I've just finished listening to a couple of Tom Baker audio's today (Sands of Time and War Against The Laan) and it's got me thinking about a relatively untouched subject. The Doctor before your Doctor. You see, Peter is still (and probably always will be) my favourite Doctor. The reasons for this will be dealt with at a different time, but for most of us, I think it's probably the case that we came to Doctor Who young. I think that for a lot us The Doctor before ours always carries a little of the dark stranger about him. And this feels true even with a figure as iconic as Tom Baker. I drank in the Davison era in a way I had never done with anything before, and even today feel a sense of belonging to Davison era Who in a way that isn't quite repeated anywhere else (although McCoy does come close).
The point of all this is, I suppose, that I felt, coming off the back of these two audios, that I'm still unable to actively engage in the Tom era. And that's not to criticise that era in any way. If you ask my head it's favourite story, you get Brain of Morbius. Ask my heart and you get Castrovalva. In a way that is enormously difficult to communicate, an era wraps itself around you, to the point where it's flaws can become an irrelevance. And it also has a way of affecting your relationship to the previous era. For years I felt it strange that the era that gave us Ark in Space, and Talons and Genesis wasn't my favourite, like I was missing something. How could I prefer the era that contained Time-Flight or Warriors of the Deep? And the answer. Well, the answer is completely unimportant.
Don't ask why you love, just love.