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Overview
Being an odd kind of show, Doctor Who’s locations too are odd. This is no glamorous trip. Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, anyone? A flooded china clay pit in Cornwall? As he travels, so Nick Griffiths discovers another side to his well-trodden country, which is no less evocative. Then he goes to the pub.
As in his previous memoir Dalek I Loved You, the travel writing is backed up by Nick’s childhood reminiscences and contemporary musings. A companion website offers photographs from the trip, a Google map of the locations, and details of the nearest pub. In this innovative way, readers are invited to follow in his footsteps. Who Goes There isn’t just for Who fans, it’s a very funny book for anyone who fancies a trip off the beaten path.
Praise for Dalek I Loved You
“A very funny book for anyone who grew up wearing Tom Baker underpants. I know I did.”—David Tennant
“An unadulterated nostalgia-fest written with fun, wit and love.”—Doctor Who Magazine
“He conjures up just how mind-blowing it was for an ordinary suburban kid to be transported to a realm of danger and rampant sci-fi imaginings.”—Financial Times
“If I am getting carried away, it is the fault of Griffiths’s awfully charming memoir of boyhood and Doctor Who, with its deft evocations of eight-year-old invincibility and embarrassing school discos as well as arguments about Cybermen vs Autons or Jon Pertwee vs Tom Baker. Griffiths’s chatty, self-deprecating style is disarming.”—The Guardian
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907461132 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Legend Press |
| Publication date: | 05/28/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Who Goes There
Travels Through Strangest Britain, in Search of the Doctor
By Nick Griffiths
Legend Press Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Nick GriffithsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907461-13-2
CHAPTER 1
TRIP 1
Friday, 30 November 2007
Spearhead from Space
High Street, Ealing
It's Friday morning on the last day of November 2007. Tomorrow the Advent calendar countdown begins. For myself, aged 42, there is no sense of expectation, yet something residual hangs around my being, reminding me of the 'good old days' (which is no cliché, it's just fact).
That inner child never dies, though I had assumed it would. Surely old people can't remember back through the decades, to a time of hoops-with-sticks for toys and chipped knees? But it turns out they can.
My mum once penned a little biography, hand-written on ruled paper, a dozen pages of A5, which I sent off to a magazine for old folks, and which they disgracefully never printed. As a little girl – try picturing your mother as a child; why is it so difficult? – she would sit at the kitchen table and pretend to play the piano with her fingers, because few parents of that era could afford an actual piano. Plink plonk plink ker-chung etc.
It seemed to me the lamest of games, yet utterly charming. A child's idea of perfect fun, circa the 1930s.
Forty years later, she would try to impart a sense of wonderment to me by hanging an advent calendar above the breakfast bar, come the beginning of December. Those illustrations. That glitter. Those Christmas staples: Santa, robin, snow, reindeer, sleigh, Christmas tree – a child's shorthand for cosiness and gifts.
I'd clamber atop a kitchen stool to reach calendar height and immediately trace out the route of the days. There's 1 ... where's 2? There! And so on, until 24. Ah, 24 – often double doors! Twice the mystery. What could anything that size possibly be? (Usually a crib scene, which for the budding atheist proved something of a disappointment, swiftly trounced by the knowledge that tomorrow Santa would arrive.)
My favourite ever advent calendar had a Christmas tree as its centrepiece, containing five doors up the length of its unseen trunk. At the base, 20, up to 24 at the very top. So it offered the standard countdown – plus an extra-special last-five-days via the magical tree. Boy, did those 20s take on an added significance. Extra manipulation for a child who really needed no manipulating.
What do children get these days? Something branded – Disney, Doctor Who (very wrong, though only in this circumstance), Bratz, Power Rangers – with chocolate, like today's youth need more calories and less soul. Worse, the doors tend to be in uniform rows and columns, so the fun of seeking out the numbers is painfully diminished.
Inside, the nadir arrives. Ashaped pool of crap brown, which has to be pushed out from the back, often dislodging chocolates for a later date, which then rattle around in the packaging, and you turn it over and – oh – it's an indistinct Santa. Or perhaps a reindeer with dysentery?
Finally, the child tries to peer through the clear plastic mould to catch the black-and-white line drawing within, when they would be better off trying to peer into their hearts to find an artery unclogged by commercialism. I pity them, I really do, for they know no different.
