Arthur Chappell
Create Your Badge
FAB CAFÉ DOCTOR WHOM DAY –
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7TH 2009 A PERSONAL REPORT.
The May
2009 one day Dr. Who convention at FAB Café was so good that I came away
hoping it would become an annual event, so I was delighted when the next one
took place just six months later.
With the welcome return of 7th
Doctor, SYLVESTER MCCOY, FAB- Who 2 also brought a whole group of new
guests, from former companions and Doctor Who villain-actors to writers and
production staff.
Mac’s overall as the previous
event by comedian, CHARLIE ROSS, the opening panel was hosted by John
Cooper, who introduced ANNEKA WILLS
(Polly Write in the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton years) and RICHARD
FRANKLIN (UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates in the Jon Pertwee era.
Anneka has been in many TV shows, from a 1957 version of the Railway Children, through The Strange Report, with Anthony Quayle. She had a book of her memoirs on sale at the FAB event.
Anneka got the part of Polly at a very difficult and chaotic time in her own life, and finds that things tend to happen to her in clusters like this frequently. She described Hartnell as ‘not easy to work with’. She was present for the first and perhaps most crucial of all regeneration scenes, when Hartnell turned into Patrick Troughton, and left everyone wondering if the fans would accept the new actor and Doctor easily. The same dilemma has been faced by many production teams and is now Matt Smith replaces being faced again as David Tennant. Much discussion went on about whether smith is too young for the role, with many panellists preferring the idea of a return to an older Doctor, with David Warner and Bill Nigby suggested as ideal for the role.
Richard Franklin was introduced in
the colour era, in Terror Of The Autons, the first of Roger Delgado’s master
stories. He had much praise for Delgado, in a role never bettered until Derek
Jacobi’s brief appearance as the Doctor’s deadliest humanoid opponent. Franklin dislikes some aspects of the Who
revival, including a Doctor who snogs his assistants, and Tenant’s tendency to
make the Doctor messianic. In his eyes, Pertwee was a more conservative and
authorities figure. .
I asked Richard about Yates’s
treasonous actions at the close of The Day Of The Dinosaurs, which was a great
surprise in a story noted for ropey special effects, but he reasoned that Yates
was a naïve idealist rather than a traitor, and that he did shoot the ‘balls’
off a dinosaur. His character also
redeemed himself in the next story, The
Planet Of The Spiders.
Anneka told the audience that her
favourite story was The Smugglers as it was set in Cornwall and mostly allowed
the actors to work and rest in pubs there. Richard most enjoyed working on The
Daemons, as it was filmed during an unusually warm climate, and in an ideal
English village, Aldbourne, Wiltshire, now unchanged since the days of the
programme and as much a place of pilgrimage among fans as Portmerion is for
fans of The Prisoner.
Anneka is now involved in a
psychology-paranormal research show for CONSCIOUS.TV
There was a moving thirty seconds
round of applause for the late great Dr. Who writer, Barry Letts, who died soon
before the FAB event.
The second panel was an exclusive
one for MARY TAMM, the first of the two ROMANA actresses, (the second being
Lalla Ward). Mary is still highly glamorous, and made a dramatic entrance in an
air of movie star presence. She talked of her surprise at still doing simulated
sex scenes as she did recently in an episode of Jonathon Creek. She was also in
Brookside, though she is from Dewsbury, not Liverpool.
Though keen herself to leave Dr.
Who after the one season of six KEY TO TIME story arc adventures, Mary had not
considered the need to do a regeneration scene, until it was too late, and then
she felt as if she ought to have been asked to stay for such.
She loved working with Douglas
Adams, author of THE PIRATE PLANET story who was already then working on the
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. She voiced a regret shared by many fans and
myself – how sad it is that Adams didn’t live long enough to work on the new
series of Dr. Who.
Mary Tam was not averse to
speaking her mind. Volume Two of her memoirs
promises some gossip about the Tom Baker / Lalla Ward marriage (Lalla divorcing
him quickly and now married to evolution scientist Richard Dawkins). Mary also
worked with US actor John Voight, who she described as very eccentric, rarely
staying on set when not having lines of his own to recite, though perfectly
friendly and sociable off-set.
