Toby Hadoke – comedian, presenter, Doctor Who expert

Michael Flett | September 1, 2012 | Interview | No Comments

A frequent visitor to Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe where he has performed his shows Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf and Now I Know My BBC, Toby Hadoke is something of an authority on all things Doctor Who, having presented features on several recent DVD releases including The Sensorites, The Robots of Death and Resurrection of the Daleks and contributed to several commentaries including the recently released Patrick Troughton story The Krotons and the Jon Pertwee story Death to the Daleks plus the forthcoming Ambassadors of Death. In Edinburgh with his new show My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver, Toby was present at the screening of Asylum of the Daleks at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on Saturday 25^th August, and chatted with Geek Chocolate afterwards over a pot of peppermint tea.

Geek Chocolate – Your shows, both Moths and Screwdriver, touch on communication, finding common ground with your son, learning sign language with your stepson, and watching them I thought of the TARDIS translation circuits. Isn’t it wonderful that Doctor Who brings people together?

Toby Hadoke – Well, I think that’s the genius of Doctor Who. As Steven Moffat just said, unlike a lot of stuff that is demographically led, Doctor Who‘s demographic is everybody. I’ve sort of glibly compared Doctor Who to The Simpsons before now, on DVD commentaries, but it’s not a bad comparison, something that’s enjoyed by both adults and kids on a different level, but I also think, unlike something like The Simpsons, the actual enjoyment, if you are a parent, is seeing your kid’s reactions to it. There’s nothing better than seeing your kid’s eyes light up like you know yours lit up when you were that age, and as a kid I think there’s something great about it.

Generally, if you’re a parent talking to a child, it’s a very loaded conversation, that’s either biased towards the child, where the parent is dumbing down, going “I don’t know why the sky is blue, it’s because god made the sky blue,” or whatever, or the parent telling the kid something it’s not very interested in, because they’re teaching them something, you have to learn to cross the road, or whatever, so either way it’s never a very even conversation between an and a child, unless it’s about Doctor Who, because if you’re a fan, both the adult and the child love talking about Doctor Who, and I think that’s unique in that regard.

But I like the TARDIS translation circuit analogy because it is that, but maybe it translates to you differently to how it translates to me, because I think Doctor Who is a very individual thing as well, and one might love The Androids of Tara because you happened to watch it the first day you fell in love, or something like that, but because we’ve all grown up with it as well, and because you start watching it as a kid, Doctor Who‘s history is your history as well, and I think that’s very special.

GC – Do you think new Who has overshadowed old Who? Is there a generation who are almost unaware of anything before Eccleston?

TH – Well, if there are, it is our duty to go out there and educate them! I love new Doctor Who, but I think part of what I love about new Doctor Who is the respect it shows to old Doctor Who, and brilliant though new Doctor Who is, and I love it, and there are episodes that are up there with my favourites, I will always just be marginally biased towards old Doctor Who, because that’s the Doctor Who that I fell in love with. I think that if it had been a clean sweep, if Doctor Who had started in 2005 and ignored the old days, I would have accepted it, I would probably have loved it, but there would have been something niggling and something missing. So no, it’s perfectly legitimate for people to be fans of just new Doctor Who as it’s legitimate for people to be fans of just Torchwood, but they’re missing out!

GC – How has the run of My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver gone? It was almost sold out when we saw it, and that was early in the run.

TH – I’ve had a number of sellouts, the weekends and the Mondays, have gone very well. Just got a little bit quieter on Monday and Tuesday this week, the last week of the Fringe, but I was busy yesterday, not a sellout, but generally I’ve done double the percentage of ticket sales of anything else the company who are putting me on have got on, and I know a lot of comedian friends of mine are struggling, a good house for them is seventeen or twenty, well the lowest house I’ve had is about thirty six, so I’ve done above average in an Olympic year when a lot of press aren’t coming and a lot of punters aren’t about, so I’m fully aware that it’s because of the words Doctor and Who and not Toby and Hadoke, but I’ll live with that.

GC – Will you be touring it about the country? I know that you’ve taken Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf to conventions Stateside, have you considered the UK conventions circuit?

