“Oh what a night, late December back in sixty three, what a very special time for me.”

It is 1988 and I am watching Remembrance of the Daleks, in black and white. This is not a deliberate irony on my part. But it does offer a strange verisimilitude to the events unfolding on the screen. I’m watching the programme this way because my parents are, in 1988 anyway, Coronation Street viewers. I’m lucky though. Thanks to the vagaries of unloving scheduling by BBC One, a lot of Doctor Who’s potential audience are missing it or don’t even know it’s on.

At least I have the option of a second television in another room, even if in 1988 our “second television” is a black and white portable, tuned with a dial, sitting on top of a chest of drawers in my parents’ bedroom. I’m sitting on the floor in front of it, head angled towards the bulbous, faintly acrid-smelling screen. An electric buzz. Static.