“Experiment - make it your motto day and night. Experiment - and it will lead you to the light.”

At the end of 1989, and with exquisite timing, I went to my first ever Doctor Who fan event. The series had just, unbeknownst to the general public, and certainly to me, come to an end. The event was at Aston University on a weekend afternoon and me and a school friend who also liked Doctor Who were driven there by his Dad. It was like a prototype version of the kind of signings that happen every weekend somewhere in the country these days, with a couple of guests who answered questions and signed postcards, and a quiz. It was a fun afternoon. But it was also an occasion on which I made a staggering, life-changing discovery: That some people had pretty much all of existing Doctor Who on video tape.

I do not exaggerate when I say this idea was wholly inconceivable to me mere seconds before I was introduced to it and immediately accepted it as absolute fact. It had long seemed reasonable to me to assume that some people would have been recording Doctor Who from about 1982 onwards. My Grandad had a video recorder after about 1983, and it was only cost that had stopped me ‘recording to keep’ (as we termed it in our house) all Doctor Who from the moment I became old to conceive of that concept. ‘Recording to keep’ was something my Mom had done with Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was on on Christmas Day 1984, and I started doing it for Doctor Who from Time and the Rani onwards. Hypothetically then, someone might have Peter Davison stories on videotape and it’s possible my desire to meet other fans was prompted more by the desire to raid their video collections than find people to be friends with. I don’t recall.