I still find them occasionally- my handwriting quite gawky compared to my current precise hand, ink well faded and the boxes coming apart. A few of the labels are typed, and some colour coded- a couple of phases I went through in trying to make my collection as organised as my friend John’s. Most of them are the best part of fifteen years old and in many cases have been replaced by much clearer official releases, but I stick with them nevertheless. They are, of course, the video copies I made back in my teens.

To put them in perspective: in the late 1980’s, vintage Who was difficult to obtain through official channels. As if embarrassed by the contemporary product, BBC Video’s releases were few and far between, and initially priced somewhere between ludicrous and extortionate. Those of you who have just forked out £15-20 for Pyramids of Mars on DVD might like to reflect that in 1985, a compilation version of Pyramids with a couple of scenes cut out for no reason other than bringing the package in at 90 minutes exactly, cost £25. And add inflation in- to put it in perspective, a Mars bar cost between 13 and 17p back then. I know- I was addicted to them and was literally on a Mars a day at one point. Two or three releases a year, and up until The Daleks, pointlessly edited into a feature-length compilation. Fortunately towards the end of the decade, home video became less of a luxury and more standard equipment, and commercial releases priced accordingly, but it was only after Who had been abandoned on TV that the video releases stepped up a gear.

In the meantime, there were the Unofficial Channels. One of these was SuperChannel- kind of a first attempt at UK Gold, showing not just Who but BBC classic serials of the past (some of my Super copies have trails for the Douglas Camfield-directed Ivanhoe, for example) and glossy American soaps. As is the way with satellite channels, they tended to negotiate the rights story by story, so the running order was a shambles, but they started with Robot and took it from there, which was the important thing. For fans starved of their heritage, it was a godsend. Unfortunately, people who could actually get SuperChannel were few and far between- at this stage, there wasn’t much else on satellite worth getting as the choice was basically Sky, MTV and nothing else, top-flight football being firmly in the hands of ITV and Elton Welsby (to whom I may be distantly related on my grandad’s side, but that’s another story). But if the history of satellite TV ever gets written, the authors may like to consider whether showing certain programmes affects the take-up of satellite subscriptions. Star Trek-The Next Generation was probably one of the best buys Sky could have made in terms of raising its profile, and a number of fortunate individuals with SuperChannel suddenly found themselves very popular with their Who fan friends.

SuperChannel made it as far as The Invisible Enemy- part way through, if memory serves- before being taken over and turned into a combination of music videos and the Goodyear Weather Forecast. Until the arrival of UK Gold a few years later, there was to be no channel regularly showing archive Who. Except one...and its name was ABC. If the BBC deserves the credit for producing Who in the first place, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation deserves as much credit for keeping the bits of it the BBC didn’t really want and keeping the past alive. ABC loved Who in ways the BBC didn’t, and saw a place for it as a filler in their weekday children’s scheduling. And we’re not just talking nice clean 625-line episodes here- we’re talking practically the whole Pertwee era (bar Invasion Part One which didn’t exist at the time they bought the package), black and white, 525-line colour prints, the lot. Everybody wanted an Australian pen pal, and my friend Mike got one. At the time, Australia hadn’t have Seasons 25 and 26, so the terms of any trade between Aussie fans crying out for new Who and British fans desperate for the old stuff practically wrote themselves. There were pitfalls, of course, not least the fact that, far from stopping in the 1960’s, Australian censors were snipping away at Who well into the 1980’s, but occasional dramatic non sequiturs couldn’t hide the fact that these were better viewing copies than anything else available at the time.

