What I learned from the Dr Who Annual… (Excerpt from The Annual Years by Paul
Magrs, Obverse Books, 2014.)
What
I learned from the Dr Who Annual 1976.
When
he tells you he’s taking you to a beautiful world inhabited by friendly
pacifists: watch out. Even the most innocuous worlds can be terrifying,
especially if you materialize on the wrong scale and fall in a pond. Also, it
isn’t just the monsters and stuff marauding about that can do you harm. Some
planets are alive and telepathic and can bring your worst fears to life before
you. Sponges can be sentient but not necessarily evil. Watch out for noisy
feminists. Cabbage tea can do wonders for hormonal imbalances. The Neuronic
Zone is a very strange and scary place. Watch out for being zapped into a human
farm and receiving the excess psychic energy of flame-headed skeleton people.
What
I learned from the Dr Who Annual 1977
The
deeper you get into outer space, the stranger the alien species become, and
still Dr Who is pretty blase about everything he sees.
What’s
more dangerous than evil space lizards who hate you? Evil space lizards with a
wind machine who hate you.
Beware
of return visits from your old friend Dr Who. He doesn’t ever have quiet
weekends away. If he turns up on your doorstep again, something hideous is
about to happen.
It
really isn’t worth getting into a battle of mind-power with Dr Who. He will
most definitely kick your mental arse.
What
I learned from the Dr Who Annual 1978
When
you go looking up old friends? Prepare to be disappointed. People change. They
forget you. They move on. They can go to the bad. When you travel with human
beings, they soon get tired of very dusty hot planets with three suns. They
quite like going back to Earth every now and then, no matter how much they
tease about wanting to be somewhere exotic. Just because someone says they’re a
peaceful scientist, don’t believe them. They might be psychotic killers, even
if they’re not ugly on the outside. In fact, don’t listen to anyone. Do your
own thing. We can’t ever be sure whether the world we’re in and the further
adventures we’re heading into are actually real, or whether they’re just a
heroic dream that Dr Who is having.
Never
mind!
What
I learned from the Dr Who Annual 1979
Persecution
and sacrifice are both are waste of time, and not at all nice. It’s necessary
to cultivate your own garden. And, if you do, you might get help at just the
right moment from the unlikeliest of sources. Watch out for gigantic space cows
in ermine robes. Anyone too smiley and happy and perfect is bound to turn out
to be a vampiric fiend. Always buy Princesses anti-grav belts as presents. If
all your clothes and flesh are made to disappear by a crazy mystic in a castle,
run straight to Dr Who, who understands how M-Rays work. And never, ever get
into a mind duel with him – but you already know that, don’t you?
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