This is probably the most nostalgic featurette I've seen so far on the DVD releases! The 1980s were certainly a time of meagre pickings for us fans who couldn't afford the original official BBC releases, and after the excitement of The Five Faces and The Monsters series we only had a few repeats to enjoy, and even they dried up. Sigh. But then the wonders of Doctor Who local groups came along and suddenly there were people with ... old stuff!

My first experience with 'non-current' Who was to be ... Frontier in Space. It's hard to describe the mounting excitement of seeing another Jon Pertwee for the first time, and then the biting disappointment when finding out it didn't meet the expectations built from the novelisation The Space War! A certain producer once said "the memory cheats" (though saying it for the likes of Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang is still a bit silly!), and the imagination certainly does!

Over the next couple of years a collection expanded and appetite of older Doctors slowly sated; then the BBC videos became affordable, and once BSB's Galaxy channel started up (and later UK Gold), and these treasured ragged VHS copies were usurped. I still think of them fondly, but I'm not entirely sure I'd ever dig them out of the box and put them on again (the example of generation copying shown for Revenge really brought back the memories - shudder).

How did we put up with the quality back then? Well, it was Doctor Who!

Oh, I could have appeared in the featurette, but I chickened out :)