Discovering BBC Videos – and other Doctors!

For all my so-called age and memories or watching Doctor Who as a kid, it’s ironic that Season 24 is the first season I clearly remember watching in its entirety. When Andrew and I first became friends, I remember going round to his parent’s house where he played me his off-air copies of Time and the Rani and Paradise Towers. The tape he had used to record these two stories onto had previously contained some of The Trial of a Timelord which he had recorded the year before. He had kept the opening title sequence from Trial and started the McCoy stories after that, and he also retained the last ten minutes or so of the last part of Trial at the end of tape. I was horrified that he had gone to the trouble of videotaping Trial and had then recorded over it, as I was now itching to see as much of the pre-McCoy era as I could. I always reminded him of this atrocity every time we watched Doctor Who during this period, and was not prepared to accept his excuse that it was the only videotape in the house that officially belonged to him and therefore he couldn’t use anyone else’s! I also used to chuckle whenever he told me that he could swear blind that he remembered Romana’s face appearing after the Doctor’s on the 1980 Tom Baker title sequence!

My first taste of actually watching a pre-Tom Baker episode of Doctor Who – other than the unlikely possibility of watching any of the latter half of Jon Petwee’s stories as a toddler - was at around this time (1987-88) when Andrew again invited me to his house to watch Doctor Who, but by this time he had acquired some pre-recorded BBC videos of the show. We became, and still are to this day, best friends through our mutual appreciation of the programme, and even went on to produce our own amateur video productions of Doctor Who, but a little more of those later - perhaps. The first video that we watched was Death to the Daleks. Viewing this story was quite a surreal experience for me, as I had seen Pertwee as Worzel Gummidge and in other roles, but never as the Doctor. It was also strange seeing Lis Sladen as Sarah-Jane Smith alongside Pertwee’s Doctor as I had always associated her with Tom Baker (not that I can consciously remember watching any of her stories), but they worked very well together. Whilst not an all time classic story, Death to the Daleks was an enjoyable first glimpse at the pre-Tom Baker era, and I was especially taken by the Season 11 title sequence, which to this day I still prefer to the subsequent Tom Baker version!

I remember the first time I watched the TARDIS scene in Death to the Daleks and the subsequent very darkly-lit scenes on Exxilon and thinking to myself, "This is such good stuff – why can’t they do things like this these days?" We also watched Spearhead from Space, which I thought was a much better vehicle for Pertwee, and I thought he was a gem even at this early stage. Soon after that I saw Day of the Daleks which I didn’t enjoy quite as much (though I love it now), but it did at least provide me with further exposure to the Brigadier, now one of my favourite characters from the series. I was still unfamiliar with the Brig at this point, as I was too young to have remembered any of the few Tom Baker stories that he’d featured in, at least at the time of their original transmission, and I couldn’t recall watching Mawdryn Undead which featured the character in 1983.

This was an exciting time for me as far as learning about the series was concerned. From knowing very little about the show’s history only a few months previously, I was now being bombarded with different Doctors, stories and eras, as well as establishing my friendship with Andrew.

Next Episode: Big video recorders and smelly carpets!