When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I finally need to watch this.’ I handed him a video cassette retrieved from my sister’s attic and he took it to a place that digitises such things.

On Christmas Day I nervously plugged in the memory stick. There we were: Carmel and I, aged about seven and nine, bathed in late-1960s sunshine in the garden of our mock-Tudor house in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. (I emphasise ‘Surrey’, because in those days Carshaltonions were in Margo Leadbetter-style denial over new local government boundaries that landed them in – shudder – south London.)

Blue Peter coloured the lives of children to an extent that seems inconceivable today

My father, who rented a cine camera for the occasion, would have described this footage as Carmel and Damian ‘having fun working in the garden’. It’s propaganda, in other words. There I am, digging at a flowerbed with the fake enthusiasm of a Soviet peasant. Was he holding a gun to my head? Gardening was always torture for me, not just because I was the laziest boy in Carshalton Beeches, but also because it meant spending time with my father. Our relationship was already toxic and stayed that way until a heart attack brought the ordeal to an end 15 years later. It was an ordeal for him as well, poor man: we couldn’t stand each other.

There was no soundtrack to the cine film, but my memory supplied one: the Blue Peter hornpipe. We were a Blue Peter family, in the bullseye of the programme’s target demographic at a time when it coloured the lives of children to an extent that seems inconceivable today. Our Carshalton years coincided with the Holy Trinity of BP presenters: Valerie Singleton, who looked like a sexy schoolmistress with a no-nonsense glint in her eye; Peter Purves, handsome and groovy; John Noakes, a cheeky Yorkshireman who was fearless while scaling Nelson’s Column but, like Val and Pete, nervous in the studio because autocues were banned and every word of banter was awkwardly scripted.

The mythology of Blue Peter is well known, but here’s something you may have forgotten: Pope Paul VI, no less, was filmed enthusing about it to Val, whose head was covered in the lace mantilla that Catholic women still wore to Mass every week. No wonder my mother made sure her offspring were sitting in front of the television at five o’clock on Mondays and Thursdays. (She’d have felt differently if she knew Miss Singleton once had an abortion and later a fling with Purves, but fortunately Val didn’t choose to reveal those details until decades later.)

Although Blue Peter was part of family life, my obsession was Doctor Who. My parents weren’t so keen on that. It would have been one thing if I’d been fascinated by aliens and space travel; that would have made me a normal ten-year-old boy. But my attention was bizarrely focused on Jon Pertwee, whose scarlet-lined Inverness cape, worn open to reveal a frilly white shirt, struck me as the dernier cri in sartorial elegance. In later seasons he also wore a velvet bow tie, which I thought added an unwelcome touch of night-club vulgarity. I once made the mistake of asking my father whether he agreed. I still remember his look of uncomprehending disgust. What was wrong with his son?

Good question. Instead of helpfully mowing the lawn, I turned our garden into an open-air studio for re-enactments of Doctor Who storylines. My parents were deaf to my pleas for a frilly shirt, but I did manage to drape an old overcoat over my shoulders in an approximation of the Doctor’s cloak. Of course I also had to play the roles of the Master, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Captain Mike Yates, a dashing young officer who had a crush on the Doctor’s assistant Jo Grant, played with doe-eyed naivety by Katy Manning. The role of Jo was assigned to my sister, who was appropriately beautiful and fair-haired, though admittedly only eight and very bored by the charade.

Jon Pertwee later wore a velvet bow tie, which added an unwelcome touch of night-club vulgarity to Doctor Who

All this went through my mind while I watched that cine film. I could imagine Carmel teasing me about my attempts to turn my schoolboy fringe into something resembling Pertwee’s bouffant barnet. Alas, I’ll never hear her teasing again. But I cling on to whatever reassuring fragments of the past I can find. For example, Purves has an account on X, and the other day he reminded us that before Blue Peter he’d been in Doctor Who. From 1965 to 1966 he played Steven Taylor, a companion to William Hartnell’s crotchety and unnerving first Doctor. Since then, he’s revisited the role in various audio spin-offs, most recently last year. Isn’t that impressive?

But it’s Manning who really knows how to nurse the nostalgia of ageing Doctor Who fans. It helps that she still looks fabulous. She’s on X every few days. On 15 December, she posted a selfie with an old gentleman called Richard Franklin, a name I didn’t recognise. On closer inspection he turned out to be the actor who portrayed Captain Mike Yates. What an interesting CV: Westminster, Christ Church, a real-life captain in the Royal Green Jackets, then lots of acting mixed with political activism that took him from the Liberal Democrats to Ukip.

All of which gave me a nice glow until, after watching my home movie, I checked Katy’s timeline for an update. ‘Our wonderful brave Captain Yates, Richard Franklin, has gone on his awfully big adventure,’ she said.

Looking back at his timeline, it wasn’t unexpected; certainly not as unexpected as the flaxen-haired girl in the Carshalton flowerbeds going on her big adventure two years ago. Franklin was 87 and had obviously been very ill. Still, what distressing news to hear on Christmas Day, especially for someone given to morbid self-pity. And in an empty house. What was that metallic wheezing sound? Could it be my own Tardis getting ready to dematerialise?