DWAS 1984-88

This is an account of my experience as a member of the committee running the Doctor Who Appreciation Society in the mid/late Eighties. There's some more photos relating to this period on the Fandom scrapbook page.

It’s 1985. 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 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.

The early years of the DWAS are featured elsewhere in this blog 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 and energy 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…

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 (1.5abv!) 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.

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. 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 though 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. Such was his zeal that I should be successful 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.  

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` they 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 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.

That weekend I found myself at the infamous pow wow of influential fans held at the larger than average home owned by 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 note Sixties scriptwriter, and we didn’t really find that an appealing way to spend time.  

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.

That year's PanoptiCon was in Brighton, which had been booked into the impressive Metropole hotel on Brighton’s seafront with a budget based on a thousand people attending.  Conventions generally operated on the principal of breaking even which meant that you had to predict how many attendees you might get and as no DWAS convention ever had as many as a thousand attendees it didn’t make financial sense. Our accountant actually advised us to cancel but it was too late for that.

In the end the event went ahead perhaps because the cost of cancelling it or scaling it down would outweigh the cost of carrying on and it was a big success for the attendees. One of the main attractions was the only DWAS convention appearance of Patrick Troughton albeit remaining in character the whole time.  He was fantastic though, one of the few on stage events I saw due to all the drama occurring elsewhere. Behind the scenes things were bubbling over. Clashes occurred notably between David Saunders and Paul's deputy, Steve Pugsley. Paul Zeus didn’t arrive late on Friday whereupon we found out a lot of the stewards were school kids who were far too young to do the job yet had been given free accommodation at the hotel. For an event already leaking money this was not a good look. Talking of leaking I was looking after the dealer’s room, which had a leaking roof and we had to carry all the tables up two flights of stairs as well.

Amongst other stuff going on was some costumes made with DWAS money being taken but never returned to ·the society and actually being used by another group. A year later, they offered to hire them to us! The weekend was buzzing with reports that a local cinema manager had two missing episodes and had been loitering in the hotel reception trying to sell them. There was also an exclusive Twiglet party, I missed it to stay with other people who were strictly not allowed in. Twiglets it seemed enjoyed some status back in the Eighties.

Unfortunately, I did have to attend a midnight Exec meeting, called on the Saturday to decide whether or not Ian Levine should be allowed to get up on stage and declare that when the next season did come back it would only be fourteen episodes long. This actually turned out to be the case but at the time none of us believed him and it also hadn’t been confirmed by the BBC so we voted that he shouldn't, whereupon David Saunders went up on stage on the Sunday and delivered the announcement anyway. He was due to leave soon afterwards having decided to vacate the Co-ordinator’s job after five years. I was told later the event lost around two thousand pounds. Maybe some of that was the cost of those twiglets…

One of the many people several of us met at PanoptiCon  was Tony Jordan, who was in two minds as to whether or not to apply for the soon to be vacant Co-ordinator's job. After talking to more or less the whole current Exec at the event he applied and got the job from September 1985. Another significant moment soon after was the departure of Paul Zeus. As Gordon Roxburgh had intimated he was going to do his own events unless the Exec acted at the September meeting it was clearly make or break for Paul. He wasn’t helped by Steve Pugsley who’d written an in-depth behind the scenes piece for DWB (the enemy!) which got him sacked as we were not supposed to be even reading DWB never mind contributing. Paul was annoyed by this development and, despite our requesting he stay, stormed out of the meeting and of course you can guess what happened then. He was voted off and Gordon voted in.

Meanwhile earlier in the year my idea of taking Socials around the UK, using LG's to host them had been accepted which seemed like something to make that “official” tag worth something. For co-ordination reasons and due to its success running its own convention in late 1984, my own LG on Merseyside was chosen as the pilot for the scheme. I had also informally gained expressions of interest from several other groups willing to volunteer to do future ones. A new dawn? Are you sensing a however…

However; a couple of members of the Merseyside LG sent copies of a year old internal newsletter to the production office under the guise of an “irate parent”. The newsletter contained a shocking `joke` and once inside the BBC it was brought to the attention of John Nathan-Turner and Colin Baker who were understandably furious. Having been scheduled to attend the event they now said they would not do so if it were held in Liverpool and that other potential guests would be dissuaded from attending. Didn’t it count that I’d saved them from the hurricane by keeping those doors closed?! Seriously, this left no choice but to cancel the event. A lesser known fact is that the people who sent this newsletter to the BBC were also the ones who had actually written the offensive material in the first place which tells you what sort of people they were. Unfortunately, this put the lid on any future DWAS events being run by local groups though much of what would have been DWAS Social 6 became the MLG;s own MonsterCon event, the first of several high profile events they would stage.

