My partner Nicola is an actress. For those of you who don’t know, she is best known for playing a regular character in the British sci-fi series ‘Dr Who’. I’m sure you would assume that actors who appear in cult television shows tend to attract a lot of fans, and attract lot of attention, both good and bad.
Well your assumption would be correct.
In 2008, we were working together, writing a sitcom, and at that time Nicola and I were just colleagues collaborating on a piece of work. I hadn’t known her that long and we’d only been working together for a couple of weeks when, out of the blue, I got a mysterious e-mail from someone. I’ll call him ‘X’.
‘X” was using an obviously made-up name. He had heard on the grapevine we had been working together and he had tracked down my e-mail address. ‘X’ was very friendly at first, he said he was a HUGE fan of Nicola and asked me if I could ‘introduce’ him to her for a ‘project’. When I suggested he approach Nicola’s agent and refused to turn over her contact details he turned nasty, sending more e-mails. Offensive ones, describing what he wanted to do to her.
Then he started stalking Nicola.
Somehow he worked out roughly the area of West London where she lived and followed her around—not making himself known, not approaching her, just watching her, and then telling me via e-mail what he was doing. He told me when had seen her at the gym. He reported her going out on a date with her-then boyfriend (he didn’t approve of the fact he was black).
At one point he followed her when she went for lunch, looking at her anonymously across a crowded café. He emailed me at that moment, in real time, on his blackberry (cutting edge technology at the time), telling me where he was, what she was eating, describing the clothes Nicola was wearing in lurid detail so he could prove to me that he had managed to track her down again.
When I received his e-mail I rang Nicola in a panic, telling her not to go home (we had worked out he didn’t know her exact address—yet), threw myself into a taxi and hurtled over to the café. I wasn’t far away, and got there in minutes, but X had gone.
Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But wait for it—X’ lived in America. He had travelled all the way across the Atlantic to stalk her.
To cut a long story short we finally scared ‘X’ off. But that, I learned, was the tip of the fanberg. Nicola told many stories of fan horrors; she told me of the time she hired a martial arts instructor to teach her some protective moves against another fan who had started stalking her. One day Nicola rang up the teacher’s house to cancel a session (it was her birthday and she was going out with friends) and his wife raged at her down the phone.
“You’ve got a nerve!”
It turned out the martial arts teacher had told his wife that he and Nicola were having an affair, were trying for a child and were moving to Hollywood together. All lies. All delusions.
Sometime later, Nicola was leaving her home to catch a train in the very early hours of the morning, and she caught the martial arts teacher sleeping in his car outside her flat. That one ended with a restraining order.
My partner and I have now been together for 16 years, and our life has been peppered with incidents like this, small and large. Not as alarming, but all curious in their own way. Fans who want her to sign bits of their bodies, fans with a desperate need to talk to her about anything, fans not understanding little things like personal boundaries. And I had a lot of empathy towards these people, because I was a fan too!
So there you go, we’re half-way through this article, and you’ve had a terrifying twist. Ha! I am a fan. Not THAT kind of fan. Oh no. I just have the books. And the DVDs. And the Blu-Rays in case I can’t find the DVDs. And I can recite some of the dialogue by memory.
I just HAPPENED to have a poster of Nicola on my wall when I was 16, and I just HAPPENED to write to the BBC and ask for Nicola’s autograph. I’m not OBSESSED at all. You do believe me, don’t you? You do BELIEVE ME?
It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? But call it an accident of fate, or upbringing, or mental wellbeing, I just happened to be the harmless kind of fan who channels his obsession into something positive, which for me is writing. I’ve written professionally for over twenty years now, comedy for radio, television, stuff for magazines, games, comic strips, you name it.
