Fannish juxtaposition

One of the reasons I'm anxious to pay my credit card bill is that I've been spending small sums building up my collection of old Doctor Who fanzines from the early 1980s. The 1980/81 volume of TARDIS, the principal fanzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society in the late 70s and early 80s, arrived today from my not having been to bed yet perspective (Monday). The delivery seemed appropriate as today in calendar terms (Tuesday) is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of The Five Faces of Doctor Who, the 1981 series of archive repeats which broke the BBC's taboo on showing 'out of Doctor' stories. In the age of multichannel televisions and the regular plundering of the archives, not to mention DVD, BitTorrent, and the regular posting of links to old episodes on a dedicated LiveJournal community, it's difficult to imagine how revolutionary this was, not just for public perceptions of the programme as a whole - summoning up the predecessors of Tom Baker as a way of legitimizing his successor and at the same time setting a precedent for the undermining of Peter Davison by repeating the adventures of his predecessors - but also for fandom, where a generation who had grown up with Tom Baker now felt they could speak with authority on earlier Doctors and their stories which had previously been the preserve of an elite of relative greybeards.

First birthday wishes

Happy Birthday, prince_eldarion!