Life in the DWAS Lane! part one

 To mark the 50^th anniversary of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (aka DWAS) here’s a two part personal account of what it was like to be part of the organising committee. And check out a trio of posts from April/ May 2016 commemorating the fortieth anniversary including the full story of the early days from 1976 to 1982 (first part is in the Featured Post box to the right) 

“Hold the Door!”

It’s sometime in the mid Eighties. The location is a plush hotel somewhere in London. I’m standing behind a table holding two large doors shut because if someone doesn’t keep them closed a breeze will chill the two guests currently sat at a table in front of me signing autographs- John Nathan Turner and Colin Baker. Or maybe there’s a bison lurking on the other side of those doors, I’m not quite sure. I doubt the two stars are even aware of my presence and I’m not really even supposed to be here. However, as the person who is supposed to be here hasn’t turned up, here I am. For me it affords a view of the heart of Doctor Who fandom eagerly queuing for a few moments chat and an autograph. If this sounds like a familiar pastime (the autographs not the door holding) then it’s worth remembering that at conventions nowadays people pay a fee for this sort of thing and doors are so good nobody needs to physically hold them closed. Back in the day you would pay to attend the event but autographs were free. You could even take a picture though there was no social media to publish it on.

So, this is a different type of fandom I am witnessing while keeping those Arctic winds from wafting Col’s curls or JNT’s out of season Hawaiian shirt. By this point, the DWAS had been going for nearly ten years and this is the story of the four subsequent years I was part of the society’s committee, somewhat pretentiously known as the DWAS Executive. It’s a tale of coloured paper, long meetings, VAT, friends, enemies, politics and more. I am sure Steven Knight could write a banger tv series about it. Nobody was actually killed while serving the DWAS but there is the inescapable feeling that had access to guns been easier perhaps someone would have been!

The early years of the DWAS have been covered in this blog a while back but those posts came from second hand knowledge gleaned years after the fact from old publications. This account is my own trawled from dark memories and also a piece I wrote for Purple Haze fanzine in 1990 but it was too soon after the events to have much perspective. Like leaving behind anything- a band, a job, a relationship – it takes time to disentangle oneself enough to have clarity. In 2026 with a different perspective, I find it difficult to understand why we all spent so much time and energy on a fan club for a tv programme. However, we did with a zeal that only youth and some disposable income can bring.

Also I feel as if the whole thing was a terrible mistake really. It only happened because I was in certain places at certain times. I was so introverted back then that I wasn’t really suited to being on the organising committee of anything yet I did have ideas which helps. Running through this account I wonder how much better it might have been to have remained on the periphery or done something much more creative like starting a fanzine earlier than I did. However as we all know, you can’t rewrite history, not one word. Well perhaps the occasional word…

“Come Together”

I’d been a DWAS member for a while and like any extended social group a certain amount of hierarchy had developed and was accessed by judicious networking. For example, just attending events or the informal monthly pub meetings at the Fitzroy Tavern in London led you to meet influential figures whilst quaffing too much willocky Sam Smith’s Alpine lager. So by the mid Eighties I was familiar with enough people in or around the then Exec to know what was going on. It was undeniably cliquey of course. But you get this in any organisation from a parish council to national government.

Being a member of one of the largest, I had a particular interest in local groups, bunches of fans from the same town or area who would hold meetings, create fanzines or whatever they wished to do. The theory was that as they were all Doctor Who fans they had one thing in common and would co-exist in harmony. I was about to discover that wasn't always true.  In early 1984 I found out that the post of local groups supervisor was to shortly to be vacated. Despite the grand name, this was basically a lowkey admin role which at the time was undertaken by someone on the Exec as a sideline. It had been decided to have someone doing it full time (well, in their spare time) and it occurred to me maybe I could do it.

Right there is my sliding doors moment; if I hadn’t thought to do that I could have sailed on as a regular fan and none of the following would have occurred.  Sometimes I feel like that might have been better and I know there are others who would agree! Then again I would never have met some special people. So I wrote to the then Co -Ordinator , David Saunders, to whom the post would be an assistant too. As a try out I was made a general admin assistant first. Like a challenge to be able to join the tribe. I was just glad there was no walking over hot coals involved. Instead over the next six months my tasks were not climbing the forbidden mountain or a quest to find the jewel of Ages. Nothing that glam.

