began in 1978, with Tom Baker episodes.
But I distinctly remember seeing a tiny bit of one of the Pertwee Auton serials, either Spearhead from Space or Terror of the Autons, sometime in the 1970s and being sufficiently freaked out that I didn't watch Doctor Who again for a long time. I'm not sure when it was, though.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-13 07:50 am (UTC)It's not like you to seriously ask silly questions.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 03:10 pm (UTC)http://themagicwhistle.blogspot.com/2012/02/british-mad.html
no subject
Date: 2012-12-11 03:35 pm (UTC)Contact:
http://paulscoones.blogspot.com/
Good luck!