"So I could see at my leisure, whenever things go wrong. And I would keep it as a treasure, to last my whole life long."

The appearance of (almost) all of extant Doctor Who on the BBC iPlayer, the corporation’s under appreciated catch-up service, is a kind of miracle. Something unimaginable to fans of earlier generations, for whom the slow acquisition and viewing of episodes of the show from before our first engagement with it could often be a decades long quest.

That’s not an exaggeration. The Long Way Round section of this newsletter is concerned with the order in which I saw 20th century Doctor Who, and it took me fifteen years. This is despite me being of an age where by the time I was in my mid teens, BBC Video released VHSes of old Doctor Who on the regular, UK Gold was up and running, and me being the kind of person who dived into archive television fandom early in the hope of acquiring "pirate" VHSes of stories not yet available via more orthodox means.