“If they were me, and I was you. Would you’ve liked a present too? Happy Birthday!”

There never seems to have been serious consideration of doing a multi-Doctor story on television to commemorate Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary. Thirty five years later the absence of such a serial prompted a meta-fictional joke from then once-and-future Doctor Who show runner Russell T Davies, whose doubly fictional Regression of the Daleks, ostensibly written by the series’ then script editor Andrew Cartmel, had Colin Baker and Peter Davison guest starring alongside Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred. It even had ersatz Radio Times billings published in Doctor Who Magazine.¹

Some people, though, were looking to fill the gap at the time. All the way back in 1988 Doctor Who Magazine’s then-editor John Freeman decided that, in the absence of such a thing on television, he’d do a kind of multi-Doctor story as part of DWM’s ongoing comic strip adventures. As he later noted - “You can't have a significant Doctor Who anniversary without some kind of multi-Doctor celebration, in my view!”