I Love... 1993
 

by Simon Rayner

by Lissa Levesque

by Si Hunt

by Simon Rayner

1993 was the year I started secondary school. How dull! 1993 was Doctor Who's 30th Anniversary. Much more exciting! Amongst the "Paradise of 30 Years in the Dark Dimensions in Time" anniversary fever, I started to become a regular reader of the one and only Doctor Who magazine.

About 6 years before this, my cousin had given me a collection of ancient (but not awful) Doctor Who Weeklies and Monthlies. More or less every issue from 1 to 48 or there abouts. I liked these very much but inevitably out grew their rather basic contents. There’s only so much fun to be had from the UNIT Hotline pages. In 1987, my cousin came to stay and must have been bored waiting for his train for he bought with him that years Doctor Who Magazine Autumn special - "Design on Who" with a tasteful black and white (although more oddly blue) picture of Sylv McCoy and colourful red brolly handle.

I'm fairly sure this was the first and last issue he'd bought in many a day and he gave it to me. It was thing of joy I cherished for years…actually it wasn't, it was quite dull and far too technical and dreary. I cut the front cover of to put up the "Colin and Peri junkyard" picture up a few years later. The pictures were very nice actually, I liked the Raymond Cusik interview’s clever font which incorporated various title sequences and images. If you’ve seen it you’ll know what I mean! For many years this mag was the only place I could get a record of all the 1980s stories (up to that point) as all my reference books only went up to Logopolis in 1981. And it had pant pissingly exciting picture of some Sevans model kits on the back!

I made do with these tatty rags for many a happy year. I fear you'll brand me Satan and banish me to Hades when I reveal that I cut up various issues (including the first one!) for various projects. Quite a few issues have survived intact however and they are now safely stored in cheapo plastic wallets. Hooray!

I can't remember if I ever noticed Doctor Who Magazine in the shops before 1992. I was in Smiths around Christmas and must have had some money left from Yuletide shopping as I saw two issues of DWM and was agog. I forget which the other issue was but the one I set my sights on was the Timelord special which to look at now is monumentally dull but at the time it was beautiful...and it had an article on my cherished "Trial of a Timelord". Oooh and a free poster!

I took it home and devoured, it what else! I was fascinated by all the working titles it revealed ("The Spray of Death!") and over the next few months I often flicked through the magazine in John Menzies or wherever. At some point during the summer I must have started buying Classic Comics which had not long been launched. I wasn’t over keen on it and annoyingly never got round to buying the issue with second half of "The Tides of Time"in it! What does happen in the end? Is that Zoe Herriot in the fair ground?

I didn't buy a copy of the regular magazine until that summer hols when I spotted the Dalek Special on sale in the poky shop at the holiday park we were staying at in Great Yarmouth. I adored this mag too (especially the way it was designed just like the Timelord special with a very similar painting on the cover) and it really helped build the hype for the forthcoming Dalek video set which I subsequently asked for and received my birthday.

We had two holidays that summer and during the last week of the school holidays we stayed at another glamorous holiday park on the Yorkshire coast. Yet again the holiday gift shop bared treasure! On the first day of the holiday I spotted the DWM issue with "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" on the cover! I snapped it up and adored it! As luck would have it that issue a new comic strip began, "Final Genesis". I've not read a DWM strip in years but this one with its parallel universe Silurian and seventh Dr and Ace was just my thing!

Yet more luck! That week happened to be the week a new issue came out so just a few days later three haggard and unfamiliar looking faces were staring out at me from the shelf. They weren't from Doctor Who were they? Must be some "Tomorrow People" article or something. I bought the mag and looking again I realised it was Pertwee, Courtney and Sladen from their ill advised "Paradise of Death" wet Monday morning photo call!

This week also happened to be the week Episode Two of the "Paradise of Death" was broadcast. I insisted on bringing the tape recorder with us so that I could tape the wretched thing forever. The ranger transcope was transmitting, the quality was poor. Every now and again the signal would get lost somewhere leaving much hissing on the tape. But at least I got the damn thing!

