Saint Adric's Day

On March 16th 1982, Adric died, so that we might live.


He didn't mean to, of course. He thought he was going to be fine. He thought that Doctor Who was going to save him.


He was wrong. Doctor Who did not save him. Doctor Who was off doing something else. And so Adric crashed into some dinosaurs and exploded.

It happened in episode four of a Doctor Who story called 'Earthshock". It had been a great story. Peter Davison was Doctor Who, and I was just about getting used to his frantic, excitable version of my hero, after a period of uncertainty following the loss of Best Doctor Who Ever Tom Baker. Davison was particularly good here, careering through the story with energy and humour and quite a lot of exasperated eye rolling which I've only just realised is quite a large part of my personality now.

And there were Cybermen in it! I loved the Cybermen. They looked great - massive silvery giant monsters with guns. And they bickered petulantly all the way through, constantly belittling each other's ideas in a passive aggressive monotone. They seemed like fun monsters, who had weird lives of their own - stars of a TV show called "The Amazing Adventures of the Brilliant Cybermen" which we just saw little bits of.

I watched the story with great excitement. I was 11 at the time, and had just fallen in love with Doctor Who in a big way.


And then came episode four.

March 16th 1982. I sat alone in the living room. I assume I had banished the rest of the family, lest they ruin the experience by talking or breathing. I was eating Smarties which, for some reason, I had tipped onto a plate and separated into their individual colour groups. I don't know why I did it, and I don't know why I remember. Feel free to psychoanalyse.

I was reading a book at the time, which lay face down and open on the chair arm. It was, I'm afraid to say, a Doctor Who book. I was a child consumed by singular desires.


The episode drew to an end and the Cybermen had made it so that a spaceship was going to crash into Earth and explode and kill everyone. All our heroes were on the spaceship too, which was worrying for them. They did not want to crash, or explode, or get killed. And so Adric went, "Oh, I can make it so that the spaceship doesn't crash into Earth." And so Doctor Who said, "Well, good luck with that," and ran off in the TARDIS with all the other companions. Adric got on with doing some sums and prodding a computer, hoping that this would make the spaceship not crash, and thus not explode.


And of course I thought, "Oh, I wonder how Doctor Who will save Adric?" I liked Adric. He was young, and slightly out of his depth, and often made the wrong decisions. Perfect for my nerdy idiotic self to identify with.


Well. Adric did manage to stop the spaceship crashing into Earth, except that he did it by making it go back in time. Which meant that it crashed into Prehistoric Earth instead, which is where the dinosaurs lived. Bad news for the dinosaurs and bad news for Adric, who exploded and died.

I was quite astonished. The credits rolled in silence and I sat, also in silence. I ate a couple of orange Smarties. I picked up my book - The Face of Evil, if you're wondering. But I did not want to read it. One of my TV heroes had died. It was weird and unsettling. Worse than when the cat got run over. Sorry cat.


I'm not sure why the death of Adric was such a thing. I suppose I just expected everything to always turn out OK.  I don't know why, though. The TV of the early 80s was full of death. From the massacre at the end of Blake's 7 to the routine slaughter of everyone in Blackadder, to the Young Ones going over a cliff in a bus to the destruction of the whole Earth in Hitchhiker's. There was something in the air, in the 80s, that suggested maybe we were all for the chop.


An odd place, in retrospect, for a teenage mind to take shape. The death of Adric prompted me and Best Friend Paul McGrath to come up with "Saint Adric's Day". Every March the 16th we would abstain from Mars Bars in honour of our fallen hero. We would draw on our hands a five pointed gold star, like the one Adric used to wear. Sometimes we would draw pictures of Cybermen and then scribble them angrily out.


I don't do those things now. I don't eat Mars Bars anymore, so the sacrifice would seem banal. Drawing a star on my hand feels uncomfortable in these times when symbolism is so easily misinterpreted. I suppose I still do draw the odd Cyberman. I like doing that.


And I do remember, every year on March the 16th, that a fictional character accidentally flew a spaceship into dinosaurs. And, somehow, it brings me comfort. I'm not sure what it means. I'm not sure what anything means. Happy St. Adric's day, everyone.