Several other groups had also started to run events and more were producing quality fanzines. It was becoming clear to me that there wasn't enough space in the monthly CT column to do all this activity justice and what groups really needed was their own vehicle. I hit on the idea of the Local Group Circular, a newsletter which would be paid for by the DWAS and circulated free to organisers who could then spread the information in it - I felt it would also help the LG network as a whole improve communication. The Circular was launched in March 1986 and I opted to expand the department by appointing an assistant, Nick Pegg, then Nottingham LG leader and future Dalek operator (though I had already climbed into a real Dalek the previous year on a set visit!) Once groups got the idea, it became an established facet of the network. Also on the cards was an inter-LG quiz entitled The  Megaquiz. This sort of idea had been in the planning stage for a while, but an earlier attempt to launch a 5-a-side soccer competition had flopped due to the fact that Doctor Who fans as a rule don't seem to like football. The Megaquiz was conducted via the circular and the final would take place at Panopticon. 

CT editor was probably the hardest Exec job after conventions as the editor had to walk a fine line between providing news but not information that was going to spoiler forthcoming stories or events while steering clear of gossip, keeping the production office happy as well as fending off DWB’s endless tirades. Its interesting that the early CTs of the late 70s were very much focussed on the editor’s interpretation of events and sometimes the likes of Gordon Blows would run opinionated pieces on the front page. Fast forward to my era and the merest hint of an opinion other than how wonderful everything was would rile either John Nathan Turner or else Gary Leigh. One example was Dominic May’s reporting of DWASocial 5 and Ian Levine’s speech which labelled it like a Nazi rally. This overstepped the mark as far as JNT was concerned but not for the reason you think. No, he was upset because the article floated the idea that he might be wrong about something! Later I recall Neil Hutchings telling me how he disliked the monthly meeting that the editor would have with JNT and how parsimonious the producer was as to what could be printed as opposed to what he actually told him.

In mid 1986 the Society held Early Days, a smaller scale day- long event which I recall being located in an especially oppressive atmosphere as it was about the hottest day of the year and the venue lacked any air conditioning. A few months later PanoptiCon took the DWAS back to Imperial College, where some of its founders had first started the Society just over a decade earlier and we all stayed in student rooms which were basic but all you needed really. The Megaquiz final didn't quite get the audience it deserved, but concluded with a massive dousing of the contestants and host in silly string!  It was here that I was intercepted by members of the Manchester local group in the bar and would attend several of their meetings after this. There were definitely some groups whose members I got to know quite well; including Manchester but also West Midlands, Nottingham and later on East Kent. I even went with the Nottingham group on that traditional fan pilgrimage to Aldbourne where `The Daemons` was filmed and for good measure we also called in on the `Mawdryn Undead` location too.

Just as it seemed we were in a stable patch things changed again. At the end of 1986 Tony was leaving partly due to an incident at an earlier Exec meeting. He’d been on holiday and there had been a discussion on his progress as co-ordinator raising a few criticisms. Typical of course that this happened in his absence; in fact the same thing had happened to me the previous meeting; it is irritating to read these things in minutes later possibly out of context of the overall breadth of the discussion. Yet this seemed to be a major factor in him deciding to leave at the end of the year. He had originally planned to stay till the following September. Incidentally, it was from this incident that Dominic May acquired the nickname Slimy. Having actually started the discussion, Dominic then wrote a letter in the Exec circular withdrawing his comments. Incidentally Tony did eventually return and nowadays seems to run the entire DWAS!

There was another cloud on the horizon too; something that reflected the success the Society was enjoying at this time. It seemed that we were liable to pay VAT which is paid on turn over rather than profit. It was later alleged that we tried to brush the VAT problem under the carpet, but in fact we sought out somebody with a legal background to help out. This led to Andrew Beech being appointed co-ordinator from January 1987. This scenario did give us an insight into the somewhat difficult taxation system in the UK which seems designed (deliberately or otherwise) to hinder smaller businesses whose turnover is likely to exceed their profit.

By the end of the year Nick had moved on from being LGs Assistant to be replaced initially by Phil Akiens from the Leicester Local Group for a couple of issues and then Andy Cull, the Brighton local group organiser. Though I’d never met him in person I’d seen Andy’s vibrant newsletters for his group and knew he was a good graphics person and thankfully he accepted the challenge. I later found out his views on local groups were broadly similar to mine so he became someone I could swap ideas with as well. In these primitive days it was all done by letter- we only met about twice the whole time!           

        

By now support for LG's was diminishing with new Exec members seeing them more as a nuisance than an asset, back to the situation before I’d come in. What this led to was my becoming a sort of buffer zone - defending LG's to the Exec and vice versa. Several ideas I presented - like discount deals for LGs on CT adverts - were rejected and several small incidents at different groups were blown out of proportion to back a general Exec feeling that LG's were a liability.

One good thing Andrew was responsible for was the creation of a limited company, Dominitemporal Services to run conventions under a separate budget aimed at avoiding future VAT woes as its turnover would be separate to the main DWAS account. Conventions were always the largest financial area of the DWAS. Unlike Tony though, Andrew did not discourage personal divisions and often would take sides rather than try to diffuse a problem. Once he created an additional post and became Chairman of the Exec ( a gold throne was surely months away?) and brought in candidates he had initially selected he was able to push his own interests through more at meetings.

