Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 105

Doctor W to Fans

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excluding outsiders. MUM's videos have more freedom than fan
videos culled from the source material (for instance, Bacon-Smith's
"songtapes," which cut together bits of the primary source to tell a
new story). MUM's productions can have two actors who never
appeared together on the original program appear in the same scene;
they can also add references to sources other than Doctor Who, most
notably The Prisoner and various Monty Python sources, as well as
references to current events in the Doctor Who production world.
The process of learning about Doctor Who, and, to a lesser
extent, the other sources drawn on for the videos, comes from
watching all the original Doctor Who programs and engaging with
other fans of the show. MUM members all recall vividly their
initial engagement with the program, an important time used to build
knowledge. This intense learning phase, guided by other fans,
repeated viewing of the source program, and reading magazines and
books about Doctor Who, creates an encyclopedic information base
that MUM then works with when creating videos. MUM member Tom
Keenan says of his early fan experience, "1 was going through my
crazy Doctor Who fandom phase, where anything associated with
Doctor Who--\et's learn more, let's know the ins, the outs, and
everything else." Sue Bartholomew theorizes that fans of things in
general, from television programs to sports, begin with this intense
learning phase: "These are people who like the show and want to
know everything about the show, the ideas, the sport, no matter
what It is. They want to know everything about it. Then you move
up." This knowledge does have its practical applications: Dave
Weides admits that it takes only minor effort for him to organize a
pile of Doctor Who Target paperback novelizations into the order
aired, which is helpful when assisting at conventions.
Because of this learning phase, fans end up with a large base
of common information. The learning phase of Doctor Who is
particularly lengthy, as trivia from as far back as 1963 must be
memorized and contextualized. The rarity of American broadcast of
early Doctor Who episodes, not to mention the BBC's own problems
with destroying or misplacing archive tapes, compounds the problems
of the learning process. MUM assumes that the fans have gone
through this memorization phase and will recognize the situations
and characters it re-creates. Occasional watchers of the program
would not have enough knowledge to decode MUM's videos, as they