"All change for the Brighton line!"

"All change for the Brighton line!"

"Doctor Who embarks on a new series of bizarre adventures starting tonight at six-fifteen on BBC One!"

You know, up until that point I'd never even considered the idea that 'Doctor Who's adventures could be described as being bizarre, but that's what the continuity announcer said that afternoon, so it must be true.

A few people at school had started saying how they thought 'Doctor Who' was getting a bit silly, so I started slowly downplaying my utter obsession with it. Having a birthday in early August, meant that virtually everyone in my school year was older than me, so they must know better about such things, I reasoned.

Season 18 launched just after I'd turned 12, and I can still recall being utterly perplexed by Part One of 'The Leisure Hive' and my resultant concern that 'Doctor Who' had suddenly gone all flashy.

The Twitch schedule means that the sudden gear change from Williams / Adams to Nathan-Turner /Bidmead has happened almost instantly and has reminded me how much it disconcerted me at the time.

I'll admit that I was really rather worried for a while. Was 'Doctor Who' trying to go all 'Buck Rogers' / 'Battlestar Galactica'? And if so, what the point of that? Every other show under the sun had stars in its title sequence, so why was my favourite show following in their footsteps, rather than doing its own thing? The REAL title sequence was all about time travel, not zizzing about in such a small domain as space!

But oddly, the only conversation I can remember having at school about 'The Leisure Hive (and indeed the whole of Season 18) is how the Doctor should have regenerated when he got all old at the end of Part Two.

So was no-one else bothered? Apparently not, and maybe this was the critical moment when I finally crossed over the Event Horizon, falling inexorably towards my encounter with the black hole of Organised Fandom...

I was clearly Taking It Seriously, but then I had been reading 'Doctor Who Weekly' / 'Monthly' from the Fantastic First Issue and it was obvious to me that lots of other people cared, too. It's just that I didn't appear to know any of them. I think I might have subconsciously pencilled in my mind a Things To Do List that included a heading reading 'Meet Some Others Fans', though it took me a few years to actually achieve that.

Watching that opening sequence is weird now, as in 2005 we stayed in Brighton in a hotel room with a decent view of the (by then) burnt-out West Pier. And one of the main reasons we went there was to visit the 'Doctor Who' exhibition on the East (Palace) Pier.

So watching Part One in 1980 gave me a glimpse into my future, and watching it again in 2018 opens windows on my past.

So maybe those endlessly rushing stars in the title-sequence have more time-travel associated with them than was obvious at first glance...

(By Andrew Trowbridge)