I would like to reassure Doctor Who devotees that there are no plans to axe Doctor Who. There may be a little longer between this series and the next than usual, but I very much hope that it will continue to be as successful in the 90s as it has been for the last twenty-six years.

Peter Cregeen, BBC Head of Series, 1989

The BBC first tried to axe Doctor Who in 1985. Back then, the outcry from fans and the popular press – not to mention ‘Doctor in Distress’, a terrible protest record featuring Bobby G from Bucks Fizz; ‘Listener in Distress’ would have been more accurate – forced the BBC to capitulate, and what had originally been intended as an irreversible cancellation was instead converted to an ‘eighteen-month hiatus’, which is where I first heard that deathly word.

So when, in 1989, the BBC decided to cancel the show again, they did it quietly. There was nothing to worry about, they told us. Doctor Who wasn’t dead, it was just resting. This was the line repeatedly trotted out by the perfidious Peter Cregeen, the BBC’s Head of Series, when he was asked about the show’s future. His words are etched on my memory like a Dear John letter from an ex-girlfriend.

In truth, this hiatus was intended to be an indefinite one, the sort of hiatus from which no Time Lord returns. There was no official cancellation announcement this time. There were no protests, no petitions and, mercifully, no one contacted Bobby G. The tabloids weren’t interested in headlines about a TV show that was having some time off, and the viewing public didn’t seem to care that the only time they saw Doctor Who these days was via a clip on an episode of Telly Addicts.

And so a great darkness fell upon the land.

Then in 1993 came the news we’d been waiting so desperately for: Doctor Who was coming back. There was going to be a one-off special called ‘The Dark Dimension’. It sounded fantastic. Apparently, all the surviving Doctors were going to be in it – even Tom Baker had agreed to show up this time – and they would unite against an army of classic monsters: Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, the lot. If everything went well and the ratings were good, I thought, the BBC would have no choice but to revive Doctor Who as a proper series. There was still a chance that Nicol would grow up with a Doctor to call her own.

But two months later, the BBC abruptly aborted the project, citing budgetary concerns. I was livid. In fact, I got so worked up about it I wrote a protest letter. I typed it out on Sue’s second-hand Olivetti and I sent it to a semi-professional fanzine called DreamWatch Bulletin (formerly Doctor Who Bulletin). By semi-professional I mean the magazine was printed on glossy paper and you could buy it in specialist shops like Forbidden Planet, but also that it was a not wholly professional enterprise. DWB was full of inaccuracies, insane theorising and wild, libellous rumour and in some ways can be said to have invented the concept of Doctor Who online forums several years before the rise of the internet.

Reading this letter now, I think I must have been going through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief.

Clearly I skipped the first stage of grief – denial – fairly quickly.

Or a plug off a TV, eh me-in-1993? This is clearly anger, the second stage, expressed in grammatically uncertain terms. But I has learnt a lot since then.

Oh, about sixteen years, give or take.

Hmm, the anger here is spinning out of control. Not only do I really have it in for Eldorado, I seem to be trapped in a vicious circle of mixed metaphors from which no amount of post mortems will result in a U-turn.

Welcome to the third stage: bargaining. If only, if only, if only …

Stage four: depression, leading to …

Finally, I have reached the acceptance stage. But acceptance came at a cost:

OK, that’s quite enough of that. I then go on and on about how wonderful Star Trek: The Next Generation is for several pages, but I can’t bring myself to reprint it here.

Sue looked over the letter before I posted it.

I can’t remember now if the Children in Need special ‘Dimensions in Time’ was always planned as a fundraiser for homeless children or whether it was intended to placate hopeless fans who had had their spirits crushed by the ‘Dark Dimension’ debacle – two equally worthy causes, in my view. However, when I learned that all the Doctors and his companions would be teaming up to face the cast of EastEnders in a time-warped Albert Square – in 3D, no less – my heart sank. I just hoped that the homeless kids would get something out of it, because the fans’ new false hopes were surely about to be stamped upon. Again.

In order to view ‘Dimensions in Time’ in 3D, you needed a special pair of 3D glasses; and in order to get hold of the 3D glasses, you had to buy a copy of the Radio Times. Of course, I stupidly decided to leave it to the day of the broadcast before trying to obtain a pair, by which time the special Radio Times had sold out and there were no glasses to be had anywhere – not at the newsagent’s, not at the supermarket and especially not at the opticians. (‘I don’t suppose you sell 3D glasses as well, do you …?’) With less than half an hour to go before the transmission – just as I was considering making my own specs out of a couple of Quality Street wrappers – Sue disappeared. She returned twenty minutes later with a pair of 3D glasses and no Radio Times.

