The following article, like the History piece about the group, originally appeared at a sister site for these pages, The Matrix Mutterings, as part of the Who-it-Yourself! series on the making of fan-produced Doctor Who. Anyone who has participated in the amateur production of a Doctor Who video has at one time or another asked his-or-herself whether he (or she) should have his "head examined." Karen Hellekson is an old friend of the group and a serious academic who at the time of this writing was studying for her Doctorate (appropriately enough) at the University of Kansas. Several years ago she talked to members of MUM about their peculiar hobby and came to some interesting conclusions.
Poaching "Doctor Who" -- Why Do Fans Make Videos?
So you think it would be fun to make a "Doctor Who" video. After you find the fans, the costumes, the person who can run a camera, the person who can get creative with a few Coke boxes, after you have a product you proudly show at a con or two, maybe it hits you. It was fun, but what does it "mean"?
In July 1992, I interviewed members of a fan group who made such videos (and who got creative with more than just Coke boxes) in order to find out. Though the members of Mini-UNIT Minstrels
(MUM) hadn't given much thought to what it "meant" (I think one response was, "Huh?"), their activities and their videos do have meaning. MUM members sweated through video after video in the late1980s (nearly nine of them in four and a half years), achieved a kind of local celebrity among the fannish crowd, and then faded from sight, leaving behind a lot of memories and one one- quarter-made video, "Without a Who". Their legacy has been tissue-compression eliminated into the three videotapes I have on a shelf--videotapes that distill their experience of creative fandom. I talked to Sue (also known as Bart, and the acknowledged leader of the group in its early years), the VidMaster (whose "So...YOU Want to Make Your Own Doctor Who Video?" last issue discusses these videos from a personal angle), Debby, Mark, Lisa, Judy, Tom, and Matt. (To maintain their anonymity and protect them from any kind of potential copyright infringement lawsuit, not to mention inherent terminal embarrassment, I use only their first names.) And I must admit some complicity: even though I said I would never act in a video, I made a guest appearance as an evil secretary in "The Blues Cousins" (1990).
To find out why MUM members made these videos other than to hang out with their friends, I turned to cultural criticism. Television, along with many other mass-produced texts, is an expression of mass culture, just like a paperback book or a Formica kitchen table. It is something made for large numbers of people to consume, and if you study it, it will tell you about our culture. Analyzing "Doctor Who" fan groups is especially interesting because this British show has American fans. The critical work analyzing fans on shows such as "Doctor Who", "Star Trek", and "Blake's 7" shows how fans move from being "peasant" to "proprieter" (Jenkins, "Poachers" 27).
A lowly "Doctor Who" fan in America named Sue has no say over the program. Watching it in America does not improve the ratings of the show; legions of fans both here and abroad were not enough to keep the show on the air. Sue is a peasant, with no power or control over the program. But as a MUM member, Sue is able to take her love for the show and express it creatively. By making videos, Sue becomes a proprietor. Sue, and other MUM members, took a television program, an expression of mass culture, and made videos, turning the mass culture product into a popular culture product. The process of doing this means they "own" their product.
Unlike some other typical fan activities (writing fanzines, making new stories from the source program by cutting clips together), MUM members wrote, produced, acted in, taped, and edited each videotape themselves. Though they all acknowledge that one big reason they did it was to hang out with their friends, their video-making activity has meaning beyond that. There are two main reasons besides social activity that MUM made videos: first, it gives power to the fans as opposed to the real creators of the program; and second, it reinforces the fannish learning experience and perpetuates fandom.
MUM members create new texts by donning "Doctor Who" costumes and, as actors, becoming the characters they represent. By appropriating an original text, MUM members "remake programs in their own image. Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups... to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into popular culture" (Jenkins, "Star Trek" 174). MUM members take the raw material provided in the original program and use that as the basis for humor and plot. They make something new (popular culture--their videos) out of an existing artifact (mass culture--television). Doing this in turn reinforces their own interests: they are able to perpetuate the process by which people become fans. And by including "Doctor Who" producers, controllers, critics, and other people connected with the show in capacities other than actors, MUM rewrites a program that has a reputation for ignoring the voices of its fans.
Videos are a valid way of expressing appreciation for the fans' chosen media program because they valorize the fan experience and require fannish information to decode. Because all the MUM members have a common interest--"Doctor Who", and, to a lesser extent, other British television programs--much of the humor in MUM videos relies on coded knowledge that only a "Doctor Who" fan would have. This in turn dramatically limits the audience, but it simultaneously draws MUM members closer by reinforcing the fannish learning experience and excluding outsiders.
The process of learning about "Doctor Who", and, to a lesser extent, the other sources drawn on for the videos, comes not only from watching all the original "Doctor Who" programs, but also by engaging with other fans of the show. MUM members all recall vividly their initial intense engagement with the program. I remember as a tenth-grader and "Who" neophyte finding out the phone number of the local fan club, Mini-UNIT, and having a two-hour conversation with a woman I had never met. I had questions, and she had answers. This intense learning phase involved interacting with fans, watching the source program, and reading magazines and books about "Doctor Who". Tom says of his early fan experience, "I was going through my crazy "Doctor Who" fandom phase, where anything associated with "Doctor Who"--let's learn more, let's know the ins, the outs, and everything else." Sue theorizes that fans of things in general, from television programs to sports, begin with this intense learning phase: "These are people who like the show and want to know everything about the show, the ideas, the sport, no matter what it is. They want to know everything about it. Then you move up." This knowledge does have its practical applications: The VidMaster admits that it takes only minor effort for him to organize a pile of "Doctor Who" Target paperback novelizations into the order aired, which is helpful when assisting at conventions.