I have tried, in vain, to find an advent calendar for my son Dylan that didn't contain confectionery, like those back in my day, when opening a glitter-encrusted flap of cardboard to discover a tiny painting of a beachball-plus-teddy meant nothing and everything. It's impossible to describe that 'Christmas feeling' because it's all about endorphins, memory and expectation – try getting a handle on those – but it's simply special.
Maybe kids today feel the same, and I'm doing them a disservice; I just don't believe you should be scoffing down chocolate at seven in the morning. Eat your sodding breakfast! Yes, even if they are Coco Pops! Don't get smart with me YOU LITTLE ...
So it's Friday morning and my mate Andy is down from Stourbridge. I have kept very few friends from those university days. Why? Partly it's mutual and partly it's because most of my lecture-mates were gits, but also because I don't believe one needs a surfeit of mates. The politics get cluttered. Gossip's fun the moment it hits, but then everyone throws in their penn'orth and the diluted tale becomes less enticing than a night in with the New Statesman. Or indeed a new statesman, someone buck-toothed with whinny, possibly a LibDem.
And here's another Bad Thing about These Days. Owing to the likes of Facebook and MySpace, everyone is obliged to collect 'friends', like I used to collect bubblegum cards. Anyone caught on Facebook with fewer than 87 'friends' becomes the runt of the litter, deemed a sad-sack with the social skills of a camel. The one with the tongue bacteria.
It's like Nazi Germany, only not quite that bad. I've been caught up in it, too. I have 58 Facebook 'friends' – the majority of whom I rarely talk to – and one of them I have met just once, briefly, which my wife had to remind me of. At least I know today that said Jamie B 'is a fan of Radio El'Boss in Obourg'. If only I knew what that meant. Or indeed cared.
Why did I accept Jamie B's friend request, when I didn't know him from Adam, or even from Jamies A, C or D? Because it added 1 to my number of Facebook 'friends'. At any age above 12, how sad is that?
Andy from Stourbridge, to his voluminous credit, is yet to succumb to the paranoia of Facebook. So we email each other, occasionally actually talk to each other on the telephone, and a few times a year get on a train and physically visit each other. It's marvelously old-fashioned.
Andy, it transpires, is a genuine, solid human being, almost six-foot-tall, and if I cut him he surely would bleed.
Memo to self: be careful with knives around Andy.
We like the same stuff: quizzes, beer/cider, pool (table not swimming, though we did that once, by mistake). Equally, he's one of the few people I know who will sit through something like Doctor Who's The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker, all six episodes and 150 minutes of it, not only failing to complain but actively engrossed. In fact, having already seen the story umpteen times, I would be the one who became occasionally distracted by the resonant ping of an arriving email upstairs.
Our plan is to visit five Doctor Who locations over the next two days, working across London from west to east. These are they:
* The Marks & Spencer (formerly John Sanders Ltd) on High Street, Ealing, where the Auton shop dummies smashed their way out of their window display, in 1970's Spearhead from Space, to massacre passing Ealing types.
* The NCP car park – I know, it's all glamour – on Midland Road, near St Pancras, which doubled as UNIT HQ in the same story. Whether this still exists, since the development of the Eurostar terminal at King's Cross, remains to be seen.
* The Favourite Doll Factory just off Holloway Road, the interior of which became the doll factory used by the Nestene Consciousness (also in Spearhead) to manufacture its plastic Autons. During the programme, dolls are seen on the production line: dolls with eyes that blink, permed hair that shines, jointed only at the shoulders and hips. Since dolls these days are expected to say "Fuck off" in three languages, perform oral sex, smoke crack and litter willfully, one can only hope that the Favourite Doll Factory has moved with the times, or its existence too must be in doubt.
* Clink Street in Southwark, where, in 1977'sThe Talons of WengChiang, the Doctor and Leela rush to aid a Cockney geezer being attacked by Chinese gang members.
* Wapping Old Stairs East, leading down to the Thames in the East End. A Victorian bobby, also in Talons, pulls a body from the water here. Handily, it's next to the Town of Ramsgate pub.
Two Who stories, then, both of which I own on DVD (and video; cough) – and which I have watched more times than feels necessary.
