Galaxy Four

I discovered both the Internet and the world of Doctor Who fandom in 1995, both of which I immediately set out to mine for friends and free stuff I could trade for. Like Bob Dylan fans, Who aficionados are, in my experience, notoriously generous and back then I was as eager to find new contacts as they were to receive me.

The most valuable commodity on the fan circuit in those days were the audios of the missing stories. It may not have been that many years ago, but that particular situation when compared to today was vastly different. Far from being able to buy "The Space Pirates" and "The Smugglers" in Smiths, very few people even knew that a few studious fans had set up tape recorders or (in one mind boggling case) actually wired microphone to TV to capture and preserve that weeks precious instalment of Doctor Who. Indeed, I can remember a time early on when it was widely believed that certain stories (including "The Crusade" and "Galaxy 4") didn't even exist on audio. So you can just imagine the excitement at discovering that a full set was available.

The very fact that every audio soundtrack existed seemed unlikely to the point of being suspicious. I had been a cassette obsessive when I was younger, tapes being freely available for me to record my own Doctor Who adventures, radio shows and even clips from stories like "The Two Doctors", "The Five Doctors" and "Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150AD" off the telly. Yet even I didn't bother to capture that much. Was it really likely that in the sixties, when the equipment and tapes were so much more expensive, someone would have taped the lot? We have to accept that it happened, although suspicions were rife in those days that the recordings had been taken from secretly existing missing episodes!

A chap called Andrew Cloninger in Chicago agreed to copy the lot for me in one go. As I mentioned before, Doctor Who fans are a generous bunch, and there was a (perhaps ego-soothing) push to distribute the missing audio's around as many people as possible. So the favour was granted in return for me agreeing to copy the tapes for others. Not everything was as in good condition as the selection of "crystal clear" audios recorded by fan Graham Strong. "The Celestial Toymaker" and "The Moonbase" were almost unlistenable, although there were fans working constantly to re-master the recordings and improve their quality. And the end of my copy of "The Feast of Steven" was still missing its final "Merry Christmas to all of you at home" line, where the original taper had edited it out in disgust.

My University housemates must have thought I was involved in a drugs ring or some such due to the amount of parcels that arrived daily full of blank tapes from people eager to share the experience of listening to long lost Doctor Who episodes - I never accepted any payment of course, as was the rule. My favourite audios were the marvellous "Marco Polo", every line sonnet worthy, and "Galaxy 4". The latter might seem like an odd choice, but it was the most traditional story of the lot. Not only were the bleeping Chumblies and Maaga's wistful speech about the loneliness of command like hearing signals beamed in from another time, but the careful exploration of the planet and Vicki's discovery of the Rills in "Airlock" summed up everything about Doctor Who that had appealed to me in the first place.

There were other special moments too, like hearing an accentless Jamie in "The Faceless Ones" or the Doctor meeting Charles Preslin in "The Massacre", but "Galaxy 4" remained my favourite. As time wore on and I continued to tape the unavailable episodes for other people from the discretion of my student bedroom, I maintained a list of which stories had been requested. Most people predictably opted for the classics first, "The Daleks Masterplan" and "The Web of Fear" being most popular. But oddly, a certain story caught my eye as being consistently rooted to the bottom of the list. Nobody wanted "Galaxy 4".

Even the likes of partially complete stodge "The Moonbase" and "The Invasion" were more requested than poor old "Galaxy 4", which begged just a single 100 minute tape in return for its traditional values and eerie soundscape. Personally I couldn't get half as excited about the endless silences of "The Abominable Snowmen" or the lengthy "Fury from the Deep", arguably stripped off all its charms without visual accompaniment, as I felt when I listened to the booming, theatrical Rill voices or the lost story of a world with four dawns left to live.

Nobody else seemed interested in discovering the secret, but I was (and remain) certain that "Galaxy 4" was the most exciting audio find of all.