Oh, but you should have been there...
That's something no DVD extra can ever give you. What is was like to actually experience coming in from the cold on a Saturday evening in the 1970s, and grit your teeth while you waited for the interminable football results to end before the next thrilling episode of Doctor Who.
I was a very excited boy that Saturday, just after Christmas in 1972. Although I was enjoying running about in the snow with my friends at the local park, I couldn't wait for tea time to come around. My cheeks were burning and my nose felt numb from the cold when I finally walked into my Nan's house and took off my coat and gloves. It was almost THAT TIME.
I sat down in what I still thought of as my Grandpa's chair. This would be the first time I'd be watching Doctor Who without him and I was very aware of his absence. There was a gap in my reality that he used to occupy, and I was still trying to deal with it as best, and as bravely, as a boy who had only recently turned ten years old could.
My Grandpa would have loved The Three Doctors, not least because he had once speculated that it ought to be possible for a time traveller like the Doctor to meet himself. And here it was happening. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to see Patrick Troughton's Doctor back again, now in colour! You should have seen the Cheshire Cat smile that spread across my young face when the 2nd Doctor materialised in the TARDIS. No disrespect to Jon Pertwee, who I was also ridiculously fond of, but Patrick Troughton was MY Doctor - still is, in fact - and he was back for four whole wonderful weeks, hurrah! Believe you me, the gulf of time between the end of The War Games and The Three Doctors seemed incredibly long to me in 1972.
While the 2nd Doctor may not have been impressed by the TARDIS's new interior, I loved it. It's still my idea of what the inside of a TARDIS should look like, and that's the one that I would have replicated in my castle were I ever to win the lottery (unlikely, as I don't actually play it, but I can dream).
And then there was William Hartnell, whose Doctor was still a bit of a mystery to me in those pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-streaming days. My first encounter with his Doctor was a battered old annual belonging to a slightly older cousin of mine. But here he was in action - and by 'in action,' I mean talking out of a television screen hanging in the TAR...
Oh! My ten year old self has just materialised beside me with a very serious look on his face and he says I'm to call it the scanner screen. Sorry, little me... ah, he's gone again.
Well, anyway, there was William Hartnell being wonderfully crotchety on the TARDIS, erm, scanner screen, and I took to him immediately. Even in his all-too brief and sadly limited scenes, Mr Hartnell was every bit as magnificent as my Grandpa had said he was.
If there is one thing that I would try to impart to someone who wasn't there, back then, it would be the strangeness of seeing three incarnations of the Doctor together for the first time. Nowadays, multi-Doctor stories seem to take place every other week, especially at Big Finish (multi-Master stories too!). I know these events still feel special but I don't know if they feel strange any more. And I mean strange in a good way. it was a marvelous kind of strangeness watching Jon Pertwee and Pat Troughton both pop their heads out of the TARDIS door. The only other time I've felt that same sense of delightful strangeness was also in my childhood, when DC and Marvel got together to produce a Superman meets Spider-Man crossover. As a boy, I would hold that comic in my hands and spend ages just staring at the cover featuring the Man of Steel and Spidey TOGETHER! It was wrong and yet wonderfully right at the same time. Of course, since then, the two comic book companies have collaborated many times and such crossovers have become normalised; which means that example might not mean much to a younger person either.
Whenever I watch The Three Doctors, somehow, magically, invisibly, my ten year old self will materialize and he'll be watching along too. It's funny, but no matter how old I get, that kid is never too far away.
