Nigel Verkoff Insults American fans

...an introduction from the Pinnacle reprints of Doctor Who novelizations...

Introducing DOCTOR WHO
amenities performed by
NIGEL VERKOFF

They could not have been more offended, confused, enraged and startled. . . . There was a moment of stunned silence . . . and then an eruption of angry voices from all over the fifteen-hundred-person audience. In retrospect, turning up nude on the lecture platform at the Inner Sydney Annual Star Wars Convention was almost as bad as the heretical words that had sent the kids and adults (all of them, to a man, utter retards spot-welded into their Darth Vader fright masks and Jar-Jar Binks novelty codpieces) into animal hysterics, howling with fury as I threw rotten vegetables at them.

“Star Wars is adolescent nonsense! Enterprise is obscurantist drivel! Twilight can turn your brains to purée of bat guano! The greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I’ll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!”

Auditorium monitors moved in, vibrating light sabre sex toys ready to violate anyone foolish enough to try jumping the lecture platform; and finally there was relative silence as the mouthbreathers realized I was superior to them in every way. I think it was the nudity that did it. Anyway, I heard scattered voices screaming from the back of the room, “Why are you even at a Star Wars convention if you hate it?” and I said, “Mind your own damn business, you nosy gibbering geek!”

(It was like that old William Shatner routine about fans being losers, except it was funny the way I said it. God damn it I am brilliant!)

After a while we got it all sorted out and if they didn’t understand that I was actually there to recruit them to the multifaceted fandom of Doctor Who, then at least they’d stopped caring enough to argue. Quite a few of them had gone to lunch and missed me being incredibly erudite and funky. I told them that Doctor Who was the most famous science fiction character on any kind of media you cared to name, and so many hot fangirls were there to make your brain bleed from the sheer amount of estrogen on offer. The renegade Time Lord, the far traveler through Time and Space, the sword of justice from the Planet Gallifrey, the scourge of villians and monsters the galaxy over. The one and only, the incomparable, the bemusing and bewildering Doctor Who, the humanistic defender of Good and Truth whose exploits put to shame those of pantywaist nerds like Han Solo or Captain Archer!

My hero! Doctor Who! I mean, OK, Richard Dawkins gets to go home to Lalla Ward every night, but the Doctor got there first, oh yes he did! YEAH!!

For the American audience (my god, you redneck hicks can actually read?!), I suppose Doctor Who is a new factor in the equation of fantastic literature? Mind you, you lot still can’t wrap your fat brains around the word ‘philosopher’ in the Harry Potter franchise, so sci-fi fantasy must be one long acid trip to you lot like that loser at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Since 1963 the Doctor and his exploits have been a consistent element of British culture, give or take the odd fifteen years you greasy Yanks tried to get involved and buggered everything up like a horny Labrador at an intensive care unit! YOU BASTARDS! Anyway, I’m sure you’ve noticed at some point in the last five bloody years that the wonderful universes of Doctor Who are being shown in the States and proved pretty freaking spectacular, huh? Oh, you lot don’t know you were born, unlike us who lived in shame and ridicule watching the TV series on BBC and trying to buy every single Doctor Who novelization in the days when eBay was halfway reliable. The time solitary proselytizing is at an end! What is proselytizing? No idea, but spell check thinks it’s a real world and who am I to argue with Bill Gates? Usually the first in line. HAH! No, seriously...

You have probably had this Who novel shoved into your hands still sticky from the thirteenth hamburger that hour, you unknowledgeable tools, so if you can drag yourself away from the TV set without causing your internal organs to implode under your blubber, try reading about the Doctor going through his paces instead of watching it on 32-inch high-definition plasma screens you lazy bludgers! Just look at these words and understand them, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

I envy you your first exposure to this amazing conceit. Well, I don’t, but it’s about the only kind of edge you Americans could possibly have over a superior being like myself. I wish for you the same delight I felt when Michael Moorecock, the amusingly-named fantasist in the English speaking world, became my friend on FaceBook. Oh, and he likes Doctor Who as well. Knew there was something relevant involved.

I’ve been hooked on Doctor Who since the moment it ended, and being in Australia it took about three years before that fact became known thanks to the AB friggin C. Oh, how I despise television, how I urge passers by to bash in their picture tubes with highly-polished cricket bats to free themselves of the monster of the coaxial cable. And also to drum up business for my pal Andrew who runs a very profitable second-hand television repair shop in the local high street. But you must perceive that I speak of something utterly extraordinary and marvelous to even suggest watching Doctor Who in whatever ridiculous syndicated time slot or environmentally-unfriendly digital recording media may possess. I suppose you think you’re clever and I’ve lost all credibility for future exhortations by telling this TV series will not harm you?

Well you haven’t! Sucked in!

Because I’m telling you that rather than vegetate in front of your set-top-boxes, actually crack open this dead tree and read what it contains. Like the TV show, it will delight and uplift you, stretch your intellect of all lesser visual SF affections, improve your disposition and clean up your zits. OK, it won’t, but you just admitted you’re a miserable, depressed idiot with bad temper and worse skin! HAH! You so suck.

But the point of this introduction, in case your some grass-munching spastic who needs these things codified simple and directly (oh wait, of course you are, you’re Americans!), is that Doctor Who is the apex, the pinnacle, the tops, the Louvre Museum, the tops yet again, the Coliseum, the bee’s knees and the dog’s bollocks!

Now, since the non-functional morons who reprint these Target Novelizations have chosen to not only print part two of a two part story, but also the epic finale to five of those long freaking years I mentioned earlier, so there’s a fair bit of basic facts you’ll need to brighten your way through this lunatic bit of scheduling.