So there was a steady stream of decent quality copies coming out of Australia if you could only get your hands on it. There were also copies of the black and white episodes run off after hours by fans who also happened to be BBC employees, and which served as an introduction to murky monochrome. When the episodes of The Ice Warriors were rediscovered, they were transferred onto a timecoded video in an attempt to stop the leak, but a non-timecoded copy was also doing the rounds. You’d think the BBC archives might be interested in who was borrowing these prints from the shelves for an afternoon and running them off onto VHS, but then again given that they didn’t give a flying fig about what happened to the originals, perhaps it’s not surprising. And where did we put these copies? VHS in the mid to late 1980’s cost about £4-5 for a single 180-minute tape; if you were lucky, Dixons would have an offer on and you could get three for £10. Add inflation onto that and then reflect on the fact that my local Morrisons sells 240-minute tapes for £1.09 or two for £2- and believe me, if you start taping ‘Charmed’, you need them at that price. So it’s not surprising that I was selective about the copies I had run off- fortunately with the Hinchcliffes coming from SuperChannel and Pertwees from Australia, it was fairly straightforward to get decent copies of the classics. There were some real dogs doing the rounds, though- copies of The Seeds of Doom and The Deadly Assassin several generations down from the original transmission stick in the mind, as does a copy of The Stones of Blood from its 1978 premiere, complete with a plug for the Radio Times with Frank Spencer on the cover, printed in black and white because of industrial relations problems at the printer’s. The Discontinuity Guide mentions an Australian transmission of Inferno with the announcer speculating on the possibility of finding a green man at your local ABC shop; I had a copy until I lent it to somebody who never gave it back and now reviews for TV Zone. One pleasure to be derived from the better DVD releases is the attempt to create a sense of context, and it’s the incidental trailers and voice-overs which give some of these copies their interest. Who was never shown in isolation- there were programmes before, after and later that week, and it can be fascinating to see what they were.

But this is digressing from the point, as sooner or later I have to confront the issue I’ve been trying postpone. The dirty side of video copying- the side involving the exchange of tapes for cash. Along with a few school friends, I used to belong to a DWAS local group in Liverpool where such deals were done- in the room outside the meeting room, there were a few tables where spare merchandise could be sold or exchanged- old DWMs, Target paperbacks (on one occasion I decided to clear out all my scruffy ones and get shiny new reprints) and so on. There was even a dealer who came down from Blackpool on occasion. And it was here that we started selling video copies.

We didn’t start it, though- other people were doing it before us. It was always a lottery as to who would bring what for sale, but I remember buying ‘Robot’ (still the only copy I have) and the first two episodes of ‘The Ark in Space’ for a fiver or so and then getting somebody to copy ‘The Time Monster’ and Part 2 of ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ for £3 (cheaper because I provided the tape. So we started doing our own copies- another friend who would qualify for senior fan status if he exerted himself a bit more had other contacts and better copies, so he’d run off stuff like ‘Inferno’ and ‘The Invasion’ which we knew other people didn’t have. Of course, once you took out the cost of the tapes and divided by three, there wasn’t that much money to be made at it, which in itself led to arguments. And to be honest, it probably led to the disillusionment with fandom which I experienced between about 1990 and 1996; I felt that Who fandom was increasingly acquisitive in nature and only after copies of everything in the archives. What I didn’t appreciate until recently was the fact that I was, in my own small way, contributing to it.

I still have most of my copies- I don’t watch them that often now but they fill in the gaps for certain stories which weren’t available on video at the time. Just in case anybody wants to condemn me, I’ve never had or asked anybody for a copy of anything which was commercially available at the time- I do have a certain respect for the creative talents of the makers of Who down the years, and where the opportunity has existed to give them their due reward, I’ve done it. But video copying was really killed off by UK Gold. In their early years they didn’t just show omnibus editions of Who at the weekend, they showed individual episodes in the week, so all of a sudden your average UK-based fan could have a complete collection of episodes for the price of a blank tape. Add to that the increasing availability of soundtracks and BBC Video’s eventual release of every existing episode, and all of a sudden your market for copies has shifted from dodgy deals in smoky rooms to eBay. The folk in BBC Towers have realised just how much fans are prepared to pay for archive material of suspect quality and levelled the playing field, so it’s no longer a question of who you know and who can get you a copy of that- the loyal fan has, over a period of years, had the opportunity to put together a collection of everything that exists. And with a bit of patience, UK Gold and eBay can fill in the gaps for you.

But I bet the copies of ‘Day of Armageddon’ are starting to do the rounds as we speak...