Did you get everything you wished for for Christmas? I didn’t. It’s not that I’m greedy or ungrateful.(Quiet at the back.) It’s just that some of the things I wanted don’t actually exist.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid, I sometimes used to dream that I’d get a load of Doctor Who action figures for Christmas. Literally dream. Not imagine, properly “wake up in the morning and be disappointed that that hadn’t actually happened” stuff. I didn’t get them because there weren’t such things. There were not Doctor Who figures in the same scale as Palitoy’s Star Wars toys. That range did not exist.

A small number of very similarly sized Doctor Who figures did arrive around the series’ twenty-fifth anniversary and I loved them, but they weren’t honestly terribly good and came along a tiny bit too late for me personally. Much later, when I was nearing thirty, Character Options unleashed their eventually vast range of slightly larger action figures, which eventually expanded to the point where it encompassed a staggering number go things from twentieth century Doctor Who that you could never have imagined. Which goes to show that dreams can come true. Albeit too late and in the wrong size. Like a Boxing Day jumper from a distant relative.

So, I was thinking about what Doctor Who merchandise, what Doctor Who stuff would I like for Christmas in an ideal world. What, if you’ll forgive the rampant consumerism of it, would I like to given as a present if it existed? What hypothetical merch would I create or sanction if I ruled the world? Or at least whatever-BBC-Enterprises-is-called now. After all, in a world where you can buy an audio of the novelisation of an audio, surely almost any Doctor Who item you can conceive of has some kind of viable audience? Or at least an audience of one.

Doctor Who fans love lists, right? You know it’s true. So here’s a top five of the Doctor Who merch that I think should exist. Because I want it. I’ve confined myself to the possible here. I’m not including e.g. David Whitaker’s own novelisation of The Enemy of the World, which was planned and never written and I’m not listing missing episodes, on the grounds that we don't know if there are actually any more in existence out there. These are all things that could be done, and if they were I’d buy them. Or ask my wife to get me them for Christmas.

5/ A Brigadier Bambera action figure. I love her. (Nuff said.) Maybe in a double pack with her beau Ancelyn so they could make kissy face. (Too much said.)

4/ A script book for The Inheritors of Time a licensed, written and never properly staged Doctor Who play by top US comics writer John Ostrander.

3/ Some sort of public outing for the very recently sadly late writer and former script editor Christopher H Bidmead’s rejected version of The Trial of a Time Lord Parts 9-12. This he called “Pinacotheca” (which is ancient greek for “picture gallery”) although it was commissioned on 29th October 1985 as The Last Adventure. It was written in its entirety and then written off by Bidmead’s successor as script editor Eric Saward in early February 1986. Bidmead held a copy until his death, and tweeted a couple of pages from it at one point. He was said he was open to the idea of either novelising it or of it being adapted as part of the Big Finish Lost Stories range, but seemingly blew hot and cold on that latter notion. Either would be great, although just a book of the script would be favourite.

2/ The Target range is continuing apace. But there’s a limited amount of even tangentially connected to 20th century Doctor Who material left to novelise. So, I propose: Target novelisations of the three Doctor Who stage plays. The Curse of the Daleks (1965) by Terry Nation and David Whitaker, Doctor Who And The Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday (1974) and The Ultimate Adventure (1989) both by Terrance Dicks. The first to be done by Nigel Robinson, an old school fan and former Target editor who has written some wonderful adaptations of 1960s material. Seven Keys to Doomsday I would hope could be done by Paul Cornell, as a tribute to Terrance. The Ultimate Adventure? Here’s the good bit: The play was staged with both Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker in the lead role. So which version to novelise? Which Doctor to put on the cover? Well, on two occasions on the same day in Birmingham, at the Alexandra Theatre, Pertwee’s understudy went on as the Doctor when the then seventy year old actor was indisposed. That understudy was 1980s Cyberleader David Banks, who is also the author of a number of Doctor Who books. Get Banks to novelise the play, as featuring his Doctor, put him on the cover and get him to do the audiobook while you’re at it. Job done.

1/ Recently at one of the Riverside Studios screenings of 1960s Doctor Who, which are shown from unrestored export film prints, someone suggested showing a Pertwee story in black and white. This was in part a suggestion made from nostalgia, as many Pertwee serials, particularly from his first two seasons, circulated on black and white bootlegs throughout the 1980s and a couple were even officially released on VHS either partially or wholly in black and white.

This was due to the stories only existing as black and white 16mm film print copies originally made for export to countries that did not yet have colour TV. Their colour originals had been destroyed, but black and white versions remained and in lieu of anything better were eventually used for overseas repeats and commercials releases in the video age. From the early 1990s onwards there was a concerted effort to create colour versions of these stories using colour sourced from a variety of places, such as low quality off-air video cassettes of transmissions of the now destroyed originals.¹

But while technically hugely impressive and the result of extraordinary effort, much of the first two Pertwee seasons have restoration jobs that ultimately don’t make them look like colour VT. Maybe after three or four goes over decades, it’s time to admit that they’re never going to and that some of these stories are better off watched in black and white after all?

Yes, there’s an argument that these stories were made and expected to be shown in colour, but most the original audience wouldn't have. The first year for which the majority of UK TV licences were colour rather than black and white was 1977 and a very early 1970s production team in particular would have been aware of those watching at home without the benefit of colour, where they’d have looked like black and white VT.

The thing is, the restoration techniques applied to 1960s episodes that don’t exist on their transmission masters (which is basically all of them²) do manage to make these film prints look like black and white VT; and as I understand it the workflow for creating the colourised versions of Pertwee serials for Blu-ray usually involves creating immaculate black and white versions from those film prints, before adding in the colour from other sources. So black and white versions do exist somewhere. (Do write in if this is wrong.)

It’s not the case that you could get the effect of watching these stories in black and white simply by turning down the colour on your television. Believe me, I’ve tried. It doesn’t look like black and white VT, because it isn’t and it isn’t meant to. It looks like something in colour where you’re turned the colour down. Because it is - and you can see sort of moire patterns on what should be flat areas of block greys or whites as a consequence. It has a muddiness.

So why not a box set of at least two of the three seven parters from the 1970 series³ plus Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil and The Daemons from 1971? If BBC Studios are feeling generous, a copy of the black and white version of Spearhead from Space which is stored at the BFI and which has been screened there, could be run off and presented unrestored as an extra.⁴

In an era of 4K disc releases for ex post facto monochrome versions of both really good films like Mad Max: Fury Road and unfinished amateur gibberish like Zack Snyder’s Justice League, I don’t think this is as crazy an idea as it maybe sounds if you’re hearing about it for the first time right now. After all, the Blu-rays of more than one Pertwee season contain two different restorations of some stories, because some people on the team responsible liked the version created for DVD more than the newer one created for Blu-ray.

You’ve heard of The Beatles in Mono? Get read for Pertwee in Monochrome.

In my dreams.