Some DWAS members believed that anyone working on or for the exec lived a gilded life with access to videos of missing episodes, a hotline to the production office and unlimited rice pudding but those six admin months were anything but glamorous. These were the times before smartphones, the Internet or social media. Things had to be sent out in the post. Address labels had to be typed on a manual typewriter on sticky labels which didn’t always line up properly in the printer. The Society’s monthly newsletter CT was placed in envelopes by anyone willing or available to do so on a Sunday afternoon in a church hall or someone’s’ house. It was all quite basic.

Uncle David has five admin assistants. The others were very noisy, I was the quiet one, and each of us had to undertake this admin work at his overly cramped house in Harlesden. To be honest it wasn’t too bad, the banter made the work seem less tedious than it was, and we did have the bonus of witnessing Uncle David standing on the back step shouting “Queenie!” at the top of his voice. It was the name of his cat btw.

When the time came to apply for the actual local groups job I sent an application so packed with ideas that apparently it was no contest when it came up at the exec meeting. That being said it was a popular job- fourteen other members applied. David actually showed me the other applications beforehand which wasn’t exactly what he should have done but there was nothing I could add to my already completed bumper offer. I realised later he wanted me to get the job to bolster the number of people siding with him on the Exec, a taster of the sort of personality politics I was getting myself into. Like real politics there was a lot of that kind of thing; you don’t get something for nothing.  

“Us and Them”

In mid 1984 I became local groups supervisor and then realised there was absolutely no job description for this job. There were a lot of DWAS local groups. They grew up as isolated fans got in touch with the Society and an earlier Exec had the idea to try and enable them to meet each other in local fan groups. What the advantages of being an “official” DWAS local group were remained a tricky issue during my time and long afterwards. It was a nut we never quite cracked. My job was to crack it so you can see the pitfalls from the off. The cardinal rule was always that groups could never use their official status to claim to represent the Society if dealing with outside bodies like libraries, venues, pubs etc. `Au contraire` the groups would say- we are “official” DWAS local groups. This argument went round and round and round like a prototype circle of death. What was the answer?

To me it was simple. You make being an official local group worth something. This was my aim though it had to be introduced gently. As we can see to this day, the enemy of Doctor Who fans is change of any kind and that applied as much to the DWAS as it did to the programme itself. After sending out a questionnaire to see how things were with each group (and whether they really even needed to be official if it was just three people who met each week for a few pints at the Dog and Clowns) I opened up regular correspondence with organisers to build a regular flow of information in both directions, while I decided there was enough need for a LG column in every CT, as well as reports from different groups each month. It’s a shame nobody had invented social media yet; imagine how easy all this would have been.

One unanticipated aspect of the role was that I was expected to try and arbitrate local groups’ problems. Either Fred Bloggs was a disruptive presence at the meetings and the Organiser wished to throw them out or the Organiser was the problem and some members wanted to get rid of him. Looking back the idea that I - or indeed anyone outside the group itself - could solve these problems from such a distance using written correspondence and a soupcon of supposed authority is ridiculous but there it was. Lacking a squad of trained guards, I did my best and occasionally it worked – people listened, acted and thanked me. Often though they told me to piss off!.  All of this incidentally was conducted by hand written letters. Not quite quills, manuscripts and a messenger on horseback delivering each missive but not far off! My attempts at arbitration occurred in slow motion.

To try and counteract some of this negativity my ideas for revising and loosening the LG rules were accepted by the Exec. I was also able to draw up guidelines to help point active LG's in the right direction when dealing with outside organisations; helping them rather than laying down rules. Yet dealing with so many strong personalities was not always easy. I was accused of being arrogant and looking back at some of the columns I penned for CT maybe there’s something in that. I never stopped to think how it might look to someone living two hundred miles away. I used to receive lengthy letters over these issues some being forensic accounts of an incident that happened at a meeting. Really, how did I even know what was and wasn’t true about what they were saying?