Sue returned to the living room when it was all over.

‘Dimensions in Time’ was so mind-bendingly, humiliatingly dreadful the BBC didn’t dare broadcast the whole thing in one go. They were probably worried that Children in Need viewers would start withdrawing their pledges. The second part was transmitted the next day, in the middle of Noel’s House Party. Even Noel Edmonds – a man whose career was built on his seeming unembarrassabilty – introduced the segment and then turned his head away in shame. It was the final proof that the BBC didn’t just dislike Doctor Who; they were actively seeking to destroy it.

As if by way of an apology, BBC One broadcast a hastily commissioned documentary on the night of Doctor Who’s thirtieth anniversary in November 1993 – ‘Thirty Years in the TARDIS’, which was actually surprisingly good. But with no new episodes in sight, it felt like I had been invited to attend a posthumous birthday party for a murdered relative by the very person who had killed them. The programme concluded with a tight-lipped Alan Yentob teasing a possible comeback for the Doctor. But I didn’t believe him. Thanks to the BBC, Doctor Who had become the thing that nobody liked any more.

Except for the fans. If the Doctor wasn’t going to return to television any time soon, he would have to survive in other media – comics, books, videos. This wasn’t anything new for Doctor Who. From the very beginning the character has appeared in spin-off comic strips – TV Action, Countdown etc. – and this tradition still continues in the official Doctor Who Magazine to this day. But the comic strips were just one strand. The most exciting development was the launch of a brand-new series of books called the New Adventures.

When Virgin’s publishing arm ran out of Target novelisations to reprint in 1990, and with no new novelisations on the horizon thanks to the programme being ‘rested’, the company decided to plug the gap with a series of original novels. These novels were called the New Adventures and they were, to all intents and purposes, the continuing exploits of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, no longer limited by budget or special effects. Described as being too broad and deep for the small screen, they certainly lived up to the claim, with many of them containing strong violence, swearing and even sex, the last of which, for many readers, demanded the biggest imaginative leap of all.

But these adventures weren’t constrained to the printed page. Industrious fans with access to increasingly affordable video technology managed to convince Doctor Who cast members to play subtly different versions of themselves for direct-to-VHS releases. So, Sixth Doctor Colin Baker took on the role of a pan-dimensional hero called the Stranger, while Nicola Bryant, best known for playing his companion Perpugilliam Brown, portrayed Miss, erm, Brown. The BBC’s lawyers were naturally suspicious, showing that when it came to protecting their intellectual property, perhaps the corporation did care about Doctor Who after all. However, the fans also knew that the BBC didn’t own the whole Whoniverse. They didn’t own the rights to the Daleks, for a start; Terry Nation’s agent was famous for driving a hard bargain whenever the programme wanted to use them. There were other cheaper monsters and characters not owned by the BBC, too. All of a sudden, if you wanted to make a sequel to ‘Terror of the Zygons’, say, and you could raise the funds, there was little to stop you except your own lack of competence and talent. And, as it turned out, this was easily overcome.

The result was a series of amateur fan videos like Wartime, which saw U.N.I.T.’s Sergeant Benton confront his haunted past; Shakedown, which featured Sontarans battling the cast of Blake’s 7; and Downtime, where the Brigadier took on the Yeti for the third and final time. And these videos didn’t have to include the words ‘Time’ or ‘Down’ in the title, either. For example, in The Airzone Solution, four actors who have played the Doctor team up for an edgy eco-thriller, although it’s probably best remembered – or forgotten – for the bit where Colin Baker climbs into bed with Nicola Bryant for a quick fumble, something that definitely never happened in ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, though no less frightening.

These videos were not very good – some of them were barely legal – but none of them were as shameful as ‘Dimensions in Time’. The books, comics and videos were produced by the fans for the fans. Doctor Who was the thing that nobody liked, least of all the BBC; nevertheless we cherished it, we nurtured it, and we ultimately spent a fortune on it. But it was worth every penny because, for better or worse, Doctor Who belonged to us now.

Which is when the BBC decided to take it back.