Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 106

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Popular Culture Review

deliberately leave behind audience mentbers who know little or
nothing about Doctor Who, thus reinforcing the learning phase and
linking the "real" fans into a cohesive unit.
When I asked MUM members about the videos' audience,
responses were similar. Mark Rollie says, "Some people have
accused us of shooting them for ourselves," a response echoed by other
MUM members. Alex Rollie says the videos were made for the
fannish convention audience; she notes, "[t]he people who watched it
on cable access probably don't know what was going on an)rway----Unless they're Doctor Who fans, they wouldn't understand.. . . You
have to know something about Doctor Who in order to understand a
lot of the jokes." Matt Alexander responds with "No one." When
pressed, Alexander adds, "Well, the first one we had an audience.
We were trying to shoot for the fandom audience.. . . But after that,
it was just a case of it was fun to do. If people watched them, fine----You know-who cares." In every case, their responses to my question
referred to the specialized knowledge required to understand the
video and acknowledge the incomprehensibility of the product to the
average viewer.
Alexander's response goes a step further by implying that
MUM produced later videos with no intention of consumption,
implying recursiveness in the members' mastering and transmitting
fannish knowledge. The later videos were made to fuel the group's
closeness and exclusivity. Tom Keenan in particular remembers the
extreme difficulty he had getting into MUM and finding the
acceptance of his fellow MUM members. The group took the learning
phase a step further: instead of just mastering the source program,
members had to master the content of the past videos and-much to
Keenan's distress-the unstated content of the videos as expressed
through in-jokes based on common MUM experiences such as flubbed
lines. Not surprisingly, the later videos rely heavily on in-jokes and
references to earlier videos. MUM gives a nod to the videos' drawing
the group together by following the credits of each video with
outtakes and taping mishaps.

Power Co-opted by the Fans

Despite the escalating use of self-referentiality and
exclusive in-group jokes, MUM's videos generally have a narrative