Because of this learning phase, fans end up with a huge base of common information. MUM assumes that the fans have gone through this memorization phase and will recognize the situations and characters it re-creates. John Tulloch, a British cultural critic now living in Australia who has co-written two books about "Doctor Who", speaking of games played at "Doctor Who" fan conventions abroad, notes that "the standard knowledge of minute details of the series' history is prodigious, and is a major marker of being accepted as a 'real' fan" (Tulloch 134). Though in America this is a bit of an overstatement--I have seen dedicated trivia buffs accept less educated fans easily, perhaps because of problems finding the source programs--MUM wishes to speak only to other "real" fans. Occasional watchers of the program would not have enough knowledge to decode MUM's videos, as MUM's videos deliberately leave behind audience members who know little or nothing about "Doctor Who", thus reinforcing the learning phase and linking the "real" fans into a cohesive unit.
When I asked MUM members about the videos' audience, responses were similar. Mark says, "Some people have accused us of shooting them for ourselves," a response echoed by other MUM members. Lisa says the videos were made for the fannish convention audience, because "[t]he people who watched it on cable access probably don't know what was going on anyway...Unless they're "Doctor Who" fans, they wouldn't understand...You have to know something about "Doctor Who" in order to understand a lot of the jokes." Matt responds with "No one." When pressed, Matt adds, "Well, the first one we had an audience. We were trying to shoot for the fandom audience... But after that, it was just a case of it was fun to do. If people watched them, fine... You know--who cares." In every case, their responses to my question referred to the specialized knowledge required to understand the video and acknowledge the incomprehensibility of the product to the average viewer.
MUM videos play with "Doctor Who" characters by placing them in situations unrelated to the program itself, as when MUM's Doctor Six finds herself in the world of "The Prisoner". However, the context, particularly of the earlier videos, relies heavily on knowledge of "Doctor Who" and its situations and characters. Such scenes are familiar to any moderately educated fan. The following cutting from a dialogue from "Genesis of the Daleks" (1975), a Tom Baker episode where the Doctor is given the means to kill all Daleks before they can become the scourge of the universe, shows the Doctor's moral dilemma. As the Doctor holds together two wires that will trigger an explosive device, his companion, Sarah Jane Smith, begs him not to hesitate.
The Doctor: Listen: if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?
Sarah Jane Smith: We're talking about the Daleks, the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them; you must complete your mission for the Time Lords!
The Doctor: Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other, and that's it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations, could live without fear, in peace, and never even know the world Dalek.
Doctor Four: Listen: if somebody who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that child would grow up to be totally evil, to be a ruthless Controller who would destroy many great TV programs, could you destroy that child?
Sarah Jane: It's Michael Grade we're talking about--the most evil person ever created. You must destroy him. You must complete your mission for the producer!
Doctor Four: Have I that right? Thousands of generations could live without fear, in peace, and never know the name of Grade...
By using behind-the-scenes "Doctor Who" personnel as characters, MUM seizes power by recontextualizing the source program to include these people in order to bring about a preferred result. The peasant can get revenge. The Doctor/Sarah Jane Smith dialogue quoted above, for instance, shows the Doctor wrestling with a decision to kill "Mikey" Grade. This approach uses the "Genesis of the Daleks" story as a frame to suggest that within the purview of MUM's own creation, Mikey will get what he deserves. Likewise, in "The Fallout of a Time Lord", based on the season-long "Doctor Who" "Trial of a Time Lord" series (1986), MUM members exact revenge that the real-life sixth Doctor may have wished to visit on his bosses, who refused to renew his contract.
By doing this, MUM expresses its desire to control the means of production, which it articulates in two ways. First, of course, is the making of the video itself. Second is the inclusion of "Doctor Who" behind-the-scenes players, notably producer John Nathan-Turner, script editor Eric Saward (played by a puppet in MUM videos), and controller Michael Grade. Mary Whitehouse, affiliated not with the BBC but with the children's programming watchdog group National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, also appears in several MUM videos. These people, responsible for the program's direction and ultimately for its demise, appear in most MUM videos. MUM wants to control the controller and does so by rewriting the source program and inserting those who really do control the production and direction of "Doctor Who"--under the control of MUM, of course, and poetic justice can be poetic indeed.
Henry Jenkins remarks of fans in general that "[w]ithin the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors" (Jenkins, "Poachers" 27). By straddling the line between consumer and producer, as well as blurring the distance between creation and creators, MUM members rewrite the texts to their own liking. In MUM's world, "Doctor Who" comptroller Michael Grade and producer John Nathan-Turner get what they deserve for "sabotaging" "Doctor Who". MUM members seize control of their commodity, becoming proprietors not only by making a final product but also by valorizing their ownership of knowledge, their engagement with the fan experience, and the group itself.
Karen Hellekson
Works Cited and Consulted: