“There may be a powercut, and the candles burn down low, but something inside of me, says the bad news isn't so.”

Many fans have stories about reading Target books of Doctor Who serials before seeing the serials themselves, and of being disappointed by the scale or production of 1970s television compared to their own limitless imagination, as prompted by Terrance Dicks’ prose. That’s not really my experience, if I’m honest. I did read a lot of Target books as a kid, and there must be a lot of stories where I read the book first. But I remember the first time television Doctor Who was ever disappointing, and it wasn’t a serial of a book I’d read.¹

Regardless, at this point in The Long Way Round it’s still 1988, and I’m ten and I’ll take as much new or old Doctor Who as I can get, and with equal excitement. I am, let’s be honest, much the same now at the age of [[mumbles quietly, you can work it for yourself with a bit of mental arithmetic if you must]]. One story that I know I read before I saw it is Death to the Daleks. I also know I read that book before I saw Day of the Daleks because when I read Death I saw Colin Baker’s Doctor in my mind’s eye as I read it, having no real experience of Jon Pertwee’s at all.

I don’t know when that was, but I do know it was before the Spring of 1988. Because in 1988 my school friend Adam loved Daleks.² He was one of those Doctor Who viewers who liked Daleks more than any other aspect of Doctor Who, and when his birthday came around in the spring, he got Death to the Daleks on VHS; and after a decent interval, I was allowed to watch it too, and I did so knowing this was the telly version of a book I’d read.