In early 1984 I began to get interested in girls. Perhaps not coincidentally, at around the same time, I stopped watching Doctor Who for three years. Final childhood memory of the show: Ingrid Pitt karate-kicking a sea monster called the Myrka in the face. After that … nothing. It was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile the demands of early adolescence with the exact and opposite demands of being a teenage Whovian. At this point in history, being a teenage Whovian was just about the worst thing it was possible to be.

It was Myrka’s fault. Doctor Who’s past is littered with ropey special effects and unrealistic monsters, though that had never bothered me before. But there was something arrestingly, preternaturally dire about the Myrka. It was operated by the same men who brought Dobbin the pantomime horse to life in Rentaghost, but Dobbin was a far scarier prospect than the floppy green waddlefuck that staggered along a corridor, bumping into the walls, in episode 2 of the story ‘Warriors of the Deep’.

I was thirteen when I started noticing the female of our species. Up until then, the only girls I’d been interested in were the Doctor’s assistants, and that was purely platonic. But then one day – practically overnight – girls stopped being my classmates with the funny clothes, long silly hair and giggly voices, and they became the most alluring creatures on this or any other planet. I’d even been on a date with a girl, if you can call paying for Sharon Wilkins to watch E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial at the local ABC fleapit as long as she agrees to sit next to you, a date.

It wasn’t just a conspicuous love of Doctor Who that was cramping my style. My physical appearance definitely contributed to my failure to make any headway with the opposite sex: my pudding-bowl haircut (cheers, Mum), my squashed boxer’s nose (thanks for that, Dad), and my delightfully spotty face (nice one, Curly Wurlys). In addition to which, my Mum, in an effort to save some money, took it upon herself to kit me out in a pair of safety boots that she’d liberated from the factory where Dad worked. The first time I wore them to school, my classmates took it in turns to sing UB40’s ‘One In Ten’ at me. I didn’t get it at first, and they had to explain it was because I walked around with a size-one foot in a size-ten shoe. This went on for about a year.

So to recap: comedy shoes, Mr Logic hair, chronic acne and a big squashed nose. Where girls were concerned, I could ill afford the additional handicap of a deep enthusiasm for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, Doctor Who. So Doctor Who had to go.

One night in 1984 Amanda Williams, the girl of my dreams, asked me round to her house to watch Lace. Lace was a very steamy (at least by 1984 standards) television mini-series based on the equally steamy novel by Shirley Conran, the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day. It would have been a fantastic opportunity for a quick fumble if Amanda’s mum and dad hadn’t been sitting in the same room as us. I made it as far as the second ad-break before sheer blushing discomfiture got the better of me and I had to make my excuses and leave. When I got home, I was too embarrassed to tell my mum where I’d been, and she only got the truth out of me when she threatened to take my ZX Spectrum away.

Ah yes, my ZX Spectrum, another reason for abandoning Doctor Who. I loved my Spectrum like the girlfriend I didn’t have. While Peter Davison was fighting Daleks and the combined uselessness of the BBC prop department, I was copying reams of machine code into a cheap lump of plastic, just so I could play an electronic version of Hangman on it several hours later, instead of using, say, the pencil and paper right next to me. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was painstakingly transcribing pages from the Daily Mirror newspaper onto our television screen in BASIC, because no one had invented the World Wide Web yet. But most of the time, I just played games on it.

And so, time passed. I chased girls and learned the trumpet. I took my O levels and visited America. I graduated from the Spectrum to a Commodore 64. But what I didn’t do for the next three years was watch – or even think much about – Doctor Who. So I missed Peter Davison’s regeneration into Colin Baker, and then I missed Colin Baker.

I didn’t really notice that the programme was circling failure in a rapidly decaying orbit and so wasn’t much bothered when it was announced that it would be going ‘on hiatus’ for a year – even the BBC had noticed the show wasn’t attracting anything like the audience numbers of yesteryear. I didn’t really care about any of it because I had been on hiatus from Doctor Who for quite some time myself.

And then everything started to fall apart at home …

My parents divorced in 1987. However, instead of going their separate ways, they carried on sharing the house, in different rooms, with individual rotas for the kitchen and the bathroom; it was like a bad eighties sitcom, but without the laughter track. My sister and I continued to live at home, where we would occasionally be used as weapons in our parents’ ongoing war of attrition. Christmas that year was especially grim. You don’t easily forget sitting down to eat a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings while your dad cooks beans on toast for himself in the kitchen next door. Happy days.

I now realise that my parents must have been going through a terrible ordeal, but all I can remember about this period of my life is a long string of pointless arguments between me and them. Arguments about failing to return my library books, arguments about money, arguments about curfews, arguments about the number of biscuits I’d left in the barrel; even the colour of the sky wasn’t off-limits. On my eighteenth birthday, the whole family had a massive fight because I had forgotten to post a letter for my sister. I can’t remember what was in that letter now, or why it was so important, but it must have been a big deal because two days later, after threatening to put my fist through the wall, I packed my bags and left home.

After I left, Mum threw out my red Palitoy Dalek, my Denys Fisher Tom Baker, my Target novelisations, my back issues of Doctor Who Weekly and my talking K9 (so it wasn’t all bad). She did not do this out of malice, but because all the evidence suggested I had grown out of Doctor Who and wasn’t coming back.

As so often before, she was only half-right.