Clive James: Doctor Who was just for the fans The BBC spent a whole week celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Programmes without number were devoted to his continuing fame. Heaven help you if you had never crouched behind the sofa being scared out of your dressing gown by the croak of Daleks. It was assumed that the whole nation, perhaps the whole world, had the Whovian experience in common. The concomitant assumption was that if you hadn't, you didn't exist. Never a great fan of the show myself, I was saved for civilisation by the fact that both my daughters went through a period of intense watching, back about the time when Tom Baker was the star. Sometimes I wandered in and picked up a bit of the lingo. Exterminate! I can still do it. The true fans, of course, could do it all. Some of the early fans have never stopped doing it: they dress up and talk semi-scientific double-talk about a plasma separation in the fabric of reality. Whole generations were inducted into time travel. But the time travel that counted was the prescience shown by the show's initial producers, who somehow knew in advance that the programme would rope in whole families at one go. If they had been wrong we would never have heard of them. But they were right, and now they are legendary behind the screen, just as their chief character became legendary on it. Most impressive of these back-stage geniuses was Verity Lambert. In an enthralling one-off play called An Adventure in Space and Time (BBC Two), Lambert, played by Jessica Raine, shared centre stage with the BBC's then head of drama, Sydney Newman, played by Brian Cox. A Canadian hustler making his way in a world of English gentlemen, Newman was pretty impressive himself, and Brian Cox made sure that the character showed all the flamboyance for which he has been long remembered: as a bad-taste fashion statement, Cox's moustache echoed his cravat and vice versa. But Newman, from the point of view of the Beeb's hidebound establishment, was merely a foreigner. Lambert was a woman. I met her years later and was knocked out by her combination of creative brains and funny charm. She needed all that and more when she was fighting to get Doctor Who on the air: the Beeb's bosses, though not as uninspired as most of them are today, were firmly stuck in the mud. She had to fight Newman as well, but the script (by Mark Gatiss) bravely showed how Newman's decision to re-shoot the first episode was crucial: he wanted to scare the kids by just the right amount. As the very first Doctor Who, David Bradley was a ringer for William Hartnell and didn't miss a nuance. It was a fine play and made me want to watch the several hundred episodes of the series that I had missed. Several of them were back on the air in the following week, running back to back in batches. The culmination of the whole binge was the worldwide transmission of a brand-new gala extravaganza called Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor (BBC One). Beamed out to cinemas equipped for 3D, here was a show that had quite enough techno dazzle even if you were watching at home. Back when the young Verity Lambert's back-combed hairdo was the latest thing, the special effects and props in Doctor Who cost fourpence, and looked it. Now they look like a million dollars per minute. In amongst the doo-dads and electronic zing, at least two versions of the hero ran about, sometimes bumping into each other. Matt Smith and David Tennant were both present. Not having been plugged into the show for several decades, I needed guidance to recognise them; but I thought that young Jenna Coleman was well up to the tradition of the charming girl companion. I felt only mild feelings of guilt about this, because, in Verity Lambert's original plan to enslave the whole viewing family, the charming girl companion was an obvious pitch at Dad, not to mention Grandpa. Billie Piper and John Hurt were there too. The show needed its lavish casting. In all other respects it was incomprehensible. But the Beeb had spent so much money that they could be excused for assuming they had scored a triumph. To rub the triumph in, there was a follow-up show on BBC Three called Doctor Who: The Afterparty. There is a long history of fizzling disaster to suggest that parties held in a TV studio never work, but the BBC, rather than learning from a mistake, always prefers to repeat it. So here everybody was, all the surviving veterans of Doctor Who since the beginning, ready to be quizzed and jollied along by Rick Edwards and Zoë Ball. Rick's main task for this event was to be keen, but to be outshone by Zoë. He accomplished this with ease. When fronting It Takes Two, the satellite show for Strictly Come Dancing, Zoë"s role is to shower the Strictly contestants with sparkling encouragement at the very time when they are suffering agonies in the boot-camp phase of their training. There is no one like her for effervescence, but here, at the Afterparty, she excelled herself. Her default phrase was "Very exciting." She would say it even in the middle of saying something else. You could imagine her saying it even if the building had caught fire. Would everyone proceed calmly to the very exciting exit area. The assembled veterans looked a bit subdued but Zoë wasn't about to let them get away with that. Are you happy? Did you enjoy that episode? Is everybody happy? Rick essayed a general statement about how the atmosphere "couldn't get any more exciting" but Zoë was ahead of him. She marched into a bunch of veteran girl companions and asked one of them, "Did you enjoy it?" The veteran girl companion said, "I'm exhausted." This response, if it meant anything, meant "No," but Zoë and Rick weren't really after answers. They were after injecting an air of conviviality into a funeral. Most of the veterans generously played along but you couldn't miss the air of regret: having once been in a show about the conquest of time, here they were in a show which reminded them all over again that time does the conquering. Doctor Who gets regenerated as a character but the rest of us will fade out. Still, there were a few laughs; and there was always Zoë, making glee compulsory even in the face of the intractable fact that the super-episode had been strictly for the fans.