Mary has recently appeared in
Eastenders as a Russian con-lady and it is not impossible that her character
could return there.
After a break, a great panel featured COLIN SPAULL & TERRY MALLOY, who have appeared in Dr Who Dalek & Cybermen stories. Terry Malloy was the longest serving actor to play Davros, the Dalek creator, appearing in Resurrection, Revelation & Remembrance Of The Daleks. He is also a leading cast member in the radio series The Archers. The panel compeer teased him by deliberately mistaking him for the other actors who have played Davros too, (a mistake sometimes made by fans).
Colin Spaull was the only attendee to have appeared in both a classic Who adventure, Revelation of the Daleks, (a Colin Baker story) and in the new Who stories, (with David Tenant), in The Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel. He talked of the differences in pace of filming with the new series having much less rehearsal time between script read-throughs and going to camera for the actors. He has also worked on Inspector Morse.
As their interview & Q & A was almost over there was an unexpected and for many, very funny moment of high comedy that was for most attendees, totally unexpected. A BBC roving reporter arrived at the event doing a radio version of the TV series treasure hunt, and with barely a minute to spare of her live airtime, she had been sent to the convention to interview its main star of the moment. Trying initially to interview FAB Café managers, she was directed towards Terry Malloy, who she obviously didn’t know. Asked who he was in the show, he replied simply and honestly, Davros.
The presenter was surprised and naively asked if that the Davros associated with the Daleks. As the fans fell about laughing, Terry Malloy put on his best menacing Davros voice, ‘I created the Daleks’ he said. @Wow!’ was her understandable reaction and she had successfully completed her quest for her listeners with seconds to spare, a real countdown drama as opposed to the staged ones faced in Dr Who stories.
Some items were auctioned between
panels for Children In Need with bids fetching in some good generous donations.
The question arose as to whether
the Dr Who Cybermen or the avengers Cybernauts were first into production, with
each often accused of being a steal on the other, and it was concluded that the
avengers had put their robotic-cybernetic creations into production first.
An hour and twenty minute lunch
break followed, and with my mate Tom Clark (one of the auction winners), I went
to the Buffet City all you can eat restaurant above FAB for a meal. .
On return, I purchased some Big Finish audio adventures, picking out one with Mary Tamm, THE STEALERS FROM SAIPH and randomly picked out THE MAHOGONY MURDERERS featuring characters from Tom Baker’s adventure THE TALONS OF WEIN CHIENG. Both are very professional, exciting and terrific radio quality productions. Mary, and producer, LISA BOWERMAN, was delighted to sign the CD’s for me too. Big Finish had almost failed to have their stock ready for the show and a last minute rush back to Warrington had ensured the material was on display and sale. Other stalls offered the Tamm & Wills biographies, and unique artwork related to Dr. Who.
The second half of the event opened with John Cooper presiding over a behind the cameras panel consisting of legendary 1970’s Who script and book writer, TERRANCE DICKS and 1980’s producer, ANDREW CARTMEL.
Dicks had met Sylvester McCoy and had planned to suggest him as a great potential future doctor who, but Cartmel had already discovered McCoy’s potential when he was recommended.
Dicks had helped organize several Doctor Who plays and pantomime shows, some of which did well, though one was scuppered by the IRA campaigns keeping audiences down in west End Theatres. The show got critical acclaim, but no one went to see it. As Dicks said, “Everyone was there except the public.”
Dicks seemed to hold Doctor who impresario John Nathan Turner (JNT) in contempt, comparing him to Hitler and suggesting he should have been hanged. Cartmel was more lenient to JNT, believing him a decent if sometimes self-indulgent producer, who recognizing the damage he had done to Who in the early McCoy era, (with bad casting and over-emphasis on comedy), tried his best to salvage the show with good later story lines, but his noble efforts were too little and too late, and on top of damage he himself had done. This banter provoked John Cooper to quip “Next on Jeremy Kyle – My producer is better than your producer’.
