The 800 Day Project - Re-record, Not Fade Away

So this post was meant to be the season 18 overview, but more pressing things have had to take priority. Instead I thought I'd briefly touch on my memories of something else that happened during that same period. Another seismic shift in my life that fundamentally affected my ongoing love affair with Doctor Who...

....

It's 1980. A new decade and everything is changing. I officially become a teenager. Pirate radio station Radio Caroline ceases transmission when their boat sinks. Margaret Thatcher is reshaping the country with unemployment at over 2 million and inflation rising to nearly 22%. Clive Sinclair creates the home computer market by releasing the ZX80. In the world of Doctor Who, it's Season 18 and John Nathan-Turner's new broom sweeps away the old look of the show.

A couple of month's ago I talked about "The Gap" where I stopped watching Doctor Who for twelve weeks in 1977 / 1978 in favour of the dubious delights of Patrick Duffy as the "Man From Atlantis". Now in 1980 it was the turn of Glen A Larson's "Buck Rogers In The 25th Century", to distract me from my favourite Timelord.

Clearly riding on the coat tails of the Star Wars phenomenon, the show was the closest thing we had to a small screen equivalent. Briefly, the story was that NASA astronaut William "Buck" Rogers (played by cheesily handsome Gil Gerard) embarks on a deep space mission in 1987. When something goes wrong, he is frozen in a kind of cryogenic suspension, only to be woken up in the year 2491. Teaming up with Earth Defence Directorate Colonel Wilma Deering, "ambuquad" robot Twiki and super computer Dr. Theopolis (a kind of posher, rounder version of Blake's 7's Orac), Buck battles smugglers, slavers, kidnappers and evil warlords plus a continuing struggle against the Draconian Empire, personified by the scantily clad Princess Ardala (the magnificent Pamela Hensley).

The show was a big hit, with it's combination of attractive leads, humour, fisticuffs and memorable characters (particularly Twiki with his "Biddi-biddi-biddi" catchphrase). It also had pretty good special effects for the space dog-fight sequences - even though it blatantly reused sets, spaceships and sound effects from Larson's previous show "Battlestar Galactica". Another plus was that it had an excellent title sequence and, like "Battlestar", an equally hum-able theme tune:

Although the theatrical pilot version with lyrics and space-bikini-clad women has to be seen to be believed:

Hmmmm. They certainly don't make them like that anymore...

With only one television in the house, I had to chose which show to watch - and the flashier, sexier "Buck Rogers" won (look I'm sorry okay? I was 13 and Princess Ardala was so very attractive). This meant that I completely missed the first eight weeks of Doctor Who season 18, and only caught up with those stories much later. The thing is, "Buck Rogers" continued for a full 22 week season, so how did I get my fix of Wilma Deering *and* see the first appearance of the mighty Adric? It was the arrival of something incredibly important that would change my life forever. You've probably guessed by now - it was this:

(not the actual one we rented, obviously)

Yes the humble video recorder had arrived at my house. It's hard to imagine in the current world of fifty inch LCD screens and DVD players for £25 that back in the 1980s these were incredibly expensive machines. We weren't a wealthy family, so like many, many others at the time, we rented our main television and video recorder from a company like Granada or Radio Rentals (I can't remember the exact shop). For a monthly price you got the latest TV and video and if it broke down or was superseded by a superior model, it could be repaired or replaced as part of the package.

Now the eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that the recorder pictured above is not one of the all conquering VHS models. No, it's a Philips Video 2000 VCR2020. My dad has always been interested in new technology and electronics, but he doesn't have a great track record of backing the winning horse. When satellite TV first started and many houses were getting Sky dishes fitted, we got BSB and the "squariel" (not that I am complaining because they showed tons of very old Doctor Who). The Philips '2000' range was actually the third horse in the video format race along with VHS and Betamax, even though it only shone brightly for a very short period of time. The VCR2020 was technically a superior system in many ways to VHS, with double sided tapes that allowed you to record up to eight hours of television on a single cassette and excellent picture and sound quality (well for the time anyway). It looked incredibly futuristic with it's digital displays and keypad.

At last I could watch both the SF shows I liked. I clearly remember setting the machine up to record  Doctor Who - finger hovered over the pause button so that it would start recording at exactly the right moment and I would have no gaps or other extraneous material on my prized tape. Once recording I would quickly switch the television over to ITV to catch the latest adventure of Buck, Wilma and Twiki. To be honest, that show could be watched and then forgotten about til next week, but Doctor Who - I could watch it again and again! Consequently the last four stories of season 18 became the first Doctor Who that I can remember seeing many times (there were the summer / winter omnibus repeats during the late 1970s of course and although I must have watched some of those, the memories are lost to the mists of time or so jumbled up with repeated BSB / UK Gold / video viewings that I can't separate them out).

Eventually about a year later we did succumb to market forces and the VCR2020 went back to the rental shop to be replaced by a VHS model, and those few tapes we had were incompatible and useless. It didn't matter though (much). I'd probably already worn them out through repeated viewings by then anyway. What it started though was an interest (that became a near obsession) with recording everything I could. I'll come back to this some more at a later date.

To end with I'll just mention the reason for the title of this post. Obviously it's a play on the Rolling Stones' "Not Fade Away", but it's more than that. In the mid-eighties (long after the demise of Video 2000 and the domination of VHS) there was a series of very catchy TV adverts promoting Scotch VHS video tapes which featured a dancing skeleton. The idea was that your recordings on Scotch tapes would last so long that they would still be playable long after you were nothing more than a collection of old bones. In fact Scotch were so confident that they offered a lifetime replacement guarantee. Thirty years later video tapes are mostly consigned to the history books (although some things have *still* never been released on DVD), but in recognition of the enormous part they played in my life (and the fact that I had hundreds of Scotch tapes) here's one of those ads...