I was out for the most of the day yesterday, having a lovely lunch with fan/pro friends in London, so I had to watch from a distance the lovely reactions to the Hammer House of Podcast announcement, for which many thanks. (We’re nearly at our first goal on Patreon!) I got home to discover that the new Doctor Who Magazine has announced some news I’ve been sitting on for a while: I’m novelising the Doctor Who Christmas episode ‘Twice Upon a Time’! It’s been a lovely task, and I hope to write about it at greater length (without giving away any of the plot, of course) in a later one of these 12 Blogs, when I’ve been told what I can and can’t say.

It doesn’t change my vow to only work on my own characters from now on. I allowed myself a one project relapse, because I was asked to do this, and it was too delicious to turn down, and I would have hated myself if I had. Come on, what would you have done? Apart from that, the ‘only my own projects’ decision has been working out very well for me.

So today I thought I’d talk about something close to my heart: my telefantasy collection. It occurred to me a couple of years back that streaming and download services really weren’t representing older works very well. Take a look at Netflix or Amazon’s complete listings, and sort by release date. It starts getting patchy for movies as recent as the 1960s, and older television is even more badly represented. While most sectors of DVD production aren’t exactly booming (and Blu Ray doesn’t seem to have saved the industry), the success of Network indicates there’s a booming niche market for the classic titles that collectors can’t get any other way. So I decided I wanted to have on my shelves the stories that made me who I am. Every collection needs rules, and here are mine: I seek every UK telefantasy show that’s been released on DVD, up until 1989. (Mainly because after that point there starts to be so much more of it.)

Here’s what I’ve put together so far…

It’s still not what you’d call exhaustive, but it’s getting there. This is basically four shelves of titles, put onto a dining table. They’re arranged chronologically, from bottom left to top right. Series are kept together, even when seasons (like with The Avengers) could be split up. The Chocky series have individual titles, so they’re spaced out. I guess the seasons of Red Dwarf do too, but they’re just numbers, so… it’s not an exact science. All of Doctor Who, which I have in its own cabinet, would go between Space Patrol and The Crunch. Those of you who are into this stuff will note that I don’t have all of The Avengers. That’s because I suspect that, with a new episode having been found, there’ll eventually be some sort of complete Blu Ray version coming out, so I stopped looking for them. Blake’s 7, on the other hand, could really do with a new edition, but I somehow don’t feel it’s likely, so I splashed out. The Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens collections are in there for adaptations of A Christmas Carol and The Picture of Dorian Gray respectively. If the series has continued outside the time frame of the collection, as only Red Dwarf has, I’ve allowed those later episodes to be included.

The hardest of these to get hold of were: Artemis 81 (which was going for ridiculous prices until a third party seller on Amazon decided to sell theirs for a much more reasonable sum, and there’s an apostrophe in the DVD title but not onscreen, because it doesn’t refer to a year); The Year of the Sex Olympics (the same but with eBay and no grammar issues); and, for a long time, Space Patrol, Star Cops, Moonbase 3 and Star Maidens, all of which were, at one point, hard to find and expensive, only for a third party seller on Amazon to suddenly offer a batch of them at straightforward prices. I suspect boxes of them are literally found in warehouses. I get the feeling there’s a small community of us all of whom have the same online searches in place, who descend like vultures to give the owners of those boxes a couple of dozen quick sales, after which they’ll find it hard to shift what’s left. On other occasions, there are lots of copies, but the price tends to stay fixed at a level above what I’m willing to pay. I only recently bought The Champions because a seller on eBay started putting up copies one by one, and, on the third occasion, I got it for a reasonable sum. That suggests that there are lots of those in the hands of sellers, and they’re not moving. The easiest titles to get are the ones that seem to have been overprinted. They’ll probably soon be giving away copies of The Guardians and Casting the Runes with every meal at Little Chef.

I pop into record stores that have DVD sections, record fairs and the like, but, probably because us DVD collectors aren’t as organised as record collectors, the pickings are usually slim. My initial wants list was composed from books such as Roger Fulton’s The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction, and I’ve refined it a lot since then, but even now, companies will surprise me with releases of shows within my time frame that I’ve never heard of, particularly if they’re children’s shows from the 1980s, such as Simon and the Witch, which I don’t recall at all. (I’m waiting for the price of that to drop a bit.) One of the more frustrating moments was trying to discover if the US only release of the early anthology One Step Beyond included the episodes made in and for the UK. I finally found a copy cheap enough to gamble on and discovered that no, it didn’t.