Both writers were critical of the overt humanization of the Doctor in new stories, his youth, tendency to snog and the messianic saviour status cultivated by Tennant. They praised the BBC for letting the producers; Russell T Davies and Stephen Moffat come from writing backgrounds.
Dicks was asked if he’d like to write for whom and surprised many by saying no quite emphatically. He feels as if he has served his time and he dislikes RTD’s tendency to force multiple rewrites on the script writers to the point at which he seemed to be writing the show himself more and moving the goal posts at every turn.
Dicks openly declared the Paul McGann TV film as unintelligible crap, a statement that Dicks had made to all and sundry in the media when the film was first presented. His outspoken nature had landed him in hot water again. Cartmel said that The Doctor was too much of a conventional action hero in it, although McGann was very well cast.
SYLVESTER MCCOY was the last guest to be introduced at the event, and he was interviewed by Chris North, who tried to attribute a lame old joke about a the difference between a duck (One of its legs are both the same) to McCoy, who naturally denied all knowledge of its origins.
Much of the interview was more about McCoy’s days with the Ken Campbell Road show, with who McCoy had put nails in his nose and stuffed ferrets down his pants for a laugh (humour he recreated in the Amnesty International concert and film The Secret Policeman’s Ball). McCoy believes he was the first to do the ferret down the pants act, and that he had specially lined trousers that kept the ferrets and his own body safe and comfortable. Later, he watched bemused as ferrets down trousers became a national craze and one believed to date back centuries. He suspects that most ferret wranglers copying his act have no safety measures in place. One stun the did, involving wrestling, had led to him unwittingly exposing his genitalia, so he made a point of ‘accidentally’ exposing himself for a laugh in nearly every Campbell road show from then on.
McCoy spoke movingly of the sadness of having to announce the death of Patrick Troughton to the attendees of a who Convention in the States. He was starting to develop the darker sides of the doctor as his series ended, and he saw glimpses of that with Ecclestone, but he feels as if Tennant has given the character too soft and friendly a focus now. It will be interesting to see how Matt Smith proceeds when he takes on the role.
McCoy talked of his role in the golden age of TV shows, regarding himself as a jinx given that many shows he joined were off the air after just three years of him becoming involved, including Vision On, and doctor who. He lamented that shows now exist for children only to sell them toys. He seemed surprised therefore to be reminded of his own Dr who Action figure. He landed the role of Dr. Who at the very same time Timothy Dalton got the part of James Bond, and wondered if the letters had been accidentally mixed up.
McCoy’s most recent role has been to play the Fool in Sir Ian McKellan’s production of King Lear.
After a short break, a half-hearted but quite tough quiz followed between Sylvester McCoy & Terry Malloy (Doctor V Davros as it was billed0. Each actor answered questions on the other’s illustrious career, and a few general knowledge questions, presided over by event organizer, Erica Edgerton. McCoy won comfortably.
After a long tidy up break, during which stalls were closed and many attendees left, a punk band, The Red Pills, came on, performing a rock version of the Dr. Who Theme, and songs inspired by the show, including a track called The Curse Of Fenric. And some numbers not connected to the series.
I stayed around drinking for a while before exhaustion told me it was time to go home after another fantastic convention style event. Thanks to all at FAB Café, The Wirral Dr. Who fans, Erica Edgerton, my friend Tom Clark, and no doubt many others. Hope there will be more who events like this at FAB in 2010.
See my other DR WHO pages here DR. WHO
LINKS
Anneka Wills’s http://www.annekewills.com/
The Doctor Who Appreciation
Society http://www.dwasonline.co.uk/
Big finish http://www.bigfinish.com/Doctor-Who
FAB Café, Manchester - http://www.myspace.com/fabcafemanchester
The Red Pills – www.facebook.com/theredpills
Arthur Chappell
LINK TO THIS PAGE http://arthurchappell.me.uk/event.report-fab.cafe.dr.who.day-2009.2.htm
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