Home Entertainment
Every surviving episode of Doctor Who is now available to view in some format or other at a whim – but that wasn’t always the case.
The 1967 story The Tomb of the Cybermen was released on VHS in 1992.
An advert for the Philips N1500 video cassette recorder, launched in 1971.
The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) is surrounded by Draconians in Frontier in Space (1973).
Doctor Who fans have always had a burning desire to rewatch and preserve the show – or, to borrow a phrase from the late comedienne Victoria Wood, to have episodes “to keep and keep again”. Before the advent of widely available DVD and Blu-ray discs, or streaming services like iPlayer and BritBox, immediate access to Doctor Who, both past and present, was a pipe dream for fans of the 1960s and 70s.
Primitive video recorders of the mid-1960s were toys for millionaires. So, while a handful of dedicated fans audio-recorded and preserved broadcasts as far back as Marco Polo (1964), for most people in the following years Target novelisations were their only doorway to Doctor Who’s past. ‘Old’ Doctor Who on 1970s television meant a couple of summer or Christmas repeats from the previous season, plus occasional screenings of the 1960s Dalek movies.
A 1978 ad for the JVC Home Video System.
Pioneer video-tapers included James Russell (son of film director Ken), who captured latter episodes of The Seeds of Doom using a Philips N1500 VCR in spring 1976. Blackpool nightclub DJ and record producer Ian Levine invested in a Philips that autumn, just in time for The Masque of Mandragora. They and a small coterie of other video-owners pooled their resources in 1977 to buy a copy of Frontier in Space (1973) from the BBC, paying a colossal £2,500 (£14,000 today). Levine also sourced off-air recordings of American Jon Pertwee reruns during 1977-78.