Image © Tim Jackson, 1989

Cheekily named after the DWAS newsletter, Celestial Toyroom (commonly known as CT) and the popular Tom Baker Doctor Who story, City of Death, CT of Death was the brainchild of ‘Stair and Staff’, namely Alastair Hooley and David Bickerstaff of Twickenham, Middlesex. However, as we will see, the in-jokey name would lead to unforeseen problems…

“During the 1980s, David Bickerstaff and I were very keen Doctor Who fans,” says Alastair Hooley. “I recall us listening to The Master Tape and thinking it would be fun for us to do something similar, partly because we didn’t have the equipment or funds to produce a printed fanzine which otherwise would have been our preferred medium.”

The first issue was produced in the summer of 1988 but almost straight away, as Alastair reflects, the pair realised that it wasn’t going to be as easy as they first guessed: “It was hard work trying to fill a 60-minute cassette with material, as there were just the two of us contributing. We didn’t have access to celebrities for that all-important interview (something that made me envious of other fanzines and I always wondered how they managed it), so everything had to be generated by ourselves. We decided on a mix of factual articles and comedy, although, speaking for myself at least, I was never quite sure whether the comedy was actually funny. That’s still the case to this day!”

If filling the one-hour cassette with entertaining and original material had been a challenge to Alastair and David, what happened next was a further hurdle to negotiate. They tried to advertise it, a seemingly straightforward process... Alastair Hooley takes up the story. “We submitted the advert for the sale of the tapezine to DWAS’ Celestial Toyroom newsletter, but they refused to publish it on the grounds that ‘the title is too similar to that of a well-known Doctor Who newsletter’. Therefore, we subsequently sent the advert to Doctor Who Bulletin, who weren’t so fussy! Customers had to send us a blank C-60 tape, 30p and a stamped addressed envelope. I’m sure at least one customer failed to fulfil all of these requirements but seeing as the total number of orders looked like it would never break into double figures (and indeed I don’t think they ever did), we sent them a recorded tape anyway!”

Alastair and David quickly realised that the poor sales encountered with Issue 1 had been in part a result of their failure to advertise in Celestial Toyroom and compromised on the title of the tapezine for the second issue – at least on the advert, where it was called City of Death. This meant that Issue 2 was advertised in the DWAS’ newsletter in May 1989 without problem.

“For the second issue, we received a number of contributions from Issue 1 listeners, which made it an easier task to fill a 90-minute cassette than it had been to complete the 60 minutes of Issue 1. One contribution was a rather lengthy play from a Paul Magrs, who was a university student at the time, but who is of course now known for his Doctor Who novels and other writings.”

“I remember writing and recording it very well! My first year at uni,” Paul Magrs comments. “It was called Another Doctor Who and had a newly-regenerated Doctor living as a tramp, camped out in protest beside the fence of a nuclear missile base. I think two hour-long episodes were written… there was a monster who stole and ate people’s eyeballs! We gathered all my theatre studies friends in my campus room to record it, as I remember, all in my first term at Lancaster in 1988.”

Some other submissions for Issue 2 were even less tasteful than a monster who gobbled up its victims’ ocular appendiges, as Alastair Hooley recollects: “We also received a contribution from a 13-year-old boy who had recorded himself playing a Rambo game on his ZX Spectrum, pretending that he was shooting John Nathan-Turner. David and I were rather embarrassed by this, largely because we were worried that this was a representation of the mentality of our audience and that CT of Death was seen as being of the same mentality by listeners. Other contributions helped diminish this worry somewhat. Needless to say, the Rambo contribution never made it onto Issue 2. Orders for Issue 2 were a bit more abundant than for Issue 1, even when taking into account the free copies promised to contributors.”

From the perspective of the listeners, Issue 2 marked the end of CT of Death, but Stair and Staff did not initially intend the tapezine’s demise to be quite so sudden, as Alastair reveals: “We did write and record some material for Issue 3 but by that time – the year was 1990 – our passion for Doctor Who was beginning to wane. I think this may have been triggered largely by the fact that 1990 was the year ‘old Who’ disappeared from the TV schedules and there didn’t appear to be anything on the horizon. Consequently, Issue 3 never materialised.”

Alastair Hooley and David Bickerstaff are no longer active in Doctor Who fandom, although they still watch and enjoy the programme, albeit as ‘casual fans’ and are still referred to as Stair and Staff in many circles.

Stair and Staff’s take on the tapezine format proved itself to be fun and often irreverant, nicely balanced with well-presented articles on subjects such as the decline of the programme in the 1980s, the works of Donald Cotton and a comparison, with audio clips, of the two versions produced of An Unearthly Child. The comedy sketches with which these were interspersed were consistently witty and well presented. A particular highlight was an amusing attempt to review Season 25 without actually having seen it, as this issue was unleashed to the public prior to the premiere of season opener, Remembrance of the Daleks.

Alan Hayes