Image © Paul Hillam, 1990

Paul Hillam’s foray into the world of tapezines with Time Trace – The Doctor Who Years was quite different to that of his contemporaries. Shying away from the by then standard format of articles, reviews, interviews and the like, Time Trace sold itself as a “seven-piece set of audio clips and commentary” which would combine to form “the ultimate audio documentary of Doctor Who”. From a modern perspective, this would no doubt be interpreted as a wildly grandiose and foolish claim, but in 1988 such pronouncements were common in the advertising of fanzines and no one as much as blinked an eye. In the case of Time Trace – The Doctor Who Years, the boast was not as crazy or naïve as it might have first appeared as, apart from Jeremy Bentham and Gordon Blows’ A History of Doctor Who (1976-77) and Vortex – A History of UNIT (1983), it was the first time anything quite like this had been attempted on audio by a Doctor Who fan.

Paul’s idea can be time-traced back to 19th February 1987, when he commenced work on a tapezine called The Memory Circuit. Potential listeners were invited to tap into their nostalgic memories of Doctor Who, as “nostalgic memories are always of extreme significance. So what better than to let your memory take a trip back in time on The Memory Circuit?” Each issue was to focus on one particular story. Paul casts his mind back to the time: “I’m not sure there was any great plan with The Memory Circuit – just a work-it-out-as-I-go-along approach with that one; it was not really properly structured. I soon decided a Doctor-by-Doctor ’zine would work better so I gave it up. The bit were I introduced myself was weakly done and there were too many clips in quite poor quality right at the start. It just seemed messy.” With just 14 minutes of material committed to tape, work on The Memory Circuit was abandoned as Paul considered how best to continue.

“I had heard about other tapezines like WOTAN and The Master Tape at around that time,” says Paul Hillam. “I had a lot of audio Doctor Who recordings of ’60s and ’70s stories and started getting the idea of covering every story from the beginning, for each Doctor. I wanted to achieve a year-by-year retrospective documentation of the entire series.”

The audio format lent itself well to Paul’s idea, as he recollects: “With audio, it was easier to illustrate examples of each story – and give my listeners a first-hand hark back to its original broadcast. A printed fanzine would have had pictures and personal memories to conjure up the particular episodes and the feel of different scenes, but with audio extracts, you were instantly there! The atmosphere, the incidental music, the full action.”

Taking each televised Doctor Who story in turn, Time Trace embarked on its course through Doctor Who history. The plan was for each tape volume to concentrate upon the era of one of the television Doctors - with the sixth and final volume devoting one side each to the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras. Paul explains that audio clips from the stories would be linked by his spoken narration: “I outlined each story with a basic synopsis and talked about various elements of each story – biographical details, cast and crew information, and production notes and anecdotes – before rolling into the next, with further clips.” Both existing and lost stories were covered on the tapes and were represented by soundtrack excerpts of varying technical quality, due to the scarcity of high fidelity recordings at the time.

By the end of 1988, BBC Video had issued just a dozen of the 151 Doctor Who stories made at that point. As a result, there was still a great interest in fan circles in soundtrack recordings and a somewhat under-the-counter tape trading community was thriving. “As we had so few VHS releases, I was working almost exclusively from old audio cassette recordings,” Paul explains. “In some cases, I only had clips available, not full episodes.”

Aside from the focus on the televised stories and the lives and careers of the actors themselves, Paul stopped off on the way to discuss a variety of associated products such as the Aaru movies Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966), the TV21 record version of The Chase – The Planet of Decision and the Doctor Who annuals published by World Distributors Ltd.

“I had adverts, Doctor Who songs, music, news items and sound effects. I was able to interweave these – and clips, too – with my narration to make the whole documentary series more varied,” says Paul.

In addition to the basic recording equipment, Paul had a few additional gadgets which he put to good use: “Well, one piece of equipment I had at the time, more for novelty impact, was a guitar amplifier and microphone. I set the reverb up high, and the echo, and said, ‘Hello... and welcome to... Time Trace – The Doctor Who Years.” Sounded pretty good when recorded to the opening of each tapezine volume. Another, somewhat amusing gadget back then was a voice-changer I had to hand. It created a great ’80s style Cyberman voice, and a friend and I did a Cecil the Cyberman comedy interview, which was duly added on one of the tapes. I mainly worked on the issues after work in the evenings or on my days off.”

After much work behind the scenes, the first volume of Time Trace – The Doctor Who Years, covering the William Hartnell era, debuted in December 1988, when it was advertised in Celestial Toyroom.

Paul remembers the recording sessions for that cassette – and one incident in particular: “As I put the Hartnell edition together, I came home from work once in a friend’s car. He had owed me something and bought me a four-pack of large tins of Kestrel lager. He insisted I drink all four tins within about ten minutes, about the time it took to get me home. I rolled in rather drunk, but held it together. Unfortunately, I was so keen to resume my work on the Hartnell edition that my narration was distinctly slurred – and it’s very noticeable on the tape! I should have waited until the next evening, but hey, I was just 19 and a little impatient to crack on with it!”

A second volume, focusing on the Patrick Troughton era, followed shortly afterwards in March 1989, again being advertised – alongside a reminder for the Hartnell volume – in Celestial Toyroom.

From the third volume – unsurprisingly focusing on the Pertwee years – the format was altered slightly bringing it more in line with that of a tapezine. “I introduced a letters section for listeners to air their views about Time Trace and I also trailed and reviewed or advertised other publications like Tranquil Repose and The Master Tape – and they in turn covered mine on their ’zines,” Paul notes.

