Movie Memories

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the one and only bona fide new episode of Doctor Who to have been broadcast during the 1990s – the 1996 TV movie, starring Paul McGann, made in Canada for the US Fox Network as a collaboration between Universal Television, the BBC, and BBC Worldwide, as-was. That anniversary is being marked in many and various ways across the Doctor Who world. One of these celebratory efforts is a Doctor Who magazine special edition, for which I was asked to write a piece. I was pleased to do so, as I am very fond of ‘the TV Movie’, as fans call it, for all sorts of reasons. While it certainly has its faults, and it was disappointing that it didn’t lead to anything further at the time, one of the reasons for my fondness is a nostalgia for the great excitement at the time that there was actually going to be some new Doctor Who. I was 12 years old when the TV Movie came out, and by this stage very self-consciously a ‘Doctor Who Fan’. I’d been aware of and watched…