OK. The Doctor is a Time Lord, one of that immensely wise and powerful super-race of alien beings who, for centuries unnumbered, have watched and studied all of Time and Space with intellects (as H.G. Wells put it – please god I don’t have to explain who he is to you people...) vast and cool and unsympathetic. Their philosophy was never to interfere in the affairs of alien races, merely to watch and wait.

Until the Daleks pissed them off one hell of a lot.

Oh yeah, imagine R2D2’s evil psychopath cousin who had been locked in a cellar all its life fed nothing but Nazi propaganda and Sarah Palin for company and you’ve got the tiniest glimpse of how terrifyingly badass these mobile dustbins are. You think international communism is a threat? Dude, you’ll be quoting Mao and calling everyone comrade five seconds after these tin bastards begin with the exterminating.

Ah, Daleks. Movies have been made about them, some of them involving naked supermodels getting zapped in their erogenous zones by those wacky armor-plated mutant guys. Toys have been manufactured of Daleks, coloring books, Dalek candies, soaps, slippers, Easter eggs and even special Dalek fireworks. They were all cheap shitty tat, but it’s amazing how much they sell for nowadays. They rival the Doctor for the attention of a fascinated audience and they’ve been brought back again and again during the forty-plus years the series has managed to screw out of BBC television; and their shivering pleasurable manifestations have not been confined just to sex shops and perverted sci-fi conventions in America. Though I wouldn’t put it past you, you freaks.

Anyway, what happened in the Last Great Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks we’ll never see, because any one of you bitches to see the prequel Star Wars trilogy will know why this is a good thing. And if you don’t, I’m sorry, but you should be taken out and humanely gassed. JAR-JAR BINKS IS AN ABOMINATION!

Only one man came out of this mythical massacre alive, a Time Lord known as the Doctor who has studied the interplay of great forces in the cosmos, the endless wars and invasions, the entropic conflict between Good and Evil, the rights and lives of a thousand alien life-forms debased and brutalized, the wrongs left unright . . . and he was overcome by the compulsion to get jiggy with hot blonde teenagers from council estates! Yes, he was a renegade, a misfit in the name of justice and the age of consent, but when YOU see your entire race die in flames and want a bit of jailbait action, see how YOU like it!

Plus he has one dead cert way of pulling chicks: his motor.

Ah, yes, the TARDIS. that most marvelous device for spanning the Time-lines and traversing all of known/unknown Space. The name is an acronym for Transporting All-Purpose Robotic Dimensions Inner-Time Spaceship, and anyone who says otherwise should be ignored because they don’t know what they’re talking about. This marvelous, amazing, sod-it-I-can’t-be-arsed-thinking-of-any-more-superlatives machine can change shape to fit in with any locale in which it materializes, but this one is a piece of crap that’s stuck in the shape of a British police box. No one in the entire world knows what the hell a police box is, except it looks like a TARDIS only with smaller windows and smaller on the inside.

That’s right, tree-huggers, the outward size of the TARDIS does not reveal its relative size within. The size of a phone booth outwardly, it is enormous within, holding a rather rubbish interior that resembles the underside of Brighton Pier only with lots more barnacles and mould. Still, what can you do? It still pulls attractive female travelling companions, whose liaisons with the Doctor are never sufficiently explicated for those of us desperate to see the assistants with their knockers on display.

Let me conclude this increasingly pornographic paean of praise with these thoughts: hating Star Wars and Star Trek is not a difficult chore for a god-like being such as myself. I recoil from that sophomoric species of creation that excuses its simplistic cliché structure and homage to the transitory (as does Kath and Kim) as violently as I do from that which sententiously purports to be deep and intellectual when it is, in fact, superficial self-conscious twaddle (as does much of the work of Mark Gatiss). This is not to say I am an ivory tower intellect whose doubledome can only support Proust or Descartes. I am an ebony tower which is a lot more than most babes can handle, you gonads!

The Doctor’s sexual conquests are sunk to the childbearing hips in humanism, decency, solid adventures and simple good reading. And the girls never wear a bra under there, honest, which is as solid entertainment based on an understanding of Good and Evil in the world. They say to us, “You, too, can be Doctor Who. You, like the good Doctor, can stand up for that which is bright and bold and true. You can shape the world, if you’ll only go and try. And the girls will do anything. I mean anything. Look at this diagram...”

And that’s just the TV show! Can you imagine the sheer about of hot, pus-bloated sex you can get your sausage-like digits on when it’s in the form of great literature?! With a cracking good, well-plotted adventure yarn? DEATH BY SEX, PEOPLE, DEATH BY SEX! These are the direct lineal and venereal heirs to the sexcapades of Rider Haggard and Talbot Mundy, of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, of Mary Shelley and Ray Bradbury. WHOVIANS DO IT IN ALL DIMENSIONS!

Doctor Who and the Daleks have millions of rabid fans in over thirty countries around the world. You don’t see that kind of universal appeal from Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan or the Chaser Team, do you? Every nation knows about the Doctor and loads and loads of girls, frustrated at being unable to shag this fictional character, turn to their fellow fans. Especially the incredibly well-hung and fantastic-at-love-making fans like myself. Oh yeah, I’m drowning in the estrogen and squees!

Oh yes, it’s all mine and it might just be yours, kiddo, if you keep your wits around you. Give yourself up to the Doctor’s winsome ways, he will take substance and reality in your nasty and diseased imagination. For that reason, for the inestimable goodness and delight in every Doctor Who adventure, for the benefit he proffers, I lend my name and urging to read this book about the best thing in the history of history itself!

Mind you, Stargate is pretty damned cool...

NIGEL VERKOFF
Sydney