Katedance (Patreon)

On a cultural level, the existence of a relationship between Kate Bush and Doctor Who is unremarkable. Even as Doctor Who waned in popularity and quality in the Eighties, the astoundingly long-running sci-fi TV show was still a major institution of British popular culture. As Kate Bush stormed into her imperial phase, she ascended on the charts in the cultural vicinity of Doctor Who. Bush’s intersection with the program wasn’t simply a matter of synchronicity though, as she has long been a known Doctor Who fan. Having grown up with the series, Bush occasionally referenced it in places, and after its revival in 2005 issued a dinner invitation to program showrunner Russell T Davies (who was so flustered he never replied). Her personal fandom and a host of young (largely queer) Doctor Who fans and writers in the 1980s who were also Kate Bush fans of course led to some fun myth-making.

Since the late 1980s, rumors have circulated that Kate Bush authored the Doctor Who serial “Kinda” and its sequel “Snakedance.” The original hoax centered around speculative alternate candidates for the “true” identity of writer, Christopher Bailey, who wrote the two auspicious serials and then vanished from Doctor Who. Tom Stoppard was circulated as a candidate, although “Kinda’s” lack of dialogue like “I made love to your wife in the gazebo” knocks a hole in Stoppard’s candidacy. Bush’s authorship is plausible in an implausible, hoaxy way — “Kinda” aired in 1982, the same year Bush’s The Dreaming was released, and the similarities between the two are fascinating. Their use of pop music visual language as a surreal stream-of-conscious tool, mercurial trickster characters, fixation on phalluses and psychosexuality, and exploration of postcolonial themes render them remarkable contemporary bedfellows. That some jokers looked at the two works and went “Q, then T, so W” is hardly surprising.

Around 1987, Doctor Who fans Nicholas Pegg and Alec Charles had a disproportionately impactful drunken marathon of Kate Bush’s music videos in Pegg’s room at university. In an email, Pegg told me “at some point during Sat In Your Lap, [Charles and I] turned to each other and said ‘Hmm, this is all a bit Kinda, isn’t it? There were the Buddhist references in the lyrics, and the tricksters and demons in the video, and the big Quantel close-up of Kate’s eyeball, and so on.” When “The Dreaming” rolled across Pegg’s and Charles’s screens shortly afterwards, they marveled at Bush “dancing with indigenous Australians in an Earthshock Cyberman suit on a slightly unconvincing [1982 serial] Time-Flight set, which is all a bit 1982 Doctor Who as well, isn’t it?” It was decided: Catherine Bush’s common initials with author Christopher Bailey, C. B., made for a great bullshit story. The friends shared the theory in a pub with some other Who fans, who Pegg believes “took it all seriously,” leading to a delightfully popular conspiracy theory.

As is often the case with conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to the overly broad colligation. Kinda is essentially a feature-length music video, combining period nostalgia (a bombastic critique of the British Empire) with quasi-futurist surrealism. Nicholas Pegg postulated as much in a delightful Doctor Who Magazine article titled “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!,” where he explains that “Britain in the early 1980s was a curious place, juggling shiny computerised futurism with soft-focus heritage-industry nostalgia.” He gestures in particular to Visage’s “Fade to Grey” video as a contemporary to Kinda, with its “weird Elizabethan outfits and malevolent pink snake tattoos in a blacked-out, Quantel-infested landscape.” A mini-industry formed in this period, fading when the next era of popular music crept in, but leaving behind notable artifacts like Kinda.

The Katedance authorship question has evolved and fluctuated through the years. In a Usenet post from 1995, Paul Cornell claims responsibility for the hoax, a year after an amused Christopher Bailey asserted he was quite sure that he had written Kinda. Nowadays Cornell chuckles at his delinquency, copping that the idea seems “very Nick Pegg,” recalling a fanzine article on the subject from Alec Charles. As a diehard fan of Bush and Who, Cornell recalls similar hoaxes fondly. “There was also the rumour that Kate’s new album was going to be called ‘An Unearthly Child’ [after the inaugural episode of Who],” reminiscences Cornell, adding “it doesn’t help that [Kate] really is a Doctor Who fan, who once sent me a card saying how much she liked [my Who two-parter] ‘Human Nature.’” Perhaps Bush knows what she’s doing. A lack of authorship doesn’t equate to a lack of credit. It’s quite likely that by influencing and shaping the culture stories like Kinda hailed from, she deserves some credit for contributing to its narrative.