It’s a guest column by our occasional Canadian correspondent, the brilliant Graeme Burk this time, whose book about Doctor Who’s creator Sydney Newman can be got here. I’ve been writing about how, in the absence of new Doctor Who I got into the fan VHS “grey market” that allowed access to older stories. For Graeme, almost but not quite the opposite was true, as he explains.

I tend to joke that back when I was growing up there were two Doctor Who fans where I was growing up in Canada: myself, and my friend Rob, who introduced me to the series back in 1984. (He kept talking about how great it was and that I would love it. I resisted it, for whatever reason. Then one day I was home with a cold and Pyramids of Mars episode two came on the local PBS station. That was that.)

Truthfully, that wasn’t true. Back in the mid-1980s, there were three fans of Doctor Who in Oakville, Ontario. Myself (who quickly went from “That was good” to “full-blown raging fantatic” to “Lofficier-Programme Guide-quoting, Peter Haining-book-devouring, would-be expert” in mere months), Rob … and our friend Bob.

Bob, like Rob, was in the school band. Bob, like Rob, lived with his dad after a divorce. And Bob, like Rob, was a Doctor Who fan. But Bob, like me, took his fan-ness super-seriously, but in directions neither Rob or I did. Bob was connected to actual organized Doctor Who fandom. Which in the mid-1980s was through the fan club the Doctor Who Information Network. DWIN, as it was acronymically known, began as a local group of the UK fan club, the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, that covered Canada and parts of the U.S., until DWAS decided that for administrative reasons they didn’t want to deal with international fans, especially North Americans during a time when Doctor Who was booming through broadcast on American PBS stations. Thus, DWIN was born.

Bob went to Toronto for DWIN chapter meetings, subscribed to their fanzine Enlightenment and even went to Doctor Who conventions in the Buffalo, New York area, and met John Nathan-Turner and Terrance Dicks (the latter thoughtfully wrote encouraging comments on a script for a Doctor Who parody film I had written for Bob to produce, which, I’m shocked to say never got made.)  

I enjoyed Bob’s convention anecdotes (fun fact: according to JNT, A Christmas Carol formed the basis of The Trial of a Time Lord) and I admired the hardback Target novels he got those events. But Bob’s connection to broader fandom—with its overtones of being “made” like in a mafia movie—gave me something that truly excited me.

Videotapes.

Bob knew guys (they were always guys, though frankly organized fandom at the time in North America probably had more women than men) and he was able to get tapes of the most current season of Doctor Who. It was early 1986 and the hiatus meant it was an episode from last year.

Bob had The Two Doctors… taped from a tape from a tape from a tape that someone recorded off BBC1. It hadn’t aired on PBS yet (the last “new” Doctor Who story shown was The Caves of Androzani in February 1985). This was the story from Season 22 I was most excited about, having scoured all the 100th issue of Doctor Who Magazine for photos from filming. I could not wait to get home from school so I could put this in the family VCR (thankfully my sisters were doing other things that night).

The watchability of this video was… not particularly brilliant. I could make out the Doctor and Jamie and then the Doctor and Peri, if I squinted really hard. But the soundtrack was solid. And there was a promo for Grange Hill (which I watched on TVOntario on weekends) before one of the episodes. But more than that, I got to see new Doctor Who before everyone else (except me, and Rob, and Bob and other people in organized fandom I never met). The Two Doctors would eventually come to PBS in November 1986, by which I was able to appreciate the Saville locations slightly better and understand what exactly happened during the cliffhanger to episode one.

But the rush from watching it was amazing. I loved Peter Howell’s music and the black and white opening and seeing the second Doctor and Jamie together, for I had not seen their TV adventures. Yet.

That summer, Bob invited me and Rob over to his place and we watched a slightly better copy of Attack of the Cybermen (which must have been second or third generation.) It had better resolution, and I remember quite enjoying it at the time. Before we left, I asked Bob if he had anything else, and he pulled out a copy of The Krotons. I was going home to watch my first Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story.

The generation loss was better than The Two Doctors and worse than Attack of the Cybermen, so watchable. All the idents and promos were there from the Five Faces of Doctor Who season that I had read about in Peter Haining’s books. But I was thrilled because I got to see actual 1969 Patrick Troughton Doctor Who. Seeing the title sequence gave me chills. I was aware from reading DWM that this story was not beloved, but I thought it was really fun and fast-paced and sixteen-year-old me really fancied Zoe.

But then something happened, which I can’t explain. I left the VCR on after the last episode finished.

I think the remote was at the other side of the room or something. Maybe I was looking up my guide to every Doctor Who story that I had in a binder (including story title, ranking and novelization) so I could put three out of four stars under The Krotons. Whatever it was, after a long pause of nothing on the videotape, suddenly the Doctor Who theme started up again. I looked up to see the Patrick Troughton credits again.

There was another episode on this tape. One that Bob didn’t know about. (I called him after and asked. He was as shocked as I was). I parked myself in front of the TV to find out what this was. And then the episode title came.

 I jumped up and danced around the room.

 How this wound up on a tape with The Krotons is beyond my understanding. But the grey market for Doctor Who videotapes in the 1980s was dark and mysterious and unknowable.

The video quality was back into dodgier territory (I couldn’t fully grasp what the Chameleon at the end of the episode looked like until I saw it on DVD years later) but it was good enough to get the broad sweeps (the location footage at Gatwick looked very impressive). Moreover, I did not care about the generational loss of picture. I had a bonus adventure for the second Doctor and Jamie… and now I got to see Ben and Polly, whose exploits I had read about in Doctor Who and The Tenth Planet and Doctor Who and the Cybermen, on-screen for the very first time.

But more than that, somehow, I had been blessed with seeing a Doctor Who story that, as far as I knew, was locked away in the BBC archives, never to be seen because, at the time (and DWM #100 verified this), only episode one existed.

Not long after, Bob moved away and eventually lost interest in Doctor Who. He stopped by my place a year or so later to unload his own off-air Doctor Who videotapes (which I gratefully received because I was able to see The Seeds of Doom and Planet of Evil for the first time). I told him that PBS and BBC Worldwide’s distributor in the U.S., Lionheart, had gotten with the program and bridged the gap between UK broadcast and PBS airing so that The Trial of a Time Lord came out four months after it aired on BBC1. I even showed him the opening of Trial episode one.“That’s pretty cool” Bob said non-committally.

And that was the last time I saw him.

Nearly two decades later, Doctor Who was newly revived and super-colossal… and had not yet aired in the U.S. It was airing in Canada - and one of those things I did was tape those episodes to VHS and then send those tapes to friends (and other fans) in Washington D.C., and Oregon, and Florida, so they could see Rose and Dalek and The Parting of the Ways.

It was my way of paying it forward for what Bob did.