On the Saturday during 1987’s PanoptiCon an article appeared in the Daily Mail in which Andrew was highly critical of the then new season. We heard that both Sylvester McCoy and JNT were unhappy about this as it was hardly positive publicity. A subsequent DWB interview (they loved all this of course) had Sylvester criticising Andrew and the latter responding in a very haughty manner. Andrew’s close association with DWB and his attitudes towards DWAS business not to mention that national newspaper article led me to put a no confidence vote against Andrew at the January 1988 Exec meeting. This was of course a colossal mistake. There had been a few no confidence votes and I don’t think they’d ever got rid of anyone, simply soured relations.

I’m not saying he was concerned he could be voted out but Andrew went hard on his response unveiling the full extent of the VAT situation and declaring that only he could deal with it and there would need to be cutbacks in spending. This kicked off a period of DWAS austerity (DWAsterity?) with a membership limit of 2,000 imposed, three issues of CT did not appear and the magazine Tardis was scrapped despite being included in the membership fee. The no confidence vote of course fell away but that was not the end of the matter.

I daresay he’d deny it but Andrew then spent much of the year thinking of ways to curtail local groups in general and me in particular, It was a barrage for sure and I don’t know if he intended that I’d give up and resign or what? Maybe I should have. I was gradually isolated as the year went on, like being trapped on an iceberg watching bits float off. Once Brian Robb, a former local group malcontent with his own old scores to settle, became CT editor he got the others to agree to the Local Group Bulletin becoming part of the newsletter CT and then set me an impossible deadline when we had a circular at the printers at the time. Thus, he went off and advertised for his own LG editor.  Andy quit, essentially as a gesture against the rest of the Exec, but it left me forced to accept Brian's choice of editor - Cambridge LG leader Simeon Hearn. We got on but I was right to sense Simeon had an agenda of his own which meant he was no more supportive of me than Andrew was, he just pretended he was. By this stage, in modern parlance, the drama was next level.

Around this time, thinking legacy for the sake of the groups, because I knew one way or another I wouldn’t be in the post for that much longer, I had appointed a second assistant East Kent LG Leader Tom Robin who would be helping out but was also someone I thought would be able to take over from me. He was more diplomatic and less interested in the politics; we shared similar views on the way forward for groups though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit some of the talk I had with local group leaders was about the possibility of groups spinning off from the DWAS altogether.

With the local group bulletin about to be absorbed into CT (allowing its editor rather than me the final decisions on what was included), I somewhat overstepped the journalistic mark in the final independent one by including a piece that mentioned a rumour about Ian Levine and missing episodes. Whether this was true or not, it was a fairly widespread story doing the rounds at the time. I was then the recipient of an irate early morning Saturday phone call from the Superfan himself.  “You don’t realise what I’ve done for the programme” he said and all I could think of was `Attack of the Cybermen`. While he also said he would be content with an apology in the next bulletin. I heard later he was uncomfortable with the rumour being published regardless of whether it was true or not.  Andrew decided to make up the story that Levine was actually planning to sue me and on the basis of this, and without asking for any comment from me, I was suspended from the Exec pending a special meeting. Dramatic cliffhanger.

The suspension ended up running for seven weeks however the Exec would now have to contrive something else once the whole court case idea never happened. So it was that in October 1988 I attended my last Exec meeting. I was cleared over the Levine issue, which suddenly didn’t seem important to anyone despite the suspension, but that was because behind the scenes they had concocted a way to deal with me and with what they saw as `troublesome` local groups. This was a new system where each Exec member looked after a few Local groups, which I’m sure they were delighted with. The LG Supervisor post would be downgraded to assistant level- reporting to the editor of CT.  As I might have said to a passerby after leaving the meeting in London, “Guv, they done stitched me up!”

As hinted earlier, some of the larger, more active local groups had already been spitballing the concept of an independent local group network. The idea was they would break away from the DWAS en masse, form a loose association and maybe have a combined zine and an annual event. I was drafted into this once I’d left the Exec and after discussions an actual logo and name- Network Who- had been created. However, for me to get involved in something like this after four and a half years at the heart of the DWAS was a bit much so I backed off and even had a statement put into CT to the effect. Fast forward eighteen months (long enough to wait?) to mid -1990 and I’d started going to events again and at both TellyCon and Carousel that year had been part of discussions about reviving this idea with various luminaries. `Project X` as it became known was one of those things where, although a lot of people were enthusiastic about it, there was never a time when everyone was enthusiastic at once! Plus 1990 was probably the worst year to try and launch any kind of Doctor Who society.

There is a nice postscript to all this. In 1996, Neil Hutchings and I attended the DWAS 20^th anniversary event and met the people looking after local groups then and found out they’d been around when I was doing the job. What’s more they had revived the Local Groups Bulletin and were very complimentary about what I had done back in the 80s. To me that was the best thing of all to discover, it kind of made all that stress and trouble worthwhile because at the end of the day we all want to be liked don’t we?