The question of what children’s shows to include was a difficult one. It’d be a weird British telefantasy collection that didn’t feature Children of the Stones or The Tomorrow People, but where do you draw the line? The same is true for comedies. One wants Red Dwarf, which is consciously pitched as being part of the canon, but what about The Goodies or Monty Python’s Flying Circus or The Young Ones, all of which ventured into SF and fantasy? They don’t seem to fit. So I decided upon a vague rule that a series gets in if it attempts to construct and maintain a coherent world, which Red Dwarf does, but the other comedies I’ve mentioned here don’t. So, of Gerry Anderson’s early children’s ventures, I’ve included Four Feather Falls (which has magic working in a realistically-constructed Western town… well, I say ‘realistically’, but you know what I mean), but not Torchy or The Adventures of Twizzle, the fantasy worlds of which seem much more about whatever was useful for the moment. (I think that’s a ridiculously fine line, really, but it’s mostly because I’d need to find a really, really cheap copy of Torchy or Twizzle before I’d be willing to fork out for them, and I felt the need to weaponise my reluctance.) Puppets get in, because of Roberta Leigh and Gerry Anderson, but animation doesn’t, not even stop motion, so my Clangers collection is on a different shelf.

The quality of the releases varies hugely. Network generally do an amazing job of including decent extras, but Simply Media, as their name suggests, tend to just put whatever it is on a disc and put in inside a plastic cover, knowing that this collector’s market will realise that they couldn’t afford to release things like The Adventure Game (not even a photo cover!) any other way. Mind you, the picture quality on their Doomwatch is awful, to the point where I think it was barely worth releasing without restoration. On occasions like that, I tend to think that a better version will eventually appear, and thus feel a bit cheated.

So what’s still missing? There are various easy to find recent releases like the new Blu Ray Randall and Hopkirk which are on my Christmas list, and some cheap titles like Threads which aren’t getting more expensive, and which I plan to get around to. Some items, like The Aphrodite Inheritance, fit the Champions profile, in that I’m not willing to pay the prices that they’re easily available for. More interestingly, a pre-order, with cover, for the 1980s version of Tom’s Midnight Garden popped up on Amazon recently, then disappeared again. I can only speculate that there were rights issues and someone jumped the gun. It’s been out before, paired with The Demon Headmaster, which is outside my time frame, in a set which is very hard to find. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense is only out there for silly prices, but since Network has just re-released Hammer House of Horror, I have some hopes that a new version is on the way. Metal Mickey is, for some reason, very rare. The second season is going for nearly £100 from a third party on Amazon. And that’s considerably more than I’m willing to pay for Metal Mickey. I could probably piece together Worzel Gummidge, but the rather lovely Ultimate Collection is hard to find cheaply enough to attract me. If any of you have a lead on any of the above, I’d be interested to see it, but do remember that I’m rather picky.

I hope you’ve enjoyed that wander through something I take great pleasure from. I’m not a hoarder in any other way. My books are all over the place. And I find nostalgia suspicious, hard to deal with, a tugging at my sleeve towards old age and death, and try to keep my face firmly aimed at the future, even when the present day makes that hard. But still… I’m pleased with it. In a few decades, if DVD players are still around (but hey, look at the vinyl resurgence), I may spend my post-work days, when I can no longer sell a book, watching these old series and remembering how I was made.

The collection is one reason I keep up to date my former 12 Blogs page listing BBC telefantasy titles that are held in the archives but not yet released on DVD. When the BBC Store was a thing, I thought it might become redundant, but I suspect archive DVD is the way forward for the BBC back catalogue too. Today, I added three titles to the page (two of which, coincidentally, feature Pete Postlethwaite): Debut on Two: Kingdom Come; Late Night Horror: The Corpse Can’t Play and Second City Firsts: Thwum. And yeah, I wrote one of those, and hadn’t until now realised it qualified. (Also, I’m kicking myself that I never included Simon and the Witch.)

In other news, I’m pleased to see my novel Chalk features on Ginger Nuts of Horror’s Picks of 2017. Thank you, GN!

I’ll see you tomorrow for the third blog of the twelve, when it might be time for me to get to that first prize contest.