Interlude - Beyond 1990

We'd taken to watching Doctor Who together, my Dad, my sister and I. Come Wednesday evening, we'd all sit on my Mum and Dad's bed and turn on the portable. Mum had the whole of the big downstairs set to herself to watch "Coronation Street", of course. As the continuity announcer started his whimsical introduction, I'd stand at the bedroom door and holler downstairs for Mum to start the video in order to capture the night's episode on tape as well. Once I was sure she had, I'd bound back onto the bed with the others and settle down. They were special times.

I remember watching both "Trial" and "Survival" that way, and presumably everything in between. I wonder if Dad and Katie remember watching Doctor Who as well? There seemed to be a long gap before "Survival" for some reason. Given the sense of occasion that each new episode of Doctor Who warranted, I don't think we'd have missed "The Curse of Fenric", so I guess it must have been anticipation. Or the memory cheating. We really loved "Survival" - it had a certain lovely urban simplicity to it. There was no baggage or complexity, and we appreciated that back then more than you probably know.

Then that was it. Doctor Who never came back, and I was on my own. How we've tried to shake away that elusive difference between simply experiencing Doctor Who and actually having it on. But no amount of Big Finish, or DWM or video releases could ever quite compete with Doctor Who being on the box, at a certain time, for everyone. There was no excuse not to watch it, or rather no reason required to. It was on anyway, so we all did. Except Mum of course. Damn that scheduling!

How I campaigned for the series to come back as the following years rumbled on. I remember writing a rambling old letter which hinged on JNT being entirely to blame for the demise of Doctor Who, the lack of a new series, and probably the moral decline of Western Civilisation as well. Did I seriously think that, even if my fannish, pompous, computer-printed whinge advanced beyond the fingers of the office boy that opened it, into the hands of someone in power, they would re-commission Doctor Who because I thought it was all the producers fault? One time I got a personally signed reply from Tony Greenwood (in those days you couldn't open a fan magazine without being handed a list of important BBC staff members to picket). "Whilst we cannot promise to bring back Doctor Who to your exact specifications..." it began. How they must have laughed, up at Wood Lane...

Still, at the time it was all we COULD do. One hoped to merely contribute to a sizeable volume of mail that might just make someone aware we were still interested. Unfortunately I was 13 when the show was taken off the air - I know others were worse off, but I still felt my "best years" passed by Who-less. I still felt like a child, and that my childhood was criminally slipping without it. I did all the things that people used to do as fans - scouring old bookshops, umming and ahing about joining the DWAS, writing my own atrociously bad fanfic... but all without the series that should have been inspiring it.

Then, shoom. I wasn't a kid anymore. There was a job, and exams. New Who would have been a welcome thing to look forward to during those A-Levels I can tell you. But I left home before Doctor Who next came on the TV, and even then I didn't see it. The video had come out the week before. It wasn't the same. When I went back to help them move, it was a faded picture of Patrick Troughton that remained pinned to my notice board after all the posters, books and furniture had gone. A small clipping showing Zoe and the Doctor from "The Mind Robber" heralding the '92 repeats. And a haunting, chilly lack of recent Doctor Who TV memories to leave behind.