I have put this book on my read shelf but that is a bit of a lie as I only got about a quarter of the way through before giving up as i found it very irritating and not as funny as I thought it would be. I don't often give up on a book but that I did just shows you what I thought of it ! ( )

A simply book I picked up for free on Kindle is the the life story of Nick Griffiths and his love of Doctor Who, particularly the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker era of the 1970s when he was a child, and the reborn show of the 2000s as an entertainment journalist. If this was just a book about Doctor Who, it wouldn't be very good, but I did enjoy it for everything else. That being the life of an ordinary guy growing up around the same time as I but in another part of the world with entirely different culture touchstones. ( )

After reading “Dalek I Love You: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Edition” by Nick Griffiths, I cannot call myself a Whovian. While Griffiths doesn’t consider himself a hard-core Whovian his long experience with the show (from the age of 4) surely qualifies him for expert status. While the book is as much about Griffiths’ life as the show, it does give readers an idea of the sort of person who adores, follows and obsesses over the iconic show. People the world over whether they watch the show or not know when they see Tom Baker’s scarf the show from which it originated.

There is a Dave Barryesque reticent charm to Griffiths’ writing. At the start of the memoir he tells us he has a child so at least one woman was willing to sleep with him and then cites another girlfriend so that was two. He also openly states that some facts will be slightly blurred due to either memory or convenience. The tone is light and fun and there’s no shortage of laugh out-loud quotable moments. “Surprise is everything. Without it you have stuff; with it, you have stuff plus wonderment.” (Location 875) This author certainly surprises the reader in a delightful way as no matter how far the author gets away from his Doctor Who, he always comes back to the show and actors begging the question of how pop culture shapes us.

“Dalek I Love You: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Edition” by Nick Griffiths doesn’t simply chronicle a love affair with Doctor Who. In respect to a cultural barrier, the football team was the only point where I stumbled. “Dalek I Love You: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Edition” was fun, warm hearted and even David Tennant liked it. Who am I to disagree with one of the two greatest Doctors ever? ( )

Humorous memoir of a Doctor Who fan and music/TV journalist of more or less the same age as me. There's lots in it to enjoy for anyone who grew up in Britain in the 70s and 80s and lived through the music and culture of the time. A lighter read than most of my books;). There is a hilarious quote where the author laments the lack of success in his lovelife "Neither was I Casanova - more Vauxhall Nova, when it came to girls"! ( )

It’s all Nick Hornby’s fault, I suppose. Fever Pitch kicked off that whole genre of Blokes Remembering Stuff That Was Important To Them When They Were Younger, Preferably in The Seventies, which at its best could offer a potent blend of pop psychology and social history; at its, well, not-best, it involved the likes of Jamie Theakston sitting in front of a camera mumbling “Buck Rogers... space dust... Torvill and Dean... clackers... ” until someone turned off the lights.

The problem with these memoirs is that the reader responds to them not because of their intrinsic merits, but on the basis of empathy with the experiences described. So if you like football, you’ll like Fever Pitch; if you like Arsenal you’ll really like Fever Pitch; and if you’re also a bald 50-something novelist who likes Springsteen and Anne Tyler as well as Arsenal, well why don’t you and Hornby just book a hotel room together?

I didn’t mind football when I was a kid, but I preferred Doctor Who. So I guess I’m a closer fit with Nick Griffiths, the author of Dalek I Loved You, which is basically Fever Pitch with Liam Brady replaced by Jon Pertwee. Ah, but then one starts getting picky. Griffiths is three years older than me, and his first DW memory is Spearhead from Space, also the first Pertwee story. I’m not quite sure what mine is – I do have distinct memories of The Sea Devils, but I would only have been three years old when that was first broadcast. Maybe I only remember the net-clad reptiles because one of their number appeared on the back cover of the 10th anniversary special; Griffiths still has his copy, carefully wrapped in plastic, but I’ve no idea what became of mine.* So my first story was probably The Three Doctors (and I do definitely remember that show, not just the Radio Times cover).

Anyway, it’s a gently amusing memoir as far as the Doctor-related stuff goes, taking you from collecting the Weetabix cards to actually meeting Elisabeth Sladen, but for some reason Griffiths insists on running through the various other things he got up to while he was growing up (his model seems to be Andrew Collins rather than Hornby) and this plays havoc with his structure as we leap from Who-related stuff to his other crazes, such as Action Man. Moreover, his grasp of fact and detail is less strong on the non-Who bits: he thinks the TV show On The Move was aimed at deaf people (it was made to tackle adult illiteracy) and Fanny Cradock’s name is misspelled. C’mon, if you’re going to be a geek, get it right.

But all this can be forgiven because at one point Griffiths lets slip his childhood address and it turns out that he lived not just in the same village, but on the same road as me. OK, he’d moved out about a decade before I arrived, and by that time Peter Davison had taken over and DW had become rather less essential. But for a moment, that weird bond of shared geography (yes, Nick, I know the Co-op of which you speak) dragged me in just a little closer to his world. And then of course, I realised I’d fallen into the tiresome trap set by the whole genre: these books are more about the reader than they are about the writer.

*The cover of the 10 anniversary special is also the only instance of Pertwee encountering a Cyberman during his stint as the Doctor, unless one counts his return in The Five Doctors (1983). But you knew that, of course.

http://culturalsnow.blogspot.com/2012/03/only-puppets-you-know-for-children.html ( )