Slipback

He's a good sort, my Dad. Like every good school teacher, he commands respect through a sort of aura of marginal approval. And like all good role models, he has selective and cool tastes. Oh, and he got me into Doctor Who, although he rarely touches it with a barge pole nowadays. Neither does Mum, but that's because she's utterly sick of it following years of me banging on about how great it is. Dad would probably still like Doctor Who a whole lot more if I didn't, or more likely, he still does but is selective in showing it.

For Doctor Who was to us like a borrowed and overworn jumper. It was his, he shared it with me, and I wore it out. Thus my memories of "Slipback" are of a reckless attempt to tape six half-hour radio programs of undetermined scheduling time. I was shocked to discover years later they had only been ten minutes long, but then how do you tell when you rarely caught the opening titles? I just thought we were really bad at catching it. Nowadays any self-respecting fan would be forced to listen constantly to Radio 4 for the whole weekend, arranging for a deputy Mum to stand by with her finger on the record button whenever he needed a wizz. Or he would just pre-order the CD before the broadcast was even announced. It was SO much more fun the way we had to do it.

I managed to get most of the thing, although my tape began not with the first Maston Creature attack, but with the murky voice of Jane Carr some minutes in, leaving me to try and work out how each last cliffhanger had resolved, the start of recording depending on overhearing that Doctor Who had started whilst walking past the dining room where the radio was continually playing. I remain very fond of "Slipback", and unable to comprehend why it's sneered at, dismissed and generally ignored by fans. Years later, they would make Doctor Who on radio and pretend that the Doctor used to ride bats, or duel in a Phantom Menace-style arena full of creatures. But "Slipback" was proper Doctor Who, practically a TV story without the pictures. There were the opening TARDIS scenes (and the Doctor with a hangover!), lots of corridors and the amusing bit where Peri falls on top of Shellingbourne Grant. And "Have you been eating those Rastafarri sausages again?". Snatch and Seedle actually pre

date Glitz and Dibber by a whole year, and it even has Valentine Dyall in it. And whilst Colin Baker would later mistakenly recall how so many of his television episodes ended with him screaming "Peri Nooooooooo!!!!" here, some of them actually do. All of them in fact.

In the nineties, Big Finish would studiously try and recreate several era's of Doctor Who as they were on telly. "Slipback" didn't need to even try, because it was made while the series was still on-air (albeit during a very long break between seasons). No imitation was required - "Slipback" IS a Colin Baker era Doctor Who story, only one sneaked out while Michael Grade had ordered an embargo on the TV cameras. It's to the writers credit that it's written simply as if he were dashing off a late-addition to Season 23, and doesn't attempt to stretch the credibility of the series by introducing elements that the TV series wouldn't have been able to afford. Remember, when "Slipback" aired, we were embarking on the first year without Doctor Who ever. We didn't want Flash Gordon or Star Wars. We wanted the Doctor Who we knew and loved.

We got a bit of Douglas Adams too admittedly, but since that gentleman wrote and script-edited the series himself a couple of years before, it's hardly a fair complaint, David "J" Howe. "Revelation" had been heavily influenced by an Evelyn Waugh book, but nobody complained about that. Douglas Adams is good, which is why "Slipback" is good. I'd never have heard it without Dad though. Do you think an eight year old could have arranged to record six randomly broadcast Doctor Who episodes by himself? Somebody must have spotted them in the Radio Times and looked out a blank tape. It just had to have been Dad.

And that was, I suspect, how it was at the beginning. I've made Who far too uncool for him now, so he usually gets up and leaves when I sneak it on. But there was a time when I was sitting in on a programme HE liked, and in nurturing me in the ways of this great thing, I owe him a pretty big thank you, not least for allowing me to steal that old jumper away from him and keep it as my own.