Video killed the Television Star

When I was growing up in the 1980s I wanted a video recorder, but my parents were having none of it.

The first Doctor Who story I saw on video was Revenge of The Cybermen at a friends house in 1985/6 following trip to Longleat..... but I didn't see many more until much later.

In 1989 during the summer when I was working I finally got the money together to buy a VCR. One of the first things I bought were Doctor Who videos. I'm not sure which but Day of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks, Spearhead from Space, Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons were early purchases. I can distinctly remember buying City of Death on the day of release. Some of the older stories turned up over time - Dalek Invasion of Earth & War Games during the summer of 1990 but apart from birthdays my real DW Video buying didn't start till I got to University......

At University a considerable amount of my grant cheque disappeared on videos: Doctor Who, Star Trek: Next Generation and Blake's 7. While there I started to acquire older stories not yet released on Video..... Really no idea how that happened ;-) During the second year I bought Robots of Death, one of the books that never really did it for me, to give me all the stories released on VHS up until that point. From there every story was bought on release day, with friends taping older stories off of UK Gold for me.

From shop buying I turned to the Internet in the late 90s using Blackstar to finish off the video collection..... save for the missing episodes collection released at the end which I had to go hunting for in the shops.

I've been retiring my VHS tapes as the DVDs came out so there's not many left on the shelves now. But there's still a number of stories unreleased on DVD so the VHS tapes will be putting in an appearance here, starting with The Sensorites.