Day 338: Frontier In Space Episode 1

One day, I was watching television. I was nine years old at the time, and easily impressionable. My TV diet consisted almost entirely of the ABC, the Australian public broadcaster. Every day I would wake up to their morning cartoons, and in the afternoons I would return home and watch their afternoon programming, confident in the knowledge that everything went to some sort of order. If a new show were to be broadcast I would see the trailers for it, get from these trailers a feeling of what the show was and whether I would like it, and then decide on whether it would be worth checking out.

Then, one day, there was a trailer that didn't describe the series that was going to be on. All it said was that "It is returning" as weird patterns filled the screen and a wheezing groaning sound came forth from the TV set. I asked my parents about it, they'd seen it too and were talking about what it really was. They said that Doctor Who was coming back. Not new episodes though, the old ones from before I was born. They explained what the show was and took me downstairs. There, I was shown their Doctor Who collection. Books that I had run past rushing through the house were actually novelisations  of these stories. A cassette tape that hadn't been played since a revolutionary time travelling nativity production a couple of years prior was actually the theme to this strange programme. And the video cupboard that only held Mum and Dad's videos was opened, revealing a handful of VHS copies of Doctor Who episodes for me to discover. That weekend, I sat down with my family and watched one of them. That episode was Frontier In Space, and it would be the gateway for me to a whole new world of discovery.