Countdown to 60: "The one with the maggots..."

The insanely popular TV series Friends adopted an episode-naming convention - each one being "The one with...".

Doctor Who had already found this particular naming convention useful, having naturally evolved amongst non-fans. 

Fans knew the story titles off by heart, so they quoted Spearhead from Space or The Green Death or Planet of the Spiders - but non-fans didn't register these titles. To them, it was "the one with the shop window dummies" or "the one with the maggots" or "the one with the giant spiders".

I own a copy of every single Doctor Who episode left in the archives. I watched most of them go out on BBC 1 from the early 1970's onwards (plus the odd Troughton episodes), and read the Target novelisations. I then bought them all on VHS. I replaced them with DVD (twice in some cases due to Special Editions), and now I'm currently buying them all for the third time on Blu-ray.

I know every story inside out, which is why I started to record it all in this blog over the last 12 years.

The non-fan isn't like that.

If you've read my recent piece on the Worlds of Wonder exhibition you'll know that I attended it with a friend who put me up for the night at his house afterwards. He had a huge 4K TV, with Britbox, Netflix etc. So after ordering a Chinese home delivery (lemon & honey chicken) and having earlier bought a bottle of wine (dry white), I settled down to watch some Doctor Who with him. Whilst he likes the series, and has watched it on and off over the years, he is not the sort of fan who boasts an encyclopaedic knowledge of the series. His remembrance is of the "the one with..." variety.

That evening we watched An Unearthly Child - just the episode, to show how it had all started - then Planet of the Spiders ("the one with the giant spiders" for him), and finally the second Dalek movie, as I wanted to see that in 4K.

We talked about various old stories as I was recommending them as good ones to dip into - to give a taste of each era. What I found interesting was his occasional misremembrance. Some stories had obviously become mixed up - with memories of two different stories combined. This is something I've experienced myself, outside Doctor Who. There are certain movies which I'm convinced feature two or more specific scenes - but when I finally catch up with them again I find I've actually recalled bits of different, albeit similar, movies.

 

Publicity photos from older films can also confuse. How many people are convinced they saw Boris Karloff as The Mummy, taking the parchment from the stunned archaeologist? In the actual film, you only see Karloff's hand, but a well known photo shows him standing over the other character - and that's the image people have in their mind.

When faced with criticism about the stories he was producing, when they were compared unfavourably with older episodes, JNT used to claim "The Memory cheats". He was right about the inconsistency of memory (but not about the quality of his stories in comparison to those of, say, Hinchcliffe-Holmes).

No doubt the more recent stories have generated new "the one with..." titles for viewers who aren't necessarily fans: 

• The one with the angels, 
• The one with Kylie,
• The one with the werewolf,
• The one with Van Gogh / Shakespeare / Dickens etc,
• The one with the mummy on the train... 

And so many more. Better to be remembered only vaguely, than not be remembered at all.