From that point on I would never miss an issue…well apart, somewhat unfortunately for the November 1993 one with the "Attack of the Cybermen" archive. I’m not sure how I missed this one, I think I didn’t get round to buying it. I must have chosen the fragile beauty that was the 30^th Anniversary Special instead. Arse!

That's the trouble when you’re a kiddo, you don’t really have money for things. I’m sure my parents would have bought DWM for me prior to 1993 if I’d asked, but I wasn’t a pushy kid and preferred not to be too demanding. Besides, I hardly ever saw the damn thing anywhere! I would probably have been too young to appreciate it before that year but in 1993 I finally jumped on the DWM rollercoaster and it’s been a highlight of the month ever since and hopefully for evermore…

by Lissa Levesque

I’ve got an awful lot of Dr Who videos and DVDs. Most of them in fact. This is no great boast as the reading several will no doubt be thinking either "I’ve got more than that" or "what a waste of over a thousand pounds". But out of that massive collection, two stand out as probably my favourites. Not necessarily my favourite stories – though both are high on the list – but the ones I most vividly remember buying and watching with excitement. Both were released in crappy cardboard cases inside rather natty metal boxes and both bear the thirtieth anniversary logo that seems to have a much higher fondness rating than the more conceptually pleasing fortieth one.

Remembrance of the Daleks came out – so my brain tells me – in September 1993. I remember clearly being in London and seeing it for the first time in HMV. There were loads of them piled up on a plinth. At first I wondered what it was and then I realised. I bought it there and then and had to endure an agonising three hour drive home from the capital before I could watch it. United had a similarly long journey home that day having played Chelsea. I think they lost but I can’t be sure. I’d read about it in the Programme Guide and, in the car, I’d read the booklet that came with the Dalek tin. It was everything I’d hoped it would be. It was Dr Who the way ordinary people don’t believe it ever was. It was a big, action packed blockbuster with fantastic special effects and a new twist on old ideas. I only managed to watch the first episode that night but going to bed after that excellent first cliff-hanger was the end to a memorable day.

But better was to come. November saw the release of Trial of a Time Lord in the now legendary Tardis tin. I have two of them now – I bought a second copy last year to replace my rather worn out original – and they have been pressed into service as rather groovy DVD bookends. I would quibble that the tins are the wrong shade of blue but that would make me look like a freak.

I didn’t buy the Tardis tin in November. I don’t even think I was particularly bothered about it. I read some scathing reviews in DWB and decided that the thirty five pounds that I didn’t have could be better spent elsewhere if I had it. But then came Christmas, Christmas went by and I found myself in Manchester on 27^th December 1993. WHS in Manchester kept moving things round. Always a schizophrenic chain, WHS has never quite known what its role on the high street is. Are they a newsagent which sells other things or are they a music and video store that also stocks magazines? Perhaps they are a book shop with other departments. They don’t know any more than I do. In those pre-bomb days, WHS in Manchester kept changing around. It had an upstairs and a ground floor. Then they opened the basement. Then the IRA opened the whole store and we ended up with the shop we now have. But in December 1993 the videos were shoved to the back of the store. There were partitions – almost like a Dilbertian office – cutting it off from the rest of the shop. But, small as it was, it had a lot of Dr Who videos. Enough that I was faced with a choice – three Davison ones (which were the Guardians Trilogy if memory serves) or the Trial tin.

I absolutely hated the theme tune when I heard it for the first time. So much so that I actually considered recording the old Baker theme onto tape and playing it at the start of every episode. What can I say – I was an undiagnosed mental case in those days. Part one contained a few good lines but I was feeling generally unimpressed. I don’t know if it was deliberate or not but I got into the habit of watching three episodes per day from Monday to Friday of that week (apart from Thursday which only had two). By Tuesday I was loving it. By the final day when, strawberry Corneto in hand, the Master appeared to my surprise and delight, I was in love with Trial of a Time Lord. I even grew to adore the Glynn version of the theme tune and am delighted to hear it used on the Colin Baker Big Finish CDs.

