I was just reading the Guardian’s piece about the rediscovery of episodes of Dr Who, The Web of Fear.
It took me back so strongly that it felt quite uncanny. I have strong memories of watching this on TV with my sister Celia, when I must only have been eight years old. I remember the dark mouths of the tube tunnels, and the yeti – who for the most part got glimpsed briefly – coming out of them with strange lights for eyes. I remember the deadly fungus that made soldiers sort of flash in oscillating light then fall down dead – there was a kind of clumpy stuff, but in my memory there was a kind of horizontal layered cobwebby stuff across the tube tunnels too. I don’t imagine I will actually watch these recovered episodes, but it would be interesting to know how much of that memory is accurate.
I remember the detail of the carpet and the furniture in our home. A bit like Proust’s madeleines, this little recovered memory brings back so much. Television was a shared experience then – Mark and Martin and Clive would all have watched the same thing, and we could discuss and play it together. I was fortunate to have an extremely happy childhood. It is strange how it makes me so terribly sad to recall it.
Weirdly enough – I have had a strange life – the article also gave me a vivid flashback to the first time I entered Jos, where the tapes were discovered.