TH – I will go where I’m asked. The difference is that I haven’t put money into the show, I’m employed to do it, I wrote it, I perform it and everything like that, but to take a show to Edinburgh is a big financial burden upon, in this case James Seabright Productions, and they will get their money back by touring it, and if I do a convention, they will not make any money out of that in the way that they would if I, as I have done, sold out the second stage at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff. So that requires different negotiation, I have to basically go, “oh, go on, I like this convention organiser,” or whatever, so I’m not averse, but it’s not as easy as it might seem in the UK. In the States, it’s not just that I want a jaunt to the States, it’s because they have no jurisdiction in the States and they don’t mind. So I would do a convention in the UK, but it has to be timed properly, and it has to be far enough away from potential dates at a theatre in that city, if that makes sense. But I’ll go to conventions to talk about the DVDs!

GC – I mentioned when we saw you, the venue you’re in, just a couple of years ago, Katy Manning performed almost directly above you in her one woman show, Me and Jezebel, and she was wonderful. You’ve met Katy several times, haven’t you?

TH – I have, although I would say she’s never, strictly speaking, performed directly above me. I sort of know Katy, in the sense you meet and work with people, and she’s friends with Rob Shearman who I know very well, and I like Katy Manning a lot, and I saw her show, I went to the press night when it was in London, in Hampstead, and she’s delightful and I thought the piece was good. She came here to the Fringe with very little advertising and still had a good time, I think.

GC – It has been a tough year for Who fans, between Nick Courtney, Caroline John, Lis Sladen. What are your memories of each of them?

TH – Well, Nicholas Courtney was an absolute gentleman. I have to say it was an absolute privilege to be asked – the Guardian have me on speed dial for when somebody dies, sadly, which can be depressing, but it’s something I take very seriously, and try and do as good a job as possible. Caroline John and Mary Tamm, the obituaries were written in three hours. It’s a very tough job in a way, you have to put that to one side for a moment and go “I’ve got to make this as good as possible, and as accurate as possible.”

GC – It must be a lot of pressure to know that you will be shaping somebody’s immediate perception of someone.

TH – And also the facts as well, where do you find what somebody’s middle name and birthdate is? It’s just a little bit at the bottom, but it has to be right. Sometimes that can be harder to find than you would think. And I’ve done too many recently, you’ve mentioned three names there, there’s also Mary Tamm, Barry Letts wasn’t that long ago either, but Nick Courtney I liked very much, he was a gentleman. I did do Moths at a convention, at Dimensions a few years ago, 2006 or 2007, and Nick Courtney came up to me afterwards and said “I’d just like to say, all the politics in that, I agreed with every word.” And it’s one thing to do something that makes Doctor Who fans laugh, but to make the Brigadier agree with your politics – get in! Lis Sladen, do you know, I never met.

GC – I’m so sorry. She was lovely, she was the loveliest woman.

TH – I have to say I absolutely adore Sarah Jane, and I think sometimes you can get too close if you’re not careful, so I quite like the fact that, in a way, she’ll only ever be Sarah Jane to me, she’s a very special companion to me. I was devastated when she died. The news broke on my wife’s birthday. It was a very bittersweet day.

Caroline John was lovely. Fortunately she got to do the Ambassadors of Death commentary, so we got to do that together, which was nice, and that’s the beauty of the DVDs, is that it preserves. The Ambassadors of Death commentary has three people on it who are no longer with us, and in a way that vindicates the hard work we do on the range to try and get as many people and to get disparate people, and to get these things down there on disc as much in advance as we possibly can.

GC – One of my great regrets was a video signing at the Virgin Megastore on Princes Street, which no longer exists, and it was Jon Pertwee, and I saw him, and I was too scared to go up and say hello, which is why I now have a policy, if you get a chance, you take it.

TH – Do, do, because funnily enough, Peter Halliday had to go early from the Carnival of Monsters commentary, and we get these frames signed for charity that we put a picture in, when the discs come out we put them on Ebay for charity, though we haven’t done them recently because of the recession, so we’re holidng on to them, and Peter was going, and I said “oh, don’t bother him, he’s an old man, he’s trying to get in his cab, I’ll send them to him,” and I didn’t, and now he’s gone. So the lesson there is, grab the chance while you can.

