“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

The War Games was the second of the two Doctor Who stories I got across three tapes and just before my birthday in 1990. Last week, we talked a little about the first of those, the first Doctor Who serial An Unearthly Child. Just as there’s a kind of poetry in that being the first Doctor Who VHS release after Doctor Who ended, pairing it with The War Games has its own internal rhyme. That day I bought both the beginning and the end of monochrome Doctor Who. That week, I saw a double bill of book ends.

Looked at it now, it feels like both a clever statement about the scope of the show in the 1960s, and also a smart bit of marketing. It seems to suggest that, having largely neglected the show’s black and white era for the first few years of its Doctor Who VHS programme, in part because of doubts about sales, BBC Video¹ was considering filling in the gaps between these two stories, provided you were prepared to pony up for them in sufficient numbers.