Dr Who: A time of reading

Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs is a book about the history of the show through a largely metatextual lens. It was recommended to me by a friend, and while I'd never read Higg's work before, he seemed to tackle interesting stuff in his other books like the Lightning Seeds, William Blake and the connection between the Beatles and James Bond.

And it was a fun read that only took a couple of days to get through. It is highly unlikely that any history of something that has been going pretty much non-stop for more than 60 years could ever be contained to a single book.

It has some fun ideas, although it went back to the 'Time Lords are really a metaphor for BBC management' a few too many times, and does spend a lot of space on what the personal history of each actor who played the Doctor brought to the role. 

But it also glosses over a lot of the show's history, and while every single aspect of this show has been covered in considerable depth elsewhere, it leaves this chunky hardback feeling rather thin, especially as things ramp up in the 21st century. (Not everybody who was turned off by the clear storytelling failures of the Chibnall era were angry little misogynistic boys upset that the Doctor was now a woman - that was the one clear success of that period.)

So an easy read, and one I got through quickly. But after an entire lifetime of reading about the production of this show and the eternal themes it brings up, I need more meat in my literary sandwich.

And it doesn't get much meatier than the About Time books by Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, Dorothy Ail and occasional chums. These thick and chunky reference books are hard to get around these parts, so I only manage to pick them up years after they were published, and Volume Eight was my most recent find.

And that volume was about one single year of Dr Who, and took me a fucking month to get through it, and that is very much a compliment.

Because these books are dense with fact and opinion and analysis. I feel sorry for the authors having to think about the contradictions that inevitably pile up with this amount of material - a long devotion to all things Who means not stressing the small stuff too much, or it will all collapse. But I truly appreciate their efforts, and their dedication, and the huge amounts of trivia they bring to the table.

I'm probably fortunate that I only get my hands on one of these books every couple of years, because they require a lot of time to get through, and I don't have and police box to skip through it.

But this is most definitely my kind of book about Dr Who. I always appreciate a new perspective, no matter how slight, but it's all the meaty details that I crave in my Who diet.