The Day my Doctor Died: a Child’s Experience of the First 'Regeneration'

"Reception theory gives me permission to change the past since it attacks the assumption of the passive spectator, installing his imaginative intervention, the degree of agency that enables the seaming of the viewed into the viewer’s life-experience context. This is an approach that challenges the media ideology tradition by focusing on what viewers do with media consumption, the ‘uses’ and ‘gratifications’ of social and psychological needs. Television thereby relates to issues of personal identity and values. It can be used to help negotiate social identity, or escape from it."

This paper uses reception theory and fan studies to discuss the traumatic moment when the original Doctor appeared to die in front of child audiences at the end of the first Cyberman story in 1966 (this was retrospectively described as the first 'regeneration') and suggests that our experiences and memories of the event are mixed up with our changing relationship to the 'natural' and cyber body.

This article appears in an online collection of academic papers edited by Dene October: 'Doctor Who @ Fifty: Bigger on the Inside' available at: http://www.fbi-spy.com/doctor-who-at-50