Image © David J. Howe, 1983

By 1983, David J. Howe had already established his credentials. He had edited one of the very first independent Doctor Who fanzines, Oracle, which began as The Surbiton Doctor Who Fanzine – produced to be sold at the first-ever Doctor Who convention in August 1977 – and ran until late 1981.

David fell in love with Doctor Who during the Patrick Troughton era: “My earliest memories of Who are The Evil of the Daleks (the Dalek conversion process, the destruction of the Dalek city at the end) and The Tomb of the Cybermen (the Cybermats, a Cyberman having his chest unit ripped off). It was the monsters that I loved. They drew me in and made me fascinated by the show. I also loved Lost in Space for similar reasons, but Who was the thing which really intrigued me. I loved behind-the-scenes stuff as well – and I wanted to work for the BBC so I could do Doctor Who. That never happened though!

“I joined DWAS in late ’76. I discovered the Reference Department run by J. Jeremy Bentham and lapped up the STINFOs [STory INFOrmation sheets] particularly, loving the detailed story breakdowns of the early adventures. This led to me helping with the second convention in ’78 and contributing to Jeremy’s output, penning some of the STINFOs. I was doing more and more and I think when Jeremy decided to stand down, he looked to me as a sort of ‘natural successor’.” David duly assumed the Reference Department organiser role from March 1980 and took the work of the department in new and ambitious directions, beginning with Plotlines publications, each of which detailed a complete season of Doctor Who.

Whilst running the Reference Department, David found time to be a pioneer once more, on this occasion by producing the first fanzine on audiotape. In doing so, he coined the term ‘tapezine’, at least in the eyes of Doctor Who fandom. David looks back to the genesis of Dr. Who: Tapezine: “I don’t really remember now, but I suspect that with Oracle closed, I wanted to do something ‘fannish’, and the idea of a ‘tape ’zine’ was appealing. I had been recording Who off-air for several years – the first time was for The Curse of Peladon, when my Dad wanted to watch UFO (I think) which was on at the same time, and so he rigged up his reel-to-reel to record off the telly. My dad recorded a lot of material on audio – The Goons, Big Band shows as he loved the music – and so we had all the equipment to do that. Later on, I recorded regularly from Robot onwards, and eventually my dad rigged up a TV receiver into his audio set-up, allowing off-air recordings with no extraneous sound, or the usual buzz you got from a microphone recording. So, I had a ‘background’ in audio.

Image © David J. Howe, 1979

“I think the idea came to do a tapezine as I had an interview with Mary Tamm which Owen Tudor and I had conducted when she visited a local fête to open it. We interviewed her for my ’zine Oracle on the day, and the recording came out pretty well, so I think that having that set wheels in motion. I had also only recently acquired recordings of some of the ’60s Doctor Who ‘novelty’ singles, and, while you couldn’t use them in a print ’zine, on audio... you could. The idea slowly formed to edit it all together and make an audio fanzine.

“Part of the inspiration was J. Jeremy Bentham and Gordon Blows’ DWAS A History of Dr. Who tapes, which presented a history of the programme with clips and narrative on two cassettes. That was the very first time I heard clips from old Who and it was magical! It was another spur to wanting to do something myself.” Indeed, Dr. Who: Tapezine 1 begins with a respectful homage to the History tapes, with David reperforming Jeremy’s entrancing opening monologue – the words having been written by David Whitaker.

David’s idea to produce a fanzine on tape was revolutionary, even allowing for its predecessors, A History of Dr. Who (1976-77) and Vortex: A History of UNIT (1983). These two titles had been documentaries about a single subject, and while a fanzine on audio cassette was arguably just a step away from both of these titles, no one had thought to try out the fanzine format in the sound medium before David did. When it was advertised in the May 1983 issue of Celestial Toyroom, it marked the first time that DWAS members were offered what David announced as “a new concept in Doctor Who fandom... the very first TAPEZINE.” Perhaps confusingly, the advert was headed “The Oracle Speaks...” and consequently some listeners came to refer to David’s tapezine by this name. The title Dr. Who: Tapezine appeared only on the cassette cover that accompanied David’s tape, and not in the CT advert. The term ‘tapezine’ is also not mentioned on the tape – David preferring “tape magazine” during recording – suggesting that he thought of the contraction only when he came to design the cassette’s packaging.

Image © David J. Howe, 1983

(As an aside, when Dr. Who: Tapezine was advertised, another such project was in the works, being produced completely independently - but interestingly, in the same English county – Surrey), with its producers fully expecting to be the first “audiofanzine” published. Zero Room Audiozine, edited by John Ryan in association with his fellow West Surrey DWAS Local Group members, ultimately debuted one month after David’s tapezine, in June 1983.)

Interested Celestial Toyroom readers could order Dr. Who: Tapezine 1 by sending David a C-60 cassette and a stamped addressed envelope. “I decided not to charge for it as I realised it had copyright stuff on it which I didn’t own. I asked people to send me a tape onto which I copied the ’zine and an S.A.E. for me to return it to them.”

Today, David has quite understandably no records concerning how many orders he received, but, considering the number of tapezine producers and contributors who claim to have ordered or heard his tape via some more circuitous route, it has to be marked down as a success.

