Doctor Who... The In-Joke

I like clever people and the in-jokes they play.

I’m not necessarily claiming to be clever, but I plant lots of little jokes in my stories, simply for my own pleasure. They often revolve around names. For example, my story Cell for the Sabbat Worlds Anthology was about resistance fighters, so I gave them all monikers derived from old French, and just to add to my own delight, I gave them all Huguenot names, because that’s where Abnett came from, originally. Yes, it takes a little longer to research, but the names have to come from somewhere and it stands to reason that people from one region might have names that share something in common, so I’d be researching them anyway, so my little whims and jokes give me a starting point.

As many of my regular readers know, I’m not a great sleeper, so I put my iPad on my nightstand and tune in to NetFlix for boring tv. I don’t, after all, want anything that’s going to keep me awake. The other night, I was watching an episode of Kingdom with Stephen Fry; it was, in fact, series 3, episode 2, and it was a storyline about crop circles and UFO enthusiasts. Among the characters was Dr Who as played by Tom Baker, or, in this case, a lookalike. 

This was all meant to be amusing, and it was, of course.

It was the sub-plot, headed up by Lyle Anderson, ably played by Karl Davies, that had the pathos with an elderly couple threatened with eviction, but it was also in the sub-plot that the most satisfying joke of the piece was played out.

It was all in the casting.

Colin Baker as Dr Who

The elderly man, the mainstay of the couple, the householder under threat from eviction and the carer of fifteen dogs was played by non-other than Colin Baker... Dr Who number Six.

I do hope lots of other people enjoyed the joke, too, but I suspect whoever indulged himself with the casting choices really didn’t care, one way or the other.