“Where’s your head at? Where’s your head at? Where’s your head at? Where’s your heeeeeead at? Where’s your head at? Where’s your head at?”

Doctor Who Magazine #144 had a single page advert for all the BBC Doctor Who VHS releases up to that point. Amongst them was one so mysterious and distinct that it was, it seemed to me, slightly separated from the others at the end of the row. It was a different price point to them too, and a different running time. Counterintuitively it was both more expensive and shorter? 60m for £19.95? What? For me and my friends, young enough to be ignorant of the whole slow crawl downwards of general retail VHS prices and the frequent re-releasing of the few Doctor Who VHS that were available at a variety of increasingly low price points, this was wholly baffling.

Eventually we came to the conclusion that the video must be so short because the material had been cut for simply being too terrifying for words. Too hot, not for TV, but for VHS. After all, The Brain of Morbius was one of those famously frighteningly stories that older fans of this era never stopped banging on about. Mary Whitehouse had claimed it contained “some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children's television”, which had become a source of fan pride. Given that this was the era of the “Video Nasties” panic, I’m sure you can see how kids would conflate these ideas.