Dr. Who: Tapezine Issue 1 featured an archive interview with Mary Tamm, a history of the Cybermen, a quiz and a record spot which comprised Dudley Simpson’s The World of Doctor Who (a suite of incidental music from the Jon Pertwee serial, The Mind of Evil) and two novelty singles - Who is Doctor Who? by actor Frazer Hines and Who’s Who by Roberta Tovey, who had portrayed Susan in the two Aaru Dr. Who films of the mid-1960s. These inclusions would have presented many listeners with their first opportunity to hear these tracks, which at the time were quite rare.

David signed off from Dr. Who: Tapezine with the following announcement: “Please write and let me know what you think of this trial issue – and any suggestions for items for future issues are also welcome. That’s all for now. See you next time.”

Work commenced on a second issue, with an interview being recorded with Ray Dale, the manager of the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, during the 1983 fans’ summer trip to the attraction. David also recorded a commentary as he walked through the exhibition (much as Paul Chandler would later do at Longleat for Lost in Longleat). However, in the fullness of time, David realised that the issue was not coming together quite as he had hoped: “It was a work in progress, not actually completed. I think I ran out of content and ideas and it just floundered as I couldn’t think of what to include that would be good or what I could do that would be worthwhile.”

Even though the second issue was abandoned, David had already – perhaps unwittingly – inspired a new trend in Doctor Who fandom that would lead off in many interesting directions – as did David’s own subsequent journey in fandom, writing and publishing.

One of the headline features of Dr. Who: Tapezine 1 was in fact recorded nearly five years prior to the issue’s release. David J. Howe and Owen Tudor took the opportunity to interview Mary Tamm when she made a personal appearance at the Surbiton Eye Hospital Fête on Saturday 2nd September 1978. The interview was initially transcribed and included in David’s Oracle fanzine (Volume 2, Issue 1 – October 1978), with the audio recording itself debuting on Dr. Who: Tapezine in May 1983. The transmission of Season 16 of Doctor Who kicked off on the evening of the interview, so Mary’s answers set the scene: “When I joined, I realised that Tom [Baker] did a lot of ad-libbing – he changed a lot of the scripts. That’s the way I like to work as well, so, seeing him doing that inspired me to do it as well. In fact, the two of us actually changed quite a lot of our scenes together. Most of what’ll go out – I don’t know if I should be saying this, actually – is what Tom and I made up, not what the scriptwriters made up! The character I play is defined as an intellectual – I don’t know if that’s how it comes across. Certainly the scripts are inconsistent because sometimes she’s written very dim, but then the Doctor is sometimes written as very dim. We try and make something of it. The thing is, the scripts aren’t really written for aliens – they written as though we’re all human beings. Tom sometimes tries to remind us both, or remind the scriptwriters, or the directors that we are playing aliens, but the problem is, really, that the scripts aren’t written that way. They could do a lot more with the characters, but they are written in very human terms, so we have to play them in human terms to a certain extent. [However,] there have been a couple of scripts which have had me looking up in a dictionary all the time. It’s not so much the words as the concepts, because there was one story which we did three stories ago – The Pirate Planet – where it was very difficult to grasp the concept. It took us about six weeks to work out what the writer was really talking about! If you do understand it, I think it helps, although the director kept telling us that it didn’t matter whether we understood it or not. I always feel I like to know what I’m talking about. It helps.”

The Tapezines in Focus section of The Logopolitan Issue 1 (February 1984) included a review by Michael Flint of Dr. Who: Tapezine Issue 1: “1983 was the year that saw the tapezine evolve. The first on the market was David Howe’s Tapezine 1, which was absolutely free [if you sent a C-60 and a stamped addressed envelope]. It even had a cover! This was a well-written and edited production with many clips on it, mostly old, which are the ones few people have. The most boring part is a poor tape of an interview with Mary Tamm. It doesn’t reveal anything and most of the jokes are lost under the tape noise, then followed by loud laughter. The rest of the tape is very good sound quality, and I hope that Tapezine 2 is on its way. I hope that it uses up more of the tape as well.”

As part of a feature looking at the development of the Doctor Who tapezine in Death Zone Issue 2, Keith Musselwhite remarked on the importance of Dr. Who: Tapezine as the first tapezine issued, also noting the inspiration that it had given to others. In addition, Keith commented: “I have to say that Tapezine 1 – or Oracle – was probably one of the best of the earlier tapezines.”

David J. Howe went on co-edit the highly-respected Doctor Who fanzine The Frame with Stephen James Walker and Mark Stammers, with whom he also wrote several well-received books including Doctor Who: The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties and seven volumes of The Doctor Who Handbook for Virgin Publishing. His work for Virgin also included I Am the Doctor (with Jon Pertwee) and Doctor Who: Timeframe – The Illustrated History, which marked the programme’s 30th anniversary. For BBC Books, David wrote The Television Companion (with Stephen) and Doctor Who: A Book of Monsters. David and Stephen set up Telos Publishing in 2000 and together they have overseen the publication of cult TV reference works, original fiction, novellas and tie-in adaptations by a wide variety of authors. David’s own books for Telos include The Target Book (with Tim Neal), Howe’s Transcendental Toybox (with Arnold T. Blumberg), The Who Adventures: The Art and History of Virgin Publishing’s Doctor Who Fiction and all manner of factual guides and fiction. Beyond publishing, David has amassed over his lifetime one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Doctor Who merchandise.