Sometimes I do dip into my knowledge of cult fandom for my writing. Roughly about the time I met Nicola I was planning a series of three light-hearted thrillers called ‘The Mervyn Stone Mysteries’. They concerned—wait for it—a creator and script-editor of a cult science fiction series called ‘Vixens from the Void’ that was broadcast in the 80s and 90s. I conjured from my imagination a cheesy old TV series full of attractive young women dressed in spandex, that caused much libidinous excitement from boys of a certain age, who had since grown up into men of an equally certain age with certain odd ideas about women that were less than healthy.
My titular character, Mervyn Stone, had found his career on the slide since the cancellation, and was now eking his life out going to conventions, signing books in cramped comic book shops and attending DVD commentaries. He was a man out of time, telling anecdotes to stay alive like a slightly overweight Scheherazade. The ‘hook’ was that Mervyn kept becoming a detective by accident, solving murders at the aforesaid science-fiction conventions, comic book shops and DVD commentaries, and his experience at script editing (finding plot holes, for example) made him ideal for working out whodunnit.
And, of course, in the pages of these books there were fans. Weird fans. Obsessive fans. Violent fans. Psychotic fans. Murderous fans! I’m sure fans would have featured, but I’m not sure they would have been quite so crazy, had I not experienced second-hand what Nicola had done through.
The three books, ‘Geek Tragedy’, ‘DVD Extras Include: Murder’ and ‘Cursed Among Sequels’ came out in 2012. They got some nice reviews, I had some lovely feedback and Mervyn developed some fans of his own, and at the time I thought that was that, until I met a publisher at a party. He was asking me about my writing and I told him about the books. He loved the premise and wanted me to write more, but he wondered if they could re-launch it, with a different detective?
I went home and thought about it, and became very excited about the idea, because this time I could make my detective a fan! Because fans can be suspects, but they can also be detectives. Take it from me!
And after all, what are detectives but fans in their own way? People with a passionate interest in minutia? Is a fan with a detailed knowledge of Star Trek that different from Sherlock Holmes, with his self-declared encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘sensationalist literature’? Poirot’s obsession with order, with his square furniture and compulsive trimming of his little moustache, is an exercise in creating a framework within which his little grey cells can function. A fan of Star Wars also has a framework of rules that also gives their lives a sense of order (if only to create incredibly accurate outfits for cosplay).
In the last fifteen years, for every scary fan my partner encountered, she has met dozens of wonderful, creative fans itching for the chance to be helpful. They raise money for her charities, answer any technical question she has when her computer throws a tantrum, they turn up at conventions with specially made dog treats and collars for her dachshunds and many of Nicola’s fans are now both close friends and or work colleagues. So I thought it was a great opportunity to show the other side of fandom, the enthusiasm, the channelling of obsession into something positive.
And so the character of Kit Pelham was born, star of my new murder mystery ‘The Fan Who Knew Too Much’. A nerdy, slightly awkward passionate fan of ‘Vixens from the Void’, but not THAT type of fan. Oh no. She just has the books. And the DVDs. And the Blu-Rays in case she can’t find the DVDs. And she can recite some of the dialogue by memory.
In the book, Kit and her fan friends plough through the original paperwork of ‘Vixens from the Void’ and find an interesting anomaly; The dates of location filming in the 80s happen to coincide with a suicide of one of the extras. Have they stumbled across a suspicious historic death? Only one way to find out, if you’re a fan…They decide to film a ‘making of’ documentary for a Blu-Ray release and invite the original cast together to be interviewed on their memories of filming, to see if they can work out if one of the cast happens to be a murderer.
As Shakespeare once put it: ‘the play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’. And he should know. He was a pretty obsessive writer himself. Big fan of Queen Elizabeth. Why else would he trash the Yorkists?
It has been a great experience writing for Kit, because unlike Mervyn Stone, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the plot, Kit Pelham and her friends are really up for the adventure, keen to track down new facts and confront errors in the paperwork. I’m looking forward to writing a lot more, mainly because if I do I can line the books up neatly on the shelves in order of release…
Because, obviously, that’s what us fans do.
***
