Free Paperboy by Christopher Fowler Page B

man who vaulted chairs and threw himself around like a teenage acrobat. Cartoon fun was provided by a Viking and a pirate, Noggin the Nog and Captain Pugwash respectively. They were drawn with a remedial simplicity most children could have improved upon. The worst of all children’s entertainers was Harry Corbett, who always wore a suit and tie, despite the fact that he had one hand up Sooty, a dead-eyed teddy bear glove puppet that was the least anthropomorphic children’s character in the history of television. Believing in Sooty required a leap of imagination that was beyond anyone over two years old. For the more mature child there were
Tales from Europe
, creepy, gaudy Eastern European folk fables put out by the BBC, who saved on dubbing by simply whacking English narration on top of the existing dialogue. This show was useful for teaching us that Europeans lived inside trees and wore dirndls. On Friday evenings there was
Crackerjack
, a sort of music hall for children without the smut. It featured singalongs, bad panto skits and a game called ‘Double or Drop’ in which children were forced to hold a pile of stuff without dropping it. The prize for winning was the meanest of all game-show rewards, a pencil inscribed with the word ‘Crackerjack’, while the loser was given a cabbage. The whole thing played out like some kind of experimental psychological torture. TV was also flirting with science fiction, though, and in 1963
Doctor Who
arrived.
    I would never understand space operas like
Star Trek
; all those life-lessons to be learned each week made it like being at school.
Doctor Who
landed at a time when England was finally freeing itself from debilitating post-war gloom. The nation of smog and rations and polio jabs was slowly fading. The English imagination, cowed by the horrors of a Europe-wide conflict, was set to return. Pop music was in its grand ascendancy. After the largely disastrous design mis-step of the Festival of Britain, 2 which, with the exception of the Royal Festival Hall, was all curly ironwork and atom-balls, the creative arts were budding in fresh directions. Thanks to television series like
Quatermass
,
Pathfinders to Venus
and
A for Andromeda
, the strange ideas of science fiction were stealing young minds.
    Into this fertile innocence was planted a series of such peculiar originality that it took the nation entirely by surprise. Its hero was a crafty and somewhat sinister elderly man, its setting anywhere and everywhere, its cast of characters ever-changing, fallibly human. Although flawed by primitive monochrome technology and virtually no effects that could not be produced in polystyrene, it exhibited imagination in abundance. There was one recognizable object, although it quickly became unrecognizable as they vanished from the London streets: the blue police box, bigger inside than out – the first thing I had to grasp. Folding time and space, that was the second. Time Lords, the third. And as the series developed, through many doctors and dozens of castaway passengers, one true nemesis ruled them all.
    The Daleks were unlike any alien seen before. They possessed no recognizable human features and had no redeeming qualities. Their very alien-ness made them impossible to reason with. When Daleks appeared, there was a sense that the laws of normal TV could be broken and something terrible might happen. But they were popular because any child with a sack and a sink plunger could carry off a passable imitation. Even Spike Milligan conjured up some dubious Pakistani Daleks who fried a dog and put it in their curry.
    Finally, Daleks ingrained themselves deep within the national psyche. It was often stated that the English were historically a cruel race, and perhaps they found a kindred spirit in this cruellest of enemies. The poverty-row settings and props became unimportant when all you saw was encroaching alien terror. Likewise, who wondered how they coped with stairs when the Daleks had