Since we really need to get going, having risen late after a night of gigging and unfortunately successful late-booze-seeking, there is only time to watch one fully through; we shall have to fast-forward through the other to the locations of relevance, for purposes of recognition.
I offer the guest the choice, so it's Andy who picks The Talons of WengChiang.
It's an undeniable work of genius, from the typewriter of classic Doctor Who's greatest writer, Robert Holmes. The late Holmes was also responsible for the likes of: Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, The Ark in Space, The Brain of Morbius, The Deadly Assassin, The Caves of Androzani – as well as The Two Doctors, but everyone's allowed to become jaded.
If those titles mean nothing to you, just study them and imagine.[The Brain of Morbius! Who's this Morbius and why is his brain being talked about as a separate entity? Terror of the Autons! The who? And why are they so terrifying? (The Deadly Assassin might have slipped through the net, as any assassin who isn't 'deadly' is frankly a bit shit.)
Russell T Davies, the man behind the new Who revival and no dialogue slouch himself, said this after Holmes' death: "Take The Talons of Weng-Chiang, for example. Watch episode one. It's the best dialogue ever written. It's up there with Dennis Potter." Rest assured that he's not exaggerating.
So I lay on one sofa, Andy lay on the other, we ate Eccles cakes and Wine Pastilles for breakfast – which, as adults, we have every right to do – while the Walthamstow morning spread its gloom over the outside of the house, and we cosseted ourselves in Holmes' Victoriana.
Essentially, the story is this: the Doctor (Tom Baker) and companion Leela (a savage plucked from another planet, played by Louise Jameson) land in Victorian London. There's a mutated nutter in the basement of a theatre, sucking the lifeforce from women kidnapped by his Oriental accomplice, the magician Li H'sen-Chang. The Doctor is aided by theatre impresario Henry Gordon Jago, a coward, however with a literally loquacious line in alliteration, and the estimable proper doctor, Professor Lightfoot.
The story contains the wonderfully sinister Mr Sin, the Peking Homunculus, an Eastern-garbed ventriloquist's dummy with eyes that move, limbs that work and a sharp knife – and one of the most rubbish Who monsters ever: the giant rat, which I described in Dalek I Loved You as resembling 'stock doing a runner from Carpet World'.
Here is one dialogue exchange, to give you an essence of the piece: Lightfoot: Forgive us, ma'am.
Leela (a savage, remember): For what?
Lightfoot: For being so indelicate in the presence of a lady of refinement.
Leela (to the Doctor): Does he mean me?
Oh, go on, here's another:
Lightfoot (discussing sugar in tea): And then, for example, I would say, 'One lump or two, Miss Leela?' To which you reply 'One will suffice, thank you.' Now do you follow?
Leela: Supposing I want two?
Lightfoot: Oh no no no. One lump for ladies!
Leela: Then why do you ask me?
That's Bob Holmes there, taking the pee out of social etiquette and sexism – in 1977. Back when young women wearing outer clothing that dropped below their gusset were ridiculed in the street and forced into service with the WI, laden with jam-making equipment, and ladies in bikinis were used to advertise anything from cars to fridge-freezers and beer-making kits. Oh, and blokes had perms.
Frankly, it's going to be a pleasure to follow in the sphere-prints of the man's mind's eye. But time waits for no man, the December daylight is impatient to depart and we have another DVD to watch. Spearhead from Space, starring Jon Pertwee in his debut as the Doctor, and co-starring the Autons, feature-lite plastic monsters in denim suits, looking suspiciously like shop dummies who might today inhabit Mr Byrite's window, with snap-down wrists concealing guns that kill.
That was my first-ever Doctor Who story, back when I was four-and-abit, and to say I have watched it several times since is an understatement. I'm actually quite relieved that we only have time to fast-forward to the relevant locations: the doll factory, that car park, and the iconic scene in which the Autons come to life, like Madonna in her Vogue promo, only less breasty, in a department store window.
We make notes of landmarks to watch out for – that church spire in Ealing, rising above the shops of 1970, looks particularly useful – and plan the route of our first day. Yep, we'll be going again tomorrow. I told you Andy would be easily cajoled.