“I think, in retrospect, although I approached certainly the earlier issues with a more monotone, deep voice and it was more basic, flat documentary, rather than lively, changing topics, I think perhaps it improved as I went through the Troughton edition and into Pertwee.”

In common with other tapezine producers, Paul dubbed copies for listeners using equipment available at home, in his case a twin cassette deck: “The transfers for customers were done very cheaply. I think I charged about 40p per tape and £1 for the Pertwee edition as it was twice as long as each of the Hartnell and Troughton ones. I recall the postman was often stunned when he arrived with 20 or so packets of tapes for me at a time!”

In February 1990, a telefantasy event, Fantastic Television IV, was staged by some of Paul’s friends at the Whitgift Film Theatre, a school-based facility in Grimsby built as a regional screening centre with a grant from the British Film Institute. He saw this as the perfect opportunity to publicise the Time Trace audio productions and set up a stall to sell copies of the first three volumes, but there was something he had overlooked. “The copies I took along had been speedily put on to C-90 and C-60 cassettes and unfortunately not all had been checked before sale,” Paul recalls. “Several cut off before the recordings had actually finished due to the blank tapes being fractionally shorter than the masters, but they still sold quite well!”

Unusually, the third Doctor release offered at this event differed from the general release. Whereas the standard edition was across two C-90 cassettes (with the Pertwee era taking up three sides of the release), the event edition was a truncated version on a single C-90 tape. The bulk of the edits were to the second and third sides of the full version, meaning that the four stories of Season 7 formed Side A and the remaining 20 Pertwee era serials were looked at on Side B. This was not an ideal arrangement as Paul had to deal with the final three Pertwee stories in the space of a minute and half before the tape ran out...

But all good things come to an end and Time Trace – The Doctor Who Years was no exception. Indeed, it ended halfway through its intended six volume run. “The editions were great fun to put together,” Paul reminisces. “I think it was an amalgamation of different things that ended the run. I’d made a small start on a Tom Baker edition, but didn’t get far with it. I think part of it was an alert from one of the other tapezine producers that we were using audio TV clips of Doctor Who and it was copyright material. I think the BBC were turning less of a blind eye to it. We were all young back then and didn’t really think about such things, so we put the brakes on with our productions and that was that really. However, we were all at that youthful age where life continued to change. We changed in maturity and everything else. I suppose it was the stepping stones of life. I just moved on to other projects and other things. It wasn’t as if my passion for classic TV was centred purely around Doctor Who, after all.”

Mark Saunders devoted his tapezine review in Tranquil Repose Issue 7 (April 1989) to Time Trace - The Doctor Who Years, and seemed suitably impressed: “Paul Hillam’s Time Trace tapezine series is worth a listen. I’ve sampled Time Trace 2, which not surprisingly covers the Pat Troughton era. He includes clips from every story along with some radio tributes, trailers and so on. This provides a representative pastiche of the Doctor and Pat Troughton the actor – a sort of Rock ‘n’ Roll Years with commentary, if you can imagine it. Paul’s deep, butch voice takes us on a journey through the Pat Troughton era and I for one am looking forward to Time Trace 3. My one criticism is that, in places, some of the clips are not as clear as they might be, but this is due, I think, to both their age and the equipment that they were originally recorded on. It reminded me of my distant youth with a plastic Philips microphone jammed up against the TV speaker. No, actually, that’s not fair. It’s a lot better than that would sound. I can highly recommend it.”

A month later, Time Trace - The Doctor Who Years was discussed in the Merchandise Review section of Celestial Toyroom (May 1989), and Lynn Burns proved harder to please: “Paul’s rather deadpan and hesitant delivery of his script is not really enjoyable listening, and his attempts to lighten up a bit on the second tape fall rather flat. A more laid back, relaxed and chatty approach would work better. Documentary seems to make people very straight-laced. The main fault with [the idea behind Time Trace is] the boring re-telling of plots we all know backwards. Fan producers should assume a higher degree of knowledge… Despite the criticism, the tapes show a great deal of effort and enthusiasm, congratulations to Paul for that. Also, I’d not heard or seen a lot of the clips used, so it has a value from that angle – get all the worthwhile clips on one tape!”

Over the years, Paul Hillam has amassed a remarkable collection of video equipment and recordings on a wide variety of tape formats. His interest stems back to the late ’80s / early ’90s when he purchased an odd-looking square video tape at a car boot sale and subsequently discovered early video formats such as Betamax and Video 2000. This led him to collect tapes and machines out of curiosity, with his scope expanding to include less well-known machinery. From humble beginnings with his VHS tapes and recorder, he now owns a multitude of video machines and thousands of video tapes. The video formats include VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, Betacam, Betacord, Video 2000, U-matic, Philips N1500, N1502, N1700 and N1702, Grundig SVR, and open-reel VTRs such as Shibaden, Sony CV2100, JVC Nivico and Sony Videocorder AV3620CE. Over the years, Paul gained knowledge of how to operate, connect, restore and repair these machines and replay degraded and mouldy tapes via cleaning and other techniques. Learning that many programmes were not held in official archives, Paul realised his collection was a potential source of otherwise lost television. This led him to track down numerous missing TV programmes, trailers, idents and continuity for the BBC, ITV and others, returning them via Kaleidoscope TV Archives in the Midlands. He still collects and transfers vintage tapes of multiple formats and enjoys recapturing items from British television’s golden era.