“Ooh, the second time is so much better, Baby..”

The brave new era of streaming is suffering some teething troubles. Recently several people on the late, unlamented Twitter were very exercised about the imminent disappearance of several new series (e.g. Willow and Pistol) before they’d had a chance to check them out. The commercial reasons for removing recent series from streaming in this way are complex (and largely reprehensible), but what surprised me was the reactions of people who’d come to expect that television from the very near past would be available to them to check out at their leisure.

But this wasn’t quite what you might think. These were people, some approaching middle age, who carefully explained to yawny oldsters that before streaming ruined everything, there was a natural order. One in which even prestige series were shown, and maybe repeated, but in which you’d be able to leap on the internet and order on DVD or even Blu-ray at no notice. Or spent a cheerful afternoon scrounging up for much less in your local CEX or similar size and business model retail concern.

Now, both those series have emerged on Blu-ray since they were yanked from Disney +, but there was a moment where it looked like we were perhaps emerging into a new age of lost media. (Indeed, we still might.) But it felt like a marker of my own age that peak DVD, been and gone though it undoubtedly is, still feels like a relatively new and luxurious thing to me. Because I grew up in the time when television was on and then gone, barring the odd repeat. Sure, when I was a bit older you could record stuff yourself to keep. But tape was expensive, and that didn’t work for things you’d missed.

I was a teenager before the idea of even the edited highlights of both archive and recent television looked likely, which means that the sudden withdrawal of TV series and their disappearance into an ether of memory and supposition seemed more like a return to mean than a calculated insult. But before this turns into yet another four Yorkshirefan sketch, you’d be forgiven for asking if this is still a Doctor Who substack or what? The former, I hope, and what makes all this relevant to “the show” is that availability is one of the dividing lines between the series’ 20th and 21st century incarnations.