Adventures in Time & Space: The Doctor Who Experience
There are several activities and events for which a small child is a useful prop; the openings of films one is probably too old to attend alone, circuses and random birthday parties held for other children… Another example might be the odd hybrid of theme-park ride and museum for children that is Cardiff Bay’s newest tourist attraction: The Doctor Who Experience. Sadly my go-to child has been away on holiday, so I went with the next best option; a whole passel of affable inebriate geeks celebrating one of their (I’d say “our” except I’m an affable teetotal geek) numbers’ impending nuptials (on which congratulations to Cat & Steve). A little alcohol preceded this, although not for me, but you should still take the following with a pinch of sodium chloride to account for my giddy geek excitement.
So, emboldened by our numbers, we descended on a building which has a larger and more regular attendance of five to eleven year-olds than a well-regarded primary school in an inner-city location. Then we waited for about forty minutes as the groups queuing ahead of us were ushered in in small increments, variously more bored and more overexcited than the progeny of understandably contemptuous adults who had thought to bring their tiny half-clones along as cover. But then, after a rote lecture about not breaking anything, we were lead into a darkened room where a film began to play. What followed were surprises, a chance to step through a blue door into a much bigger space, and some rather nasty monsters…
I don’t want to offer too many spoilers (…sweetie…) but there are several moments, buoyed by Murray Gold’s exquisite theme I Am The Doctor (which you can hear at the bottom of this self-indulgence) in which it’s surprisingly easy to lose oneself in the moment. More so perhaps for a child, and when one such miniature human was scared witless by The Doctor’s most implacable foes one of our number, a nameless über-geek, offered her his Sonic Screwdriver to repel the terrors the lines blurred again. At which point I thought to myself, “I’m going tell this story in the first person to people I would like to sleep with, and then admit, sheepishly, that that’s why I’m telling them the story, so that they think I’m both kind and honest…
Too soon though it was over, and we were ushered through into the museum, a house of horrors to evoke childhood terrors for young and old alike. A few of the displays we less than enthralling to the young fan whose Whoniverse began in ought-five or later and which concerned a history that the show’s major demographic of children are mostly unaware of but, all in, it’s fantastic. It’s perfectly silly, expertly silly and over the top in the same way which fables and fairy tales have always been. Grab the nearest available child, or a group of friends large enough to come across as non-threateningly nebbish, and proceed immediately to Cardiff Bay. Sometimes there are dolphins in those parts too. Or so I hear.
