“Fire! I want you to burn!” 

I wound up with a VHS copy of most of Planet of Fire in early 1990. It was an unlikely choice for only the sixth story I had even part of on hookey VHS. But then it wasn’t really a choice. Not a conscious one. I got it because my friend, the one who’d also discovered the existence of grey market Doctor Who videos with me, decided to chance his arm with our one “contact” and ask if he’d do him another tape, despite him making it absolutely clear he was only going to copy one for each of us and that was it. Finito. And for some reason he agreed. My friend didn’t ask for Planet of Fire, of course. No one would ask for Planet of Fire. Except perhaps for people whose main interest in Doctor Who comes from being attracted to Nicola Bryant. (I imply no shade at all on her, and only a little on them.)

My friend wanted Resurrection of the Daleks, which we both just about remembered from transmission, and as had happened with the previous tapes we’d acquired, our benefactor just let the tape was copying from run on until the tape he was copying to cut out. What with his copy of that serial being his own off-air recording, that pretty naturally meant it was followed by Planet of Fire, just as my copy of Revelation of the Daleks was followed by the first three and a bit episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord. My copy of Trial Part 4 ran out of time in the middle of the Doctor’s trying to tell Merdeen what “Neons” are, and similarly every time I’ve seen Planet of Fire since it finally came out on commercial VHS in 1998, up to and including today, I’ve been surprised it doesn’t cut out moments after Bryant’s new companion Peri asks the Doctor “What are you going to do?” and he begins to reply “You’ll see”.