THE comedian Rob Lloyd is a Doctor Who fan, which means one of two things. Either he is a sad git who should get out more (there are lots of people who hold this opinion about Doctor Who fans) or he is something else entirely. Maybe he is someone who has benefited from the programme; maybe it has had a positive influence on him and others like him. Shock, horror: maybe Doctor Who is good for you.
Lloyd will be putting this either/or situation to the test in his show Who, Me, which is touring the UK including two dates in Scotland. The idea is that Lloyd will present the facts about his life, his relationship, his social life, and at the end of the show, the audience will decide: is Doctor Who a force for good, or bad?
Speaking from Australia, where he lives, Lloyd, who’s 40, says that he can see both sides of the argument. At university, while everyone else seemed to be going out drinking and smoking and exploring their sexuality, Lloyd was indoors watching Doctor Who. Was that healthy, I ask him. Not at that stage, he says. Not for a boy like him: nervous, self-conscious and a bit scared about any type of physical intimacy. He should have been out there meeting people.
But wait a minute. Lloyd recognises that spending a lot of time watching Doctor Who can become obsessive and unhealthy, and it took him a while to be less sheltered and cut off, but on the whole he says the programme has been good for his mental health by providing a comfort zone.
“It connects you with a time in your past, with a part of you that relaxes you,” he says, “you can chuck on a Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton and that can send you back to a place of comfort and relaxation and just take everything else away.”
Lloyd also believes the positive influence of Doctor Who goes wider in providing a different type of hero.
“The great thing about the Doctor was that he wasn’t your typical masculine, hetero-normative version of a hero we were so used to growing up – I was a very scrawny, nerdy kid from country New South Wales and the only heroes we had were sports stars or big action heroes so to get a hero who was smart and funny and used his wit to get out of situations was someone I could relate to very much – he didn’t rely on his physical appearance or being able to punch the hardest or shoot the quickest. That was really attractive to me.”
And it still is, says Lloyd. The Doctor’s first instinct is to accept rather than reject, to never give in, and to find the best of any situation. Whether Doctor Who is a positive or negative influence will be up to the audiences, but Rob Lloyd thinks this quality of the Doctor is nothing but positive and something he – and all of us – could do with copying.
Rob Lloyd is appearing at the Eden Court in Inverness on July 8 and the Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh on July 9. For more information, visit roblloyd.com.au
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