How Whovians Learnt to Change the Future

What connects the novelists Steven Hall, AL Kennedy and David Mitchell, the literary editors of the Times, Telegraph and Scotland on Sunday, a senior radio producer at BBC Scotland and Scotland’s leading book publicist? They are all, bizarrely, self-confessed Whovians (that’s fans of Doctor Who to the non-Whovian reader). If the words “Sontaran”, “Magnus Greel” and “Shada” don’t send a shiver down your spine, it’s probably best to stop reading now.

What interests me is the extent to which a generation - more than a generation in some ways - of the rather nebulous ‘Literary Establishment’ were weaned on this programme. Now, of course, plenty of plumbers, orthodontists, coke-heads and God-botherers watched Doctor Who as well, and, conversely, plenty of writers, critics and literary types were probably not hyperventalating when it was announced that Doctor Who was coming back.

I remember interviewing Steven Hall and, at the end of the seesion, he conspiratorially asked if my Converse-and-suit combination was a homage to David Tennant. It was. We spent the rest of the time discussing the 1975 Tom Baker story Genesis of the Daleks. In one sense, it seems, a love of Doctor Who is a form of shorthand for all sorts of other shared interests and concerns. What might these be?

If I were to sketch them out, I’d say scepticism (particularly towards the idea that reality is mundane), a serious sense of not taking yourself seriously at serious moments, and a thrawn personal aesthetic (you might think that X is culturally significant, but from my Time Lord view of all space and time I think you’d be surprised to learn that my private passion Y is actually more important).

Above all, though, Doctor Who taught me that you can change the future. It’s quite easy: you just decide to do things differently. And there can be no better approach to the whole business of the arts than to know about the past and yet to be free from its preconceptions.

Stuart Kelly, literary editor, Scotland on Sunday