Why wouldn't Doctor Who be popular in Nigeria?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/11/doctor-who-popular-in-nigeria

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There are a few acting roles which give viewers a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure luxury. James Bond is one – forget Sean Connery and Roger Moore, my first Bond was Timothy Dalton. The Living Daylights came out when I was five, and memory suggests I must have watched it on VHS when I was about eight years old. So my first exposure to Bond was Norwegian pop and a perpetually confused Maryam d'Abo. The grand threat was the KGB, encapsulated by Cold War defections, and a little mujahideen action thrown in for good measure.

The other great British role is the Doctor. I have been a fan of Doctor Who since I was a child, hiding behind the settee scared silly, just as the programme-makers would have wanted. The bulk of that fandom was formed in the same country where nine lost episodes were recently found gathering dust in a TV facility in a northern city – Nigeria. I grew up watching Doctor Who with my family in Lagos, and I'm not terribly surprised by the find – pre-internet and long before international fan conventions in San Diego – Doctor Who was a big deal in Nigeria. And as for the tapes being decades old, that makes sense too – in the late 80s and 90s when we were there, while all the British kids were watching Sylvester McCoy ("Seven"), my Doctor was "Four" aka Tom Baker, an actor who had vacated the Tardis before I was even born.

In the same way people hashtag their frivolous angst on Twitter with #FirstWorldProblems, they wonder what the allure of Doctor Who must have been for Nigerians. The answer is: the same as anyone else. Whatever the trigger was for the creation of the series – a spike in interest in science fiction programming largely due to space travel, say – people watched for the adventures therein. Space travel was (and still is) exciting – and the space race was an international phenomenon, beyond just the players directly involved.

Anyway, the Doctor might have been from a faraway planet, but the show was not really about outer space. It was about spooky and exciting things, things out of this realm of understanding. People go on and on about Doctor Who's quintessential Britishness, but forget that the conceit of the show is that the Doctor, for all his out-of-this-world origins, is drawn with a profound humanity and attracted to Earth because of all its plucky little inhabitants. Plus, if ever there was a culture that would readily embrace the idea of a man from a faraway place and time, parachuting in to poke his nose into the business of mere mortals, it is Nigeria's. The time travel conceit was also an attractive element for Nigerian audiences. I'm Yoruba, and time travel resides in our very names – for example, Yetunde, Yeside and Iyabode are all names given to the first granddaughter born after the death of a grandmother. Regeneration and reincarnation lie at the heart of many Nigerian cultures, so the Doctor's returns in new bodies was not necessarily alien to us, just a little more literal than normal. And of course, it is the human condition to want the chance to right wrongs, avert disaster, reset and remodel or simply relive the glory days – these are not exclusively the preserve of Europeans. These are not #FirstWorldDesires, just regular human ones.

The discovery of the lost tapes in Nigeria could almost be a subplot of the show – The Dusty Archive, maybe – in which the Doctor visits a northern Nigerian city during the harsh Harmattan and uncovers long-buried secrets. I'd watch that in a heartbeat.

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