One location stands out as some kind of Who-related Holy Grail: the Autons at M&S, so the route plans itself: east to west, Ealing first, then the car park off Euston Road, before travelling downwards and outwards to Clink Street near London Bridge. This leaves the doll factory and Wapping for tomorrow. With mice unavailable, these are the best-laid plans of men alone. Surely nothing can go wrong?
There is just one potential spanner in the works. We are both lovers of a genuine olde worlde boozer, something from London's past, unfettered by chrome, un-bored by loud-voiced arrogance in suits, with honest stains on walls and ceiling and an atmosphere that harks back through the ages. Andy, ever keen, has pre-researched these (on the embarrassingly useful www.fancyapint.com) and carries with him a sheath of printouts, detailing some dozen delightful pubs in the environs of our five locations. And Ealing corresponds very neatly with St Mary's Road's The Red Lion, once Britain's most popular pub name, lately superseded by The Twat & Bling.
So we leave for the tube and deepest West London, Andy enquiring whether he should take an overcoat, as if I am his mother. There is a distinct bite to the air and a sense of anticipation. We are inescapably off.
The journey ... well, it goes on forever. It is interminable. It is a ride on a merrygo-round, without the 'merry' and on the first revolution you notice the operator is having a heart attack; come revolution number nine, he's clutching his left arm, mouthing "Help!", you're shouting "Don't you bastard die!" back at him, and it's becoming painfully apparent that you're stuck on the thing.
Perhaps it's not that bad, but put it this way: I used to do a daily Central Line run to White City, when I worked in the Radio Times offices, and as I look up on reaching White City, I'm thinking we've been travelling for long enough to reach Slough, let alone Ealing.
White City is noticeably the station at which the underground train begins to go overground. Out there was once a celebrated greyhound track, and before that the stadium for the 1908 Olympics. Then the BBC came along, like an irate god with a television fixation, and clomped great buildings all over it. Dig down beneath that vast complex and you'll probably find an athlete or two sharing a grave with Mick the Miller.
We had left Walthamstow in daylight. It's dusk by the time we reach White City; the heavens are drizzling all over the train windows, forming rivulets of doom. Among too numerous other stations, we still have the Actons to go: East Acton, North Acton, West Acton – don't ask me what happened to South Acton; if you're that bothered, petition Transport for London – it's where traditionally People Who Work at the BBC live. So you imagine a Queen's-English kind of place where stiff-upper-lip types in suits mingle uneasily with crazies in colourful corduroy who suggest programmes about troubled teenagers cooking soup for gibbons in Haiti, and whose youthful idiocy has to be slapped down or we'll all become far too Channel 4. Whatever, I'm glad we're not stopping.
It has become apparent that our timetable isn't working, so after a quick discussion we knock the Midland Road NCP car park off the night's itinerary. Neither of us is gutted.
By the time we reach Ealing Broadway station, I feel like we've gone far enough west to be in sodding Washington. Yet amazingly, as we disembark, loads of other people do too. I think: haven't you got homes to go to? And then I realise: these People Live Here. In Ealing!
A schoolboy barges through a tube barrier and tromps towards us, sodden and demoralised (despite leaving Ealing) and, sure enough, it's tipping down as we exit the station and turn left towards The Mall. Immediately, a familiar sensation hits me: one of déjà vu. I'm staring at the pub across the road junction and I'm certain: I have been here before.
I voice this to Andy. "I've sat in that pub before, waiting for someone," I tell him. "I just can't remember why."
Quick as a flash, he's back at me. "Because you like beer."
It feels like wartime spirit: you're cold, you're wet, you're on foreign soil, a grunt on some god-forsaken mission, but your buddy cracks a gag that sparks the lame-ometer into life, spirits are raised and you chortle for Britain. I love that guy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who Goes There by Nick Griffiths. Copyright © 2008 Nick Griffiths. Excerpted by permission of Legend Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT PAGE,
FOREWORD,
AUTHOR'S NOTES,
TRIP 1,
TRIP 2,
TRIP 3,
TRIP 4,
TRIP 5,
TRIP 6,
TRIP 7,
TRIP 8,
TRIP 9,
TRIP 10,
TRIP 11,
TRIP 12,
TRIP 13,
TRIP 14,
TRIP 15,
TRIP 16,
TRIP 17,
TRIP 18,
TRIP 19,
TRIP 20,