Fans, I feel, have a hard enough life as it is, without being bombarded with thoughtless insults (not to mention articles like this). Perhaps the most pernicious of these is "Get a Life". It has become an unfortunately ubiquitous expression, the standard insult of those who like to indulge in the sport of anorak-baiting. It may have been briefly amusing when bellowed cathartically by William Shatner on Saturday Night Live, but in most situations, and from most speakers, it is wearisome. For a start, it betrays a certain arrogance, as the speaker presumably feels he has one - but what sort of a life is it where you get your kicks from picking on dumb animals? Worse than this, though, it misses the point.
The original anoraks may have been trainspotters, but even those thermos-sporting tosspots have gained a kind of reflected street-cred - or track-cred - from the film that bears their name. Science-fiction fans, on the other hand, will never be fashionable. No matter how many sci-fi films clog up the cinema-going top tens, or how many different versions of Star Trek the BBC cram into one week's viewing, the fans of same will remain an embarrassment to that great non-overlapping majority in the Venn diagram of society.
And yet, however tempting it is to assume that their lives are solitary and more than a little pathetic, dedicated solely to watching videos, eating sandwiches and self-abuse, it is a fact that these losers do occasionally 'socialise'. Like any parched thirst to an oasis, fans will inevitably be drawn to each other's company (I use the word loosely). For 'No fan is an island', and when they get together something magical and rather special is formed: fandom. I can't be bothered to research the subject, so I'm going to assume that 'fandom' is short for Fan Domain - it has, after all, the telltale crapness of a portmanteau neologism.
It's not too wide of the mark to say that any fan is only one social life away from fandom. As the latter is a cheap and reasonably satisfying substitute for the former, the temptation to succumb is strong. And this is the point: fandom is unarguably, and particularly to those who dwell therein, a life. Of a kind. Admittedly it's not so much a lifestyle choice as the choice of a life sans style, but you have to take what you can get. It's a way of gaining in one fell swoop that missing social life, a set of friends, even an identity - so obviously it is going to appeal mostly to people who have managed to avoid acquiring any of these by other means.
So we come, at last, to the moral of the story. I say to any doubters out there: next time you feel tempted to tell one of these poor sad acts to 'Get a life', remember this: as far as he is concerned, he already has. Just imagine what he was like before. Yes, I know it's frightening, but it should help put things in perspective.
The fan mentality is not, unfortunately, something one can put on and discard whenever it suits - like, to pick an example at random, an anorak. A fan is not something you do, it's something you are. Becoming a fan is a slow, steady transformation, borne of various social and psychological factors, probably involving Freudian notions of anal retentivity (though not, as many people would like to think, being dropped on the head as a child). Once with you, the fan mind-set is hard to shake off. Lurking most of the time in one's unconscious, it rears its ugly head at the strangest and the most mundane of times. For example, any true fan of television's most famous time-travelling Gallifreyan will succumb to a momentary frisson of excitement when glimpsing a newspaper headline which contains the words 'Doctor' and 'who' in juxtaposition. The fact that the story is invariably about a briefly notorious GP rather than the science-fiction show is but a momentary disappointment compared to the thrill of expectation which preceded it.
With this sort of rubbish flitting randomly through his mind, the fan is understandably desperate to feel that he is not alone. As such he is ever suspicious of lurking fannish tendencies in those he meets, and will pounce on any opportunity to prise an admission out of them. I was fully in the grip of this tendency on starting secondary school, and although I netted a few friends out of it, they were as nothing to the embarrassing stigma which then followed me like a lingering personal hygiene problem for the next seven years. On starting university I assumed this was all behind me. 'Fraid not. I made exactly the same mistake at a get-to-know-you evening during Fresher's week, and only then understood just how ingrained the fan demon is. This was the "Did you mention 'Doctor Who' earlier???" incident, a spontaneous outburst of zeal that worried me as much as it did my new acquaintance. It also set back our friendship by several weeks, though it is surprising it survived at all. (I've so far been more successful hiding my affliction in my adult, working life - thanks for asking - but others are not so lucky, such as Mr Scott, who expands upon this elsewhere in the magazine.)
It's with this kind of minor obsession bubbling away beneath every fan's veneer of sanity that the collective safe haven of fandom has its uses. As the old saying has it, 'two's company, three's a local group'. The average fan is a dull creature, overfond of labelling and compartmentalisation, so it's a natural step for a group of them to wish to formalise their relationship, by appointing a leader, issuing membership cards, and meeting in someone's front room to eat sandwiches. In this respect, I was a late starter. When I was a young fan, the idea of fandom - and I'm not even sure it laboured under that name then - was a mysterious and elevated one. In fact the whole scene was different. Doctor Who itself was not a 'franchise', as it has since apparently become, but a television programme. It was also still popular with the general public, not, as nowadays, lodged uncomfortably between true critical respectability and the kind of ironic cult status that endless repeats on BBC2 would afford it.
Doctor Who fandom has always been unusual. It the late seventies, when it was starting to become organised, it was largely university based, thanks mainly to the very marvellous and trendy Tom Baker. This student support reached its peak during the brief period when script-editor Douglas Adams moulded the show into a mainstream half-brother to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide. Even the fan club was not content to be just a fan club; no, they were the 'Doctor Who Appreciation Society'. They still are, even though the programme is no longer made, and they were all through the eighties, when they didn't seem to appreciate it much at all.
As I say, all this seemed a world away. I was happy enough relieving my obsession through the monthly panacea of facts, figures and photos that was DWM. The idea of fan pubs, professional fans, conventions, collecting autographs and the like seemed insane and glamorous, but said nothing to me about my life. Thus I made no active efforts to get in touch with fandom. Secretly, though, I was hoping it would find me.
Eventually it did. A minor outbreak of fandom occurred at school, when someone I shall refer to only as Bruce Mann (trombone player and former Oxford alumnus) gathered together seven or so disparate souls to indulge in frenzied bouts of video watching at weekends. Bruce considered me too subversive for his tastes - possibly because, unlike the others, I wasn't in awe of his massive collection of pirate videos - and tried desperately to prevent my even finding out about his 'group', let alone joining it. At the time I thought this said more about him than anything else - he was, after all, a noted 'eccentric' - but with hindsight, it is an example of the kind of in-fighting and general lack of perspective which afflicts the whole world of organised fandom. Many, many years later (and I'm getting ahead of myself here), I discovered that Bruce had only set up our group at school because he'd made an enemy of the local DWAS offshoot. Apparently they wouldn't let him run it. Sadder still, though, is the fact that the East Kent Society leadership were livid with him for setting up another group on their patch and stealing away seven potential recruits... For some old-guard members, the bitterness and recrimination are all they have left of those glory days, so my stoking the fire like this is all in a good cause.
Another closely guarded asset of Mann's was his network of "contacts", every mention of whom was accompanied by elaborate finger-quote marks. Shortly before he resigned, Bruce was planning, with a number of these "contacts", to set up a new national network of Doctor Who clubs. Apparently within a few months this would rival the DWAS (with whom Bruce had, you guessed it, fallen out). Needless to say, it never came to fruition. The only thing tangible thing we ever got out of these contacts was a selection of grainily photocopied pictures from the location recording of a new Doctor Who story, which itself turned out to be of extremely dubious quality. Nevertheless, anyone who found the use of such tat as bargaining chips faintly tragic was just jealous, not to say subversive.
The same was true of his prized video collection. From the 70s until the late 80s, videos were the hard currency of fandom. Never mind that they had been duplicated so many times that the soundtrack, the colour and even the picture were constantly fighting to drop out; it was literally the only way to see these fabled artefacts. The foreign tapes even had their small compensations - a sarcastic comment over the end credits from an Australian linkman, or a piece of censorship so badly edited that it made Auntie Beeb's hatchet work look artistic. When Bruce eventually made his flight from the world of fandom he sold his video collection (apparently to buy a new trumpet). Despite my previous cynicism, I was of course first in the queue with my bundle of fivers.
Although there were only seven of us in the Doctor Who Dover Group, we were a microcosm of the structure that repeats through fandom at large. The queen bee at the top, sat on his illicit archive, throwing down scraps of gossip to the young drones scurrying around, bowing and supplicating and soaking up the reflected glory of their leader's illustrious connections. Those who would actually like some theoretical meat with this otherwise fluffy article should note that the different types of fans can be understood scientifically. As Bob points out elsewhere in this magazine, 'fan sociopathy' can be broken down to two intersecting bipolar axes - "active / inactive" and "social / antisocial". The 'inactive / antisocial' fan is of course the archetypal bogeyman of popular consciousness and tabloid stereotype, but that sad creature is at the very lowest end of a scale that allows some, however limited, potential for growth. Generally, though, any progression is only of relevance within the world of fandom itself. However social a fan becomes in his own circle, he will still have great difficulty impressing Ordinary People; and no matter how active a fan is, this activity is unlikely ever to produce anything of real worth. (The best a fan can do is show some self-awareness and not even try. Like us.)
It's hard to be sure whether the fan lifestyle is a symptom or a cause of this. Teenage fans are one thing; "it's good to have an hobby", as their mothers say, and of course "it keeps them off the streets". However, for a true definition of human tragedy the increasingly - desperate - approaching - middle-age variety are on another planet (pun intended). Consider the following annoying characteristics that, while not exclusive to fans, are certainly prevalent among them: their lack of such elementary British characteristics as humility, social unease and acute embarrassment; the fact that they are so good at inciting these emotions in others; the fact that they have a different telefantasy-oriented t-shirt in their wardrobe for every day of the year; their tendency to laugh at inappropriate moments (and vice versa); the way they can drag any conversation round to science-fiction, and know of no social situation in which this would not be appropriate; and, perhaps most irritatingly, the way they insist on talking in jargon.
I'm not talking here about invented technical terms (or technobabble, as Trekkies call it, cleverly inventing a piece of jargon to describe their incessant use of same). A more subtle manifestation of the phenomenon is the way that a small number of lazy linguistic abuses are endlessly perpetuated by the majority of fan writing, with the result that it is not just ridden with clichs, but ridden with crap clich