“Well if I had money I'd tell you what I'd do. I’d go downtown buy a Mercury or two.”

It’s an almost perfect irony that I should walk into a video rental shop and see that a VHS of Doctor Who’s second serial had been released and I didn’t know about it, when twentieth century Doctor Who was only two serials from its end, and I didn’t know about that either. If it hadn’t happened to me, I might think I’d made it up. But even I wouldn’t go so far as to dictate that I write about it now, at a point where public statements from Doctor Who’s current executive producer are inducing even-greater-than-usual fan anxiety that the series may not be back anytime soon after the current run ends in May.

Were there Doctor Who fans in 1963? As an identity, I mean. I think we can call it that? We’ve long used the word “community” around fandom after all. There were certainly involved viewers. There were multiple people who were audio taping the series for their own libraries just weeks in, and others who were making extensive notes. Fans but not yet fandom. Which is also the position 11 year old me is in as he pays his 75p to rent the first of the two tapes that compromised the VHS release called The Daleks, itself given the subtitle The Dead Planet, itself the title of the serial’s first episode.