GC – Has Steven Moffat delivered on the promise of The Empty Child and Blink?

TH – Well, he’s doing a very different job. I think the feel of the show is disctincly Moffatian, and that appeals to me. I like the colour pallette of the show, I like the fairytale feel of the show, the fable, if you like, it’s like a fable. Although we are promised blockbusters this year, and I’m not averse to that, either. Yes, he has, because he’s made the show in his own image, and he’s a very clever writer. I love his conception of the Doctor and I love his casting of the Doctor.

GC – Matt Smith is astonishing.

TH – Matt Smith is great. And I also like his twisting of childhood fears, something that Doctor Who has always done well, but he’s got a real aptitude for it, taking childhood things like statues or dolls houses and all those sorts of things, and he has a real consciousness about the children in the audience, who are of course not just the children in the audience, but us, because we associate Doctor Who with our childhood, and I adore that. Yes, there have been elements of overcomplication on occasion, but that might just be because I’m old and stupid. It doesn’t seem to bother my kids.

GC – So, first impression of Asylum of the Daleks?

TH – I will just say it’s as good a Dalek story as there’s been in a decade. Frightening, epic, surprising, touching, brilliantly directed. Nick Hurran is a hell of a director, he directed The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex which are two superbly rendered episodes, I thought.

GC – And they’re about the only episodes I’ve only seen once.

TH – Well, with a CGI heavy action episode, he hasn’t gone off the boil, he’s still got the visual eye, he’s still got the pacing. I would find it a surprise to see anybody say they think Asylum of the Daleks is not a good episode of Doctor Who, I would wonder what they want.

GC – What are your hopes and fears for the new season?

TH – Oh, I always fear that I’ll die before it’s over. My hopes are that something grabs me, which I’m sure it will, that grabs the audience. I think the critics have been to keen to pan Doctor Who in the last couple of years because that’s what we do, we build something up to be a success and then we kick it. It’s still better than anything else on telly. I would like that cynicism to pass. I’d like Doctor Who to get a bit of that Olympics feeling where people actually go, “yeah, it may be big and bold, and we maybe want to be cynical about it, but actually, it’s something that brings us together, it’s something brilliant, it’s an extrordinary achievement, and actually we’re much better off if we enjoy it rather than find reason not to.

I would love Doctor Who‘s fiftieth anniversary to be a great celebration of everything that has shaped my life and the lif
e of most of my very close friends. It’s the thing that I think about, probably first when I wake up in the morning and last when I go down. Some people might think that that’s sad, but it makes me happy, and I think that’s all one can ask for in life, if one is happy, and if I am made happy by a television programme with a long and complicated history that I spend an awful lot of time trying to make sense of, and that makes me happy, so tough! Some people get happy throwing stones at ducks, I get happy watching Doctor Who.

GC – And the big thing for us is next year, the fiftieth anniversary. There’s all sorts of ideas floating around. We’ve had multi Doctor stories before, we’ve done big wibbly wobbly timey wimey –

TH – If it’s not called The Quarks of Rassilon, I’m not going to watch it.

GC – What would you like to see? What would your idea of it be? What’s it got to be to match your expectation?

TH – It’s set a very difficult task, isn’t it? I have to say I would have said a year ago loads of Doctors, but no, I’m not bothered, come on, be realistic. But the Doctor is the Doctor, and the Doctor actors are Doctor Who icons, and I would like to see some fanboy pleasing giddy cameo appearances or features. I want something that is rich with the history, and you have to be very careful because you can be self indulgent and alienating if you’re not careful, but I want enough things there that make me go “oooh!”

I did it when the Macra appeared in Gridlock, I was was watching with a non-Doctor Who fan, and they went “Macra,” and I went “oooh!” and she went “What are they?” and I went “They’re, they’re… monsters that were in a story in 1967 that I’ve never seen but that’s still a good thing!” I don’t know. Not many televison programmes reach fifty, and I think it could be allowed to be indulgent, and I think he’s a clever enough writer to be able to be indulgent and appeal to a mass audience, so I hope for something that blows my mind and makes me feel warm inside.