“The space race is over. It's been and it's gone, and I'll never get to the moon. Because the space race is over - and I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon.”

It’s March 1988 and my friend Jonathan has a copy of Doctor Who Magazine #135. It’s a publication that I did not, until moments before I acquired the previous issue, #134, in a WH Smiths in a small town in Worcestershire, even know existed. I don’t think he did either. But a week or maybe a fortnight later, there’s a new issue, and he’s bought it. Which means I don’t have to. Because I can read his. It’s from this magazine, that I learn that a new video of an old Doctor Who story is being released at some point soon. My birthday is in very late January, and so I decide that this this will be what I spend the money that’s come in cards from various relatives on. My own brand new videotape of a new old Doctor Who I’ve never seen to keep forever and ever. I will have my own copy of Spearhead from Space!

Yeah, as you can probably tell from the story referenced in the title of this article, it didn’t quite turn out like that. From the vantage point of 2024 I know that the Spearhead from Space video came out in February 1988. So when I went looking for it in the same W H Smith that had furnished me with that DWM in mid March, they’d probably sold out of the one or two copies of the tape they’d got in for the week it went on sale, and that a backlist copy was probably on its way. At the time in 1987, I was annoyed. There was a new tape! It said so in my comic! So quite frankly why did they not have it? It was, if nothing else, great preparation for life as a Doctor Who fan, pining for episodes that no longer exist.

Instead we got, you guessed it, The Seeds of Death. Mostly because it was the only one of the three “Doctor Who videos” on the shelves of that WH Smith that I hadn’t already borrowed, watched and surreptitiously copied for my own further, private use.