“What some men will do here for diamonds / What some men will do here for gold.”

Towards the end of 1987 my next door neighbour Matthew, who was a year older than me, said something that changed my life. Something simple. It was that his Dad had some Doctor Who on video. Not some Doctor Who he’d recorded off the telly and kept, but some Doctor Who he’d bought. What? Until that exact moment, and it’s one I vividly remember I promise you, it had not occurred to me that you might be able to get Doctor Who on video. After all, they didn’t have any Doctor Who in Ampower, the local video retail and (mainly) rental shop from which we occasionally hired films for 75p a night. Video rental shops in biggish villages in provincial England all have every VHS tape you can get, right? Right. Such is the parochialism of small boys in semi-rural England.

Matthew disappeared and returned with a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS. Could I borrow it? Of course I could borrow it. We were only next door. I was inside and watching it within minutes of finding out it existed. My first sight of Tom Baker’s Doctor since transmission viewings of Logopolis and The Five Doctors. My first sight of the “slit scan” title sequence. My first sight, even, of the “diamond logo” in that title sequence.¹ An astonishing moment in a young fan’s life of “old” Doctor Who unfolding, unanticipated, before his eyes. Going from the inconceivable to the undeniable in barely any time at all. I watched that video several times that week. Because I knew I would have to give it back. It wasn’t mine. But then I had an idea. Periodically my Granddad would carry his VCR over from his house around the corner, so that he could copy from one tape to another. Duplicating VHSes of family occasions for relatives on other continents, or editing the commercials out of films he’d recorded when out. Probably at Mass or the pub. I waited until one of these occasions, and made a hesitant request. He had no objection, and soon I’d my own copy of Revenge of the Cybermen and I’d violated the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act. Or would have, had it been passed yet.² Gosh. It really is a very long time ago.