Feature by ALISTAIR McGOWN
Young Doctor Who fans Stuart Money and Peter Capaldi visit Westminster Bridge on a trip to London in 1975.
Photo © Brian Lynch.
In August 1975, two teenagers posed with studied insouciance by Westminster Bridge, in a nod to the famous publicity photo from 1964’s The Dalek Invasion of Earth. They were fan pioneer Stuart Money, from Gateshead near Newcastle, and bushy-haired Glaswegian Peter Capaldi, who, 38 years later, would become the Twelfth Doctor. They wouldn’t be the last Doctor Who fans to make such a pilgrimage, but they were certainly among the first.
Money had an arch-rival in another trailblazing fan. Keith Miller had begun running The Official Doctor Who Fan Club in January 1972, only to find his post hotly contested. During the spring of that year, Doctor Who production secretary Sarah Newman received independent rival bids from both Capaldi (then 14) and Money (15). Brushing off this three-way tussle, Newman unstintingly supported Miller, who regularly visited Television Centre to meet the stars of Doctor Who.
Despite the polite rebuttal to his power grab, around the same time Capaldi gladly received camera scripts and floor plans from the recently transmitted 1972 serial The Mutants in the post. Meanwhile, he shared his interests with Brian Lynch, a classmate at St Ninian’s High School. “We bonded over Doctor Who in the playground,” says Brian. “We were on the geeky side, neither of us were the cool kids.”
“If the BBC sent you a grainy photocopy it was precious information you couldnʼt get anywhere else.” BRIAN LYNCH
Peter lived in Bishopbriggs, north Glasgow, with Brian one train stop away in Kirkintilloch – and they constantly pestered the BBC for Doctor Who material. “There was a real drought of information,” explains Brian. “That drove the dynamic of joining a fan club. If the BBC sent you a grainy photocopy, it was precious information you couldn’t get anywhere else. I even wrote to Scotland Yard in London asking for plans for the police box and they sent these A1 blueprints. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!” Peter and Brian’s shared interest spurred various creative pursuits, as Brian recalls: “We had a six-inch high plastic police box and a 12-inch high plastic Dalek that we’d place out in the garden and photograph. We put the Dalek further away to try and get the sizes to match up! The ending of the
Peter Cushing film Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. had the magnetic core suck the Daleks into the pit. Peter had a Super 8 camera and he made a pit out of an old wooden fort toy, filled with soil. He pointed the camera down the mouth of this pit, threw the plastic Dalek down and filmed it.”
Nor did Peter, a future Oscar-winning director, limit his enthusiasms to Doctor Who. “He spent hours building a cardboard replica of a UFO from the Gerry Anderson series UFO. Then he set it on fire, threw it out his window and filmed it crashing into the back lawn!” In addition, some of Brian’s enthusiasm for Star Trek rubbed off on Peter, with the duo attending the first British Star Trek convention in Leicester in 1974.
Stuart hosts his version of the Generation Game in the 1970s.
Photo © Robbie Liston.