Love Me Who

In the early sixties, two separate outbreaks of pop culture ‘mania’ rewrote all the rules and sent the children and teenagers of the UK – and eventually across the world – into a state of fervent adulation to which the word ‘mania’ did not really do adequate justice. In households across the nation, elder siblings stuck customised mops on their heads and practiced going ‘woo’ in dubious approximations of a ‘Mersey Sound’ accent, while their younger counterparts argued in the street about who got to ‘play’ what character from their new favourite science fiction series. The fervour surrounding Ian And The Zodiacs and Secret Beneath The Sea would soon abate, but whether the bank managers writing furious letters to TV Times about two different forms of electronic caterwauling liked it or not, Dalekmania and Beatlemania were here to stay. Other than their brief cameo in the 1965 story The Chase – and there’s much more about that here incidentally – and that time John Lennon was snapped by the paparazzi sharing a pint with a Dalek, though, Doctor Who and The Beatles never actually properly crossed paths. Until now.

To accompany the upcoming Doctor Who episode The Devil’s Chord, in which The Doctor and Ruby are set to drop by on Abbey Road in the early sixties while The Fab Four and George Martin are in the middle of a recording session – no, it’s not Carnival Of Light, sadly – I’ve got a feature in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine looking at all the occasions on which Doctor Who and The Beatles did somehow find themselves in each other’s orbit, usually by accident rather than design. There’s long-forgotten panel show appearances and what Carole Ann Ford thought of the latest top pop discs, the story of how Delia Derbyshire ultimately didn’t end up working on Yesterday, who else was on Top Of The Pops in the week that the performance in The Chase was recorded and lots more besides, including what was really going on with John and that Dalek – and which equally exciting other sixties screen icon he also met a couple of minutes later.

You can get issue 603 of Doctor Who Magazine from here or in all good newsagents, and if you’re looking for more of my thoughts on all matters Beatle, then you can find an attempt to unravel the mystery behind their legendary unreleased electronic sound collage Carnival Of Light here, a similar attempt to identify all of the television shows they natter about watching between takes in Get Back here, a chat about my love of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album and George Martin’s side in particular here, and a history of Beatle covers released as singles in direct competition with the originals here. If you’re looking for more Doctor Who-related content, then basically just click here and go wherever the Time Vortex takes you, although you might well be interested in a chat I had with Paul Abbott of the The Big Beatles Sort-Out podcast about the concurrent emergence of Beatlemania and Dalekmania in I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek here.

After all, that’s really what we ought to be celebrating here. Back when John, Paul, George and Ringo were recording With The Beatles at Abbey Road and the Doctor Who cast were preparing to record the first appearance of The Daleks at the BBC’s Lime Grove studios, ‘manias’ like these were not supposed to last longer than a couple of weeks, and yet here they still are, all this time later and both still at Abbey Road and on BBC1 where they belong. Although perhaps there’s room for Ian And The Zodiacs somewhere on BBC Four…