It soon became clear that the amount of work I was doing was equal to- if not more than- some Exec members and so it was agreed that I would be promoted to full Exec status which happened officially from 1 March 1985. The very next day, possibly in retaliation, Michael Grade cancelled Doctor Who.

“Doctor in Distress”

That weekend I found myself at the infamous pow wow of influential fans held at the home of `superfan` and record producer Ian Levine.  Upon arrival you had to walk past a row of gold discs to enter his sitting room. I’d been curious as to who he actually was for a while.  Ever since I’d become involved in DWAS his name had been spoken in hallowed tones as someone of authority even though he held no official position either in fandom or with the programme. It was only later I learned he had been the show’s unofficial continuity advisor for a while notably on `Attack of the Cybermen which I suppose is something you might want to keep quiet about!  Yet here he now was leading the luminaries in the fight to save the show even if by this point the cancellation had been amended to an eighteen - month break in transmission thanks to a noisy media campaign (check out the post on all this elsewhere on this blog). Funny now of course given that eighteen months is more like the standard gap between seasons but at the time, you know, it just seemed Too Long To Wait.

It was at this meeting we heard Paul Mark Tams’ claims regarding participation in a save Doctor Who song, a list that included with some of that era’s biggest pops stars. (I’ve written about this record too in a separate post last year). In retrospect, we didn't do much else although a letter was circulated to all DWAS members in two days flat, which must be an all-time record. At least a lot of bickering ceased for a while though the meeting provided a foretaste of what was to come when it was discovered Doctor Who Bulletin editor Gary Levy had brought a hidden tape recorder along for another one of his 'exclusives' for his tabloid flavoured newszine.

Ah DWB, the `enemy`. Ostensibly a news zine, its’ style was inspired by tabloid newspapers and their over the top sensationalistic stories often based on a mere fragment of truth. Later, they launched several attacks on DWAS and our response to the cancellation. DWB was essentially the `independent` fan press as opposed to the DWAS’ “official” line. Obviously the DWAS had to be cautious; if we offended the production office it could lead to all sorts of problems. What a lot of us were unaware of at the time was the tangled personal acrimony between John Nathan-Turner, Ian Levine and Gary Levy and also the fact that a lot of DWB’s provocative news casting was provided by Jeremy Bentham, himself a founder of the DWAS. He may have worn a white suit but he was not innocent!

While all this was happening, the next big Society event, DWASocial 5 swung into view, an event organised mainly by Gordon Roxburgh (while Convention dept. head Paul Zeus got on with Panopticon which was only three months later). I'd worked as an assistant as PartyCon in Birmingham the previous October, but DWASocial 5, set in a plush London hotel was my first event as an Exec member. Apart from being in charge of the fanzine and dealers area, I also found myself having to move queues, hold those doors closed and even spending time on the registration desk. I also got to sample the much famed chicken in a basket which I’d always assumed was an ordinary name for something more fancy. But no; it was literally a cooked half chicken in a wicker basket. It says something about the way priorities change when you get involved in something like the DWAS that a couple of us had to look after one of the guests, a noted Sixties scriptwriter, and we didn’t really find that an appealing way to spend time. If that happened now I would be asking him plenty of questions.

The event itself proved a tremendous success but, yes, there was drama from lan Levine's melodramatic speech about the cancellation which caused an atmosphere amongst attendees. There was also an incident when JNT's secretary Sarah Lee requested to be interviewed on stage and JNT then refused to go on unless she was with him. It’s fair to say tensions were running a little high that day. The event also crystalized a feeling amongst us that maybe Gordon would be a better person to run the Convention dept. than Paul Zeus. Paul was largely (and probably unfairly) unaware that the furniture was being re-arranged behind him. In retrospect it was a poor way to treat anyone but it wasn’t the first nor the last time this sort of behaviour happened in what could be a ruthless environment and (teaser) it would one day happen to me too. Just think The Traitors crossed with Game of Thrones.
To be continued...