“Everybody needs to know it's the year of the rat.”

Seen: February 1982

The Long Way Round

I’m not sure I still remember watching The Visitation on transmission, but I certainly remember remembering it. In 1989, on a family holiday to Cornwall, I found a copy of the novelisation in W H Smiths in Newquay. I successfully begged for parental aid in its purchase. This was, like the copy of The Five Doctors nestled next to it, a book of forbidden knowledge from the dark times. The prose rendering of a story I then remembered vividly. The Angel of Death in the fields, the plague rats, the Great Fire of London, and actor turned Highwayman Richard Mace. I read it on the coach home from Cornwall and had time to start on The Five Doctors before we got back. Cornwall is a long way from the Midlands.