Those days after Christmas are always a bad time. Everything builds up to the Big Day and then it fizzles out, sparking briefly on New Years Eve, then the holiday season dies rather pathetically. But not so in 1993. In 1993 I was doing Trial of a Time Lord. With the possible exception of seeing the TV Movie in 1996 (on VHS naturally before it was shown on TV), no Dr Who video has ever matched Remembrance of the Daleks and Trial of a Time Lord for the sheer event of watching them. I could’ve hung on for a few months and seen them for nothing on UKGold but it wouldn’t have been the same.

by Si Hunt

Few people remember that DWM invented Magic Eye pictures - you know, those bloody annoying books of wallpaper that you were supposed to stare at for ages and eventually see a sunset or a moose or something pop out. I NEVER saw a damn thing! Not even after literally minutes of trying. I still half-suspect it was all a big trick, something my Nan made up to get me back for that time I spent a whole morning trying to teach her the rules to Harlequin's "Invasion: Earth" game, which were so fiendishly complicated that you probably needed some kind of analytical degree to comprehend them. DWM invented Magic Eye pictures, or at least, the rag in the mid-nineties looked very much like one, with it's nausea-inducing lurid background colours.

It was a good time though. Almost in parallel with the bright colours of the mag, they were recolouring all the black-and-white Jon Pertwee stories, and I can recall finding out that "Terror of the Autons" was next by spying a small version of the cover on one of DWM's news pages. Pre-VidFIRE, these arrived looking shagged-out and bleached-through, but still marvellously and definitely in colour. It was also the time that you had to rip the magazine apart before reading it, because they jammed postcards between the front and back covers, an archive into the middle and telesnaps somewhere in between. I don't have those issues any more, just a whole box of marooned pages!

It was the year of New Adventures, not that I ever read any. I fear my pocket money was reserved for keeping up with the videos and scouring the DWM Data Coils (remember those) and DWB's "items for sale" pages for cheap Target paperbacks. I splashed out for "Fury from the Deep" but I never got "The Macra Terror" or "The Underwater Menace", despite being mercilessly taunted by those greedy shops who charged £12 each for them! Imagine that, £12 for a book! Unthinkable. I figured I would bide my time, and then I find them, holy grail fashion, on Clacton market or in the old book shop next to the Bus Station for 50p each. It would be a while before I gave up searching.

And it was the year of New Doctor Who! Except it wasn't, and I can remember brandishing the new DWM which so cruelly professed to contain "return of Doctor Who - more news inside!" on the cover but which inside only yielded a stark, bold announcement - "Dark Dimension Cancelled!". Then we had to go out and buy 3D glasses and four copies of the Radio Times to watch "Dimensions in Time". I taped seven hours of Children in Need, just in case Jon Pertwee came back on. And what's up with everyone on the cover of that magazine? Sylvester looks 12, Pertwee 206. And they've all got the wrong hair as well. They'd all be pictured in cartoon form in DWB shortly afterwards, a big satirical pair of scissors cutting their puppet-strings. Could it be that our beloved Doctor's themselves scuppered our Anniversary Special?

It would eventually take that TV Movie to re-brand everything, but in 1993 everyone wanted to make new Doctor Who and no-one (at least as far as we knew back then) minded! We had at least three current Doctors - Sylv in the books, Jon on the Radio and all of them in Albert Square on the telly. It was a time of political intrigue, with DWB and Gary Levy still doggedly trying to bring down JNT as he knocked out "Years" releases as a Saturday job. And when there seemed to be four new books, videos or Classic Comic issues every month! I hated Classic Comics, but I so wanted to collect all those telesnaps. I went to a convention too, and won a photocopied script of "Volcano" and a mystery video tape in the charity auction! I thought it was worth a gamble for the chance of finding a missing episode, but it turned out to be "Doctor Who and the Wrath of Eukor" with Barbara Benedetti as the Doctor and Randy Rogel as Carl the Chimney Sweep instead.

Yes, it was a good time. In hindsight, Doctor Who never seemed further from returning in '93, especially after political wrangling throttled "The Dark Dimension". But perhaps, and even though we wrote letters like never before, it marked the first time we began to accept that Doctor Who could be great even without new episodes. Some time later, DWM got a makeover, the horrid "white pages" years, and I seriously considered not renewing my subscription! It was much better when it was bright and colourful, just like 1993, a bright and colourful year. Those were the days!

"Barbara Benedetti - the Doctor?"