Doctor Who walked back into my life – or I walked back into Doctor Who – in October 1988.

Despite a pronounced lack of study and a self-imposed bout of homelessness, I had still managed to pass all my exams and had been accepted into the prestigious grove of academe that was Sunderland Polytechnic.

It was Wednesday night at 7.30 p.m. In the communal television room of my hall of residence, a handful of freshers had gathered to watch Coronation Street. Having already spent all my money for that week on subsidised beer, I took a seat, watching Coronation Street being marginally better than sitting alone in my room feeling homesick.

But a few minutes later, a denim-clad student in the front row stood up to change the channel. Immediately, another student, this one dressed in a bloodstained rugby shirt, stood up and changed it back. After a brief pause, Denim Man got up and changed it back again, only this time he stayed on his feet and shielded the television’s controls with the palm of his hand.

Rugby Man: What the fuck is this?

Denim Man: What the fuck does it look like?

Rugby Man: TISWAS, mate. Put Corrie back on.

Smart Blazer Man at the back of the room: No, wait. Leave this on.

Denim Man: Yeah, leave it alone. Let’s watch this instead.

‘This’ was Doctor Who. Rugby Man looked furious but sat down, crossed his arms and waited for ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ to impress him.

I hadn’t seen an episode of Doctor Who since the Myrka fiasco four years earlier.

First impressions weren’t great. Did this new Doctor – Sylvester McCoy – really have to roll his ‘Rs’ quite so much? Why was his pullover covered in question marks? You can’t be much of an enigma if you have to advertise the fact, surely? Was this impish incarnation of the Time Lord brilliantly unorthodox or a complete prat? To this day I’m still not sure. And then there was the incidental music, which sounded like it had been composed by me on a ZX Spectrum.

When the programme had finished, Rugby Man stood up.

But Rugby Man was wrong. It was a little bit shit but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The thing about ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ is that it had obviously been made by fans of the show. So not only did the story feature the Doctor’s deadliest enemies, it also took place in November 1963, the month Doctor Who was born. It even featured the same Shoreditch School from that first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’. The show was treating its own history with a slightly stalkerish kind of affection. I was impressed. The Doctor’s new companion, Ace, wasn’t bad looking either.

I bought the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine the very next day, my first since 1984. I found the issue in the children’s comic rack, sandwiched between Jackie and Bunty. Kneeling down to rummage through the children’s section of WHSmith felt reassuring somehow. It harked back to a much less complicated time. I should add that I bought the Guardian as well.

The following week in the TV room, I faced down a challenge from Rugby Man, who had brought along a few burly mates to back him up. However, the majority managed to watch episode 2 of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ in a tightly anxious silence, certain that at any minute the opposing group would rush to the front and form a scrum around the TV. As a result, as soon as the episode had finished, I was so relieved I could hardly remember anything about it. But once again, I felt like I had enjoyed it.

I may have fallen under the Doctor’s spell again because I was feeling vulnerable and homesick. Maybe I was grasping for a connection to my childhood, something reassuring that I could fall back on because my new student life was stressful and unfamiliar. And it wasn’t like I could go home – with Mum and Dad divorcing, home wasn’t really there to go to.

She’s right, of course – some things are better with the Daleks. As soon as my student grant cheque turned up the following week, I bought a second-hand portable colour television, and as a result I saw the Doctor blow up the Daleks’ home planet, Skaro, I grappled with the left-wing allegory of ‘The Happiness Patrol’, I thrilled to the celebratory pomp of ‘Silver Nemesis’, and tried to forget the surreal postmodernism of ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’, without having to worry about a challenge from the First XV. And in between all that, I even found time to lose my virginity.

When I moved into rented accommodation the following year, my flatmates couldn’t have cared less about Doctor Who. Not that they ever mocked it – that would have required them giving it a second thought. They didn’t even comment when I hung a poster of Tom Baker and some Sontarans on the door to my room (a free gift with Doctor Who Magazine). They probably thought I was being ironic.

So, alone in my room, I watched Doctor Who on my trusty portable and, without irony, I was happy.

I was happy until I saw ‘Ghost Light’.

Broadcast over three weeks in October 1989, ‘Ghost Light’ seriously messed with my head. It didn’t make any sense. Not even remotely. Not in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense and is therefore complete rubbish’ sort of way, but in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense in the same way that a David Lynch film doesn’t make sense, so it must be amazing’ sort of way.

‘Ghost Light’ was made for the video generation. It was so complex, it had to be watched again, so it could be analysed, dissected and, well, made sense of, I suppose. And this would have been great if I’d owned a video recorder, because analysing Doctor Who came naturally to me. I’d just spent a year being trained in the basics of semiotics and postmodernism, so ‘Ghost Light’ came along at exactly the right time. I’d even read The Unfolding Text and not found it particularly silly. I knew it was possible to treat the programme as a serious subject, and if there was ever a story ripe for serious discussion, ‘Ghost Light’ was it.

But I had no one to share my theories with. Nobody wanted to discuss the mysterious life cycle of Josiah Smith and how the story’s over-arching theme of change was a metaphor for the series as a whole. Not a single person. Even when I was in a room filled with people who were funded by the taxpayer to talk about nothing but television morning, noon and night, no one wanted to talk about Doctor Who, and that included my first serious girlfriend, Candice.

I tell a lie. There was this one time when I tried to convince Candice that the Doctor’s companion, Ace, was a feminist role model:

I do have one abiding memory of watching Doctor Who with Candice, though. Well, perhaps not with; she was in the same room as me when the final episode of the classic series was broadcast in December 1989. It was in her flat and she was packing for our Christmas break. In fact, I’m sure I missed large chunks of that episode because Candice kept asking me for my advice about which clothes to take with her. And because I was a good boyfriend, I tried to give her my undivided attention, even when the Doctor and the Master were engaged in a fight to the death just a few inches away from her.

This memory is tinged with sadness, though. Not just because I lost touch with Candice and the last time I heard from her she was well on her way to becoming a multimil-lionaire. No, it was because when ‘Survival’, part 3 finished, and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor walked off into the sunset with Ace, I knew they weren’t coming back.

The BBC had really gone and done it. They had cancelled Doctor Who.

And yet twenty-six years was a remarkable achievement. The show had left its mark on millions of young viewers and on the wider popular culture: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the TARDIS, long scarves and paper bags full of jelly babies, women running up and down corridors screaming, giant maggots, floppy green waddlefucks … and Drashigs. Who could possibly forget the Drashigs?

Doctor Who was over. However, my life was just beginning. It was time to move on. I was twenty years old; perhaps the moment had at last come for me to put away childish things. So I did.

But I put them somewhere I could find them.