It’s 1981 and I’m a four-year-old Doctor Who fan crossing the red dirt of the Nullarbor with my family.
We are a long, long way from the nearest TV. And yet, who is waiting for us after an eight-hour drive to the next roadhouse? Doctor Who himself.
Tom Baker — the fourth Doctor — is beaming toothily from a large poster across the roadhouse counter, urging visitors to Keep Australia Beautiful. He would continue the celebrity message in a series of specialised mini-episodes tied to the local environmental push.
That oddball campaign is but one connection between Australia and a very British TV legend — one that this month celebrates 60 years on the box.
Doctor Who’s original theme tune was created by Australian composer Ron Granier; the writer of the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, was Melburnian Anthony Coburn; and, for a while in the 80s, the good Doctor even travelled with an Australian companion, Tegan Jovanka, played by Janet Fielding.
This bond between Doctor Who and Down Under goes both ways, of course.
We Aussies didn’t just help make the show, we remain one of its most enthusiastic audiences. It helps that, for most of its 60 years, the show was almost always screening on the ABC.
The omnipresent Doctor
Author and fan Kate Orman says Who’s omnipresence in the 1970s and 80s — with episodes squeezed into an evening slot between kids and adult programming — made it easy for Australians of all ages to connect with it.
“It was like a cross-generational touchstone,” Kate says.
“I have vivid memories of the teachers at school knowing what had happened on Doctor Who the night before, so they could talk and joke about it with us.
“All the kids watched it, everyone’s parents watched it. It just seemed to be part of the culture.”
Weirdly, this omnipresence is pretty much unique to Australia.
Laws around repeat fees in the UK meant Australian viewers got a far more regular serve of Who than our cousins in Britain, where it was shown once a week, now and then.
For writer and director Pete McTighe, moving to Australia as a child in the 1980s was like moving to the centre of the Whoniverse.
“I was stunned,” Pete says.
“No sooner had I stepped off the plane from the UK, I had an entire run of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker repeats to watch on ABC TV — all these classics I’d never seen. It was a gift to a thirsty Doctor Who fan like me!”
While mass appeal might have won over some Aussie fans, for others, it was the show’s oddness that struck a chord.
Writer, presenter and podcaster Paul Verhoeven discovered Doctor Who at a point where the show had edged out of the mainstream into cult territory. Part of the appeal for him was finding something that wasn’t like anything else on Australian telly.
“Everything about it felt right, from the weird almost Wurlitzer organ score, to the strange cinematography choices, to the bad costumes,” Paul says.
“When you’re a little kid and everyone else is into James Bond or Star Wars or whatever, this was the thinking child’s science fiction.”
The Whovians among us
For Australians like Paul, the show’s oddball quality was the gateway to a rich — if occasionally nerdy — subculture.
Doctor Who fandom has a long history on these shores, beginning as university clubs in the 1970s and continuing today across a wide variety of Aussie podcasts, including Splendid Chaps and Paul’s own The Doctor Is In.
Technology aside, one thing that has changed about Aussie fandom is that it’s no longer a boys-only club.
“There’s a lot more women around now. There used to be me and perhaps one or two other women showing up to meetings,” Kate says.
“Women have come to have a very large role in fandom in a way that, you know, maybe wasn’t the case during the 1980s.”
It’s unsurprising, given the powerful connection that many Australians have felt to Doctor Who, that some have felt compelled to give back.
Kate was the fourth woman to ever write for Who, publishing a number of acclaimed novels after the show was cancelled in 1989.
As well as his podcast, Paul has written professional audio adventures featuring stars from the show’s classic run.
Pete McTighe wrote two episodes for the Jodie Whittaker era on TV, a novelisation of one of those episodes, and continues to write and direct short Doctor Who films for the BBC.
“I joke that my entire career has been an elaborate plan to get to write Doctor Who but, actually, that’s the truth,” Pete says.
“Obviously I worked hard and wrote hundreds of scripts and had my own shows, but I had Doctor Who in my sights from the moment I became a screenwriter.”
From Deadloch to the Doctor
The latest Aussie to take control of the TARDIS is Melbourne-based director Ben Chessell, best known for his work on Deadloch and The Great.
Ben has directed two episodes of the 2024 series, which will star Ncuti Gatwa and, for the first time, screen on Disney+, not the ABC.
Although Ben is tight-lipped about what we can expect from the first run co-financed by Disney+, he says the influx of mouse dollars means the storytelling will be more imaginative than ever.
“As an Australian director, you learn a certain approach to storytelling where you’re often going, ‘OK, so what can I afford?’ But we were encouraged to question that and to think, ‘What’s the best way to tell this story?’
“There were some highly imaginative or striking elements in episode two that involved large, expensive set builds. And we just kind of went, ‘Well, I guess we just have to build that.'”
Ben is convinced that Australians — and everyone else — are going to love Gatwa (currently best known for his roles in Barbie and Sex Education).
“Before him, all the Doctors had been different in various ways. But when you compare Ncuti, all the other Doctors seem a little bit the same.”
With Gatwa leading the way, our love affair with Who looks set to endure — but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this series has so powerfully connected with Australians over the past six decades.
Pete McTighe says the show is in our DNA, simply because it was on television so much. But Paul Verhoeven reckons there’s more to it than that.
“Australians like to think we are battlers who champion the little guy, so I think there is something so romantic about a dude who sees a problem and just fixes it, rules be damned,” he says.
“He’s like a doctor without borders. But the borders are time and space.”
The first of three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials will air on Disney+ from November 25.
Ncuti Gatwa will debut in the Doctor Who holiday special, The Church on Ruby Road, on December 25. The 15th season will air in 2024.