May 7, 2025

"Pain is so close to pleasure. Oh yeah. Sunshine and rainy weather? Go hand-in-hand together, all your life."

A guest post this week, from the brilliant Graeme Burk, whose remarkable Sydney Newman book can be bought here and also at less evil places.

Jim’s Psychic Paper on The Seeds of Death from last year, and his own nostalgia for that story as his first purchase of Doctor Who on VHS, reminded me that The Seeds of Death was my own first purchased Doctor Who VHS – though in very different circumstances.

I not only live on a different continent to James, I’m also older than him by about a decade. I was 20 when The Seeds of Death came out… in 1990 in Canada.

Wikipedia tells me that Doctor Who VHS releases had been coming out in North America since 1987. I don’t really remember them at all, probably because I was in high school in the suburbs at that time, and Doctor Who releases were so niche, they only came to video stores in big cities like Toronto. I did frequent those places on my visits to Toronto to buy comic books and records. And I might have seen them there, but there were other niche videos that enchanted me—like episodic releases of The Prisoner, including the penultimate episode I had missed on TV. But also, honestly, mostly what came out were Tom Baker releases like The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Robots of Death which, honestly, I already taped off the PBS station from Buffalo, WNED. I wasn’t going to buy those.

Because here’s an interesting bit of nostalgia for you - niche home video in North America was bloody expensive in the late 80s and early 90s, especially for a student. Those The Prisoner VHS releases never came home with me because they were $50 for a single episode. Doctor Who became more affordable on VHS in time (and the range became reasonably popular after the show left most PBS stations during the ‘90s). But I didn’t have that sort of disposable cash as a teenager or a university student.

By 1990, I did have that sort of disposable cash. Well, a little. I had a summer job working at my dad’s employer (they had a generous policy of hiring university-aged children of employees) and I was earning a decent wage. Working in Toronto was great for me because I was a quick walk from Sam the Record Man (the greatest store ever, RIP¹) and The World’s Biggest Bookstore (I don’t know if it was the world’s biggest, but it was certainly competitive). The latter place in 1990 was remaindering their Target novelizations so I bought dozens of them for $1 each that summer.

One day in July 1990, I wandered into Sam the Record Man’s massive video department and was greeted by The Seeds of Death.

A little bit of backstory… In December 1986, the PBS station I watched Doctor Who from, WNED in Buffalo, did the most miraculous thing—they started showing black and white era Doctor Who starting with An Unearthly Child. I’m not going to lie: It was a miracle, but it could also be a little boring. Hartnell Doctor Who in particular suffered because they were cut into omnibus “movie” format and not watching those episodically - even just to know where the episodes begin and end - really becomes a slog. It didn’t help that there was no restoration to any of them and sometimes watching them was like watching old TV through a beer bottle while wearing earmuffs.

Things picked up with the Patrick Troughton era, though this being before the find of The Tomb of the Cybermen, the only complete stories available were season six except for The Space Pirates and The Invasion. I watched those stories eagerly, and taped them—except for two. The second half of The War Games was denied to me when my parents rented Out of Africa and forgot to put the timer back on the VCR while I was away - it was the great tragedy of my 17th year² — and somehow, I missed The Seeds of Death. To add insult to injury, when WNED ended its two-decade-run of showing Doctor Who to Western New York and Southern Ontario in February 1990… the final episode was The Mind Robber - two weeks shy of a potential viewing of The Seeds of Death.

But now... I could finally purchase a Patrick Troughton story I hadn’t seen. It was so exciting.

Except it was $50.

That was a lot of money for me back then. I was making decent coin, but not that decent, and I was trying to save money to pay for my second year at university. It was an agonizing decision... At least that’s what I said to myself as I took $50 out of the bank to buy it. It was the biggest single expense I made that summer outside of buying a camera. That 35 mm SLR camera cost three and a half Seeds of Deaths.

My reaction to watching The Seeds of Death was different to James’ and perhaps that’s because I’m older than James. I went to primary school in the 1970s, which was still full of triumphalism about the Apollo missions to the moon. James’ observation that it’s parodying nostalgia for a time that’s about to happen is brilliant, but watching those early episodes with their faux-reverence to rocketry felt... a trifle earnest to me. But by the time Patrick Troughton is running away from malevolent foam and there are
weather control stations - basically the point at which I realized why the video’s packaging claimed Terrance Dicks was a co-writer—I was on board.

Which was good because, again... bloody expensive.

I had other adventures with getting VHS of Doctor Who as a student. There was that glorious day in January 1992 when The Curse of Fenric (a story I had never seen but desperately wanted to after reading the novelization), The War Games (a story I had never seen the second half after “The Out of Africa incident”) and The Hartnell Years (which had the original freaking pilot) all came out.

I went to Sam the Record Man on release day (they helpfully listed new releases on a whiteboard at the cash) and I was told by the store clerk they hadn’t unpacked them. With the boldness and arrogance being twenty-two affords, I demanded that the store clerk bring me the crate it came in and I unpacked it myself.

A year later, I bought The Tomb of the Cybermen when it came out in North America (having tried, and failed, to find a rental copy in every video store in Kent³ on a visit to Britain the previous summer) and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier watching Doctor Who… or anything, for that matter.

I love living in the future, where all of 20th century Doctor Who is available to me on BritBox or Tubi, and I can stream 20 years worth of 21st Century Who (though I own all of that digitally anyway). But I remember a time when finding Doctor Who stories I hadn’t seen before was so much harder to do.

I should say, “I miss that time” but I miss the pleasure of it. Not the pain.