Death to the Daleks - Kicking it Old School

"Doctor Who fans have it easy these days." It's a familiar refrain from those of us who were obsessed with Jagaroth spaceships in the dark days of the 90s, but it's true. There's a ton of new Doctor Who being produced every year on TV, in print and on audio. Every supermarket, newsagent, bookshop and DVDish place will have a rack full of stuff for your perusal, and that's before you get on to the toys and other merchandise.

From the late 80s through to 2005 (the McGann blip notwithstanding), it was all very different. Unless you had UK Gold, you had to wait years to see Doctor Who on TV, and when you did it was almost always Genesis of the Daleks. WHSmith would usually have a selection of VHS episodes for £9.99 a pop, but it was almost always limited to the rubbish 'feature length' edited versions of Ark in Space and Terror of the Zygons. Woolworths would just have one of the Peter Cushing Dalek films if you were lucky. The mere appearance of a Martin Clunes Snakedance clip on Before They Were Famous was the sort of thing that could dominate fan discussion for weeks (generally along the lines that they should have featured a Martin Jarvis clip instead).

So when you wandered past a shop that had some Doctor Who merchandise, it was incredibly exciting, and it became more exciting the more unlikely the shop. In no particular order, I remember finding the novelisation of The Space Museum in Barbrook Post Office, a model Police Box in a pottery shop in Stratford on Avon, and the graphic novel Mark of Mandragora in the Science Museum's bookshop.

I got a sense of that fannish thrill at the weekend, walking down Hammersmith's King Street in a not particularly purposeful fashion. Discount Warehouse had various posters on the door as always, but among the carefully retro advertising prints, there was an A3 poster of the cover of the Death to the Daleks novelisation. The proper cover, you know, consisting entirely of a Dalek's dome exploding. An image so striking that its photographic reference takes up the focus of the DVD cover to this day.

I ducked into the shop to find, in an environment otherwise completely unadorned with Doctor Who merchandise, several copies of the poster. I felt like that bloke in Amelie who finds his little toy bike in a tin.

It was like a time capsule from an age where shops weren't festooned with Matt Smith's forehead, and we all had to roam around the back streets pursuing a rumour of a 1974 Annual without the price cut out.

My purchase was made all the more special because the cover in question was once one of The Five. At the back of innumerable 80s Target paperbacks, there was a mail order advert for five posters. There was a shot of Peter Davison brandishing a gun in a shot from Earthshock, against a backdrop of a Dalek and Target novelisation covers. There was an apparently random photo of Jon Pertwee wrestling with Linx from The Time Warrior. There was one that looked, thrillingly, like a cutaway painting of a Dalek, complete with grisly Kaled mutant (these images were barely even thumbnails, so correct me if I'm wrong), and the covers of The Cybermen and Death to the Daleks.

Trouble was, these were the days before t'internet. While you'd stick a cheque or postal order in the post quite happily in reply to an advert in a magazine, the Target offer seemed a bit vague. The books were still on general release years later - had the offer expired? Had they run out of stock? If they had run out, would they return your money, or send a substitute? You'd hate to shell out for that Dalek Cutaway just to get Pertwee hugging a Sontaran, or Davison apparently guarding his bookcase while a Dalek gave him covering fire. We agonised, we pocket money fans, and many of us kept our cash in our piggy banks, just in case.

Years later, I acquired the Cyberman poster from Longleat, but those five images have always stayed with me. My new Death to the Daleks poster has been treated in that faintly irritating trendy way to look like a creased paperback cover, but other than that it's a slice of history from a more innocent age.

We're so used to the 'new series' stuff crowding shops now that it still gives me that same old frisson to find a 70s Dalek image in a totally unlikely place.

On a similar note, Lee Sullivan has put his original cover art for Love And War up on eBay, coinciding with Bernice Summerfield's 20th birthday!