YOU might have seen that two long-lost episodes of Dr Who turned up earlier this month; they’d been in the hands of a private collector and now, I’m glad to say, they’ve been restored and put on iPlayer for us all to see.

I watched them the other day and they took me straight back to the 1960s in my auntie and uncle’s house in Darfield where I used to watch Dr Who from behind their brown settee.

I can still remember my Uncle Charlie’s memorable description of the dalek that I was too terrified to look at ‘it’s just a dustbin wi’ a brush stickin’ art’ he said and when he said that I forced myself to glance over the back of the settee and indeed it was a dustbin wi’ a brush sticking art, but as Dr Who fans know, it was more than that, much more.

At the end of the show I went into their pantry and pretended it was the Tardis and that I was about to float through time and space as far as I wanted to go to places even beyond Billingley, and I seemed to succeed, in my imagination anyway, until Uncle Charlie came in for some vinegar to put on his chips and broke the spell.

It nearly broke the vinegar bottle and all when he dropped it in shock when I spoke to him in a dalek voice.

Well, the voice of a brush stuck to a bin. He said ‘tha can’t use that for a time machine, when he’s recovered his equilibrium ‘yer auntie needs to get some taties ter mek a pie’.

Television is, of course, a kind of time machine; those lost-and-then-found Dr Who episodes were gateways to my childhood where I had convinced myself that, unlike what the lads said at school, Dr Who was actually a documentary rather than a slice of science fiction, and that time travel was just a fact.

An amazing fact, but a fact nevertheless. My credulity was strained a few years later when William Hartnell, who was my favourite Dr Who, perhaps because he was the first, in the same way that your first cup of tea in the morning is always the best, transformed into Patrick Troughton, the second Dr Who.

For a moment I thought that perhaps I wasn’t watching a documentary, but then I reaffirmed my faith and I decided that I was.

After I’d been banned from travelling through time and space in the pantry, partly because it was always in use for things like taties and tins of beans and bottles of vinegar and Andrew’s Liver Salts and parsnips in a brown paper bag and partly because my wailing rendition of the Dr Who theme put auntie’s teeth on edge I went to the shed at the bottom of the garden and turned that into my Tardis.

It was bigger than the pantry, anyway, and there was no smell of non-brewed condiment.

Those who are the same age as me (I’m 70 – I know I don’t look it, or maybe I do) will remember the power of the theme tune to Dr Who and can probably sing it unprompted.

I bet some of you are doing it now! My mistake with the Dr Who theme tune, maybe because I was used to songs having lyrics, was to think that the notes that made up the theme were actually singing the word ‘roundabout’.

Try it next time you’re watching an old Dr Who episode: it works! ‘Roundabout roundabout roundabout roundabout…’ Well, it nearly works.

So in the shed, behind the curtains, I pretended that the pasting table in the middle of the place was the control deck of the Tardis. I put some old toilet roll middles and an empty bottle of Tizer the Appetiser on the table to act as the controls.

My Uncle Charlie put his head round the door to ask where I was going and I replied with as much conviction as I could ‘the future, of course, Uncle Charlie!’ as I made final adjustments to the Tizer bottle.

‘Don’t you want to go to the past, lad?’ he said. ‘Lots of people want to tek a time machine to the past because they reckon it were better theer’.

I replied ‘not me, Uncle Charlie – the future is where it’s at. Well, where it’s going to be at…’

Quick, start the theme tune!