In 1989, a ninety-minute audio tapezine called Doctor Who 2000 was born. The tapezine featured interviews with fans, audio recordings of Doctor Who episode trailers and reviews of upcoming episodes. I assembled the tapes with the help of many contributors, using an old double cassette recorder and a hand held voice recorder. The tapes featured the occasional exclusive interview with famous Doctor Who stars like Colin Baker or Katy Manning. However, the main reason for the popularity of the tapezine was due to the fact that each one included two missing audio episodes of Doctor Who. Fans could relive the recordings of Marco Polo or cringe in terror to Fury from the Deep, long before either had been released in any official format.

My goal with the series was to get people interested in tracking down the final missing audio recordings. At the time, two episodes of The Crusade and the whole of Galaxy Four were not known to exist as soundtracks and my hope was that if I could get enough people interested in the missing recordings, these episodes may be tracked down. Thanks to the interest of a large number of fans worldwide, these remaining missing soundtracks were uncovered towards the end of the Doctor Who 2000 series. I included a couple of the episodes on the final tapezine, Issue 30. Whether it had made a direct impact on the discoveries or not, the tapezine series had served its purpose and with new technology called 'wavs,' the audio tapes had outlived their usefulness and were put to rest in 1995. I then moved on to slightly bigger things - the release of a new videozine - The Y Files. But that's another story!

Many of the covers were either drawn by myself or Lee Freeman in the UK. The final two-tape set featured a colour cover of two paintings of the seven Doctors by Lee Freeman and myself respectively. Lee's was definitely the best of the two!

The tapezine was essentially free. The amount charged for the 'zine simply covered the cost of the cassette, the printing of the cover and postage. Fans could send their own tapes in, with an envelope and some stamps and get it for free. Approximately twenty to thirty of each issue became available. Of those, about ten to fifteen were sales and the rest were free contributor copies.

Doctor Who 2000 was predominantly advertised in the fanzine, Data Extract. In fact, the goal was to release an issue at the same time as each Data Extract was published. For the 200th issue of Data Extract, a full page ad was taken out featuring all the issues of Doctor Who 2000 to that point. This is the only complete record to date of all the Doctor Who 2000 covers.

Doctor Who 2000 was also fairly advanced for its time in that video advertising was used during mini cons and conventions in Sydney. Many of the ads were camp or tragic and deliberately bad enough to cause a laugh. As far as is known, no other tapezine had been advertised in this way at the time. It was also advertised in programme guides, brochures and fliers, on notice boards in local libraries and even at international Doctor Who conventions like Visions '93.

Doctor Who 2000 was available for purchase in the United Kingdom from the producers of similar tapezines there, such as Rayphase Shift and The Master Tape, who acted as local distributors. In return, these British tapezines were available for local distribution in Australia in a reciprocal arrangement. Unfortunately, this wasn't as successful as we had initially hoped but the initiative increased the number of contributions to all three tapezines. Exchanges were also made for other tapezines, including Sonic Waves. There was a brief discussion about the possibility of releasing a joint tapezine called Master Ray 2000 but nothing came of it. A video production organised by Lee Freeman was to feature video contributions by various fans, including editors of tapezines, but due to various problems, I was unfortunately not able to complete my side of the deal. I regret this to this day.

Additionally, Doctor Who 2000 was also available at Doctor Who meetings, at collector's fairs and at other science fiction events.

Neil no longer has a complete collection of the original recordings as the tapes have tended to wear out, crunch up or melt in the intervening years. It is not known at this point whether anyone anywhere has the complete collection of thirty-one cassettes.

Despite this, in its time, Doctor Who 2000 had reached many corners of the globe. The production of a tapezine was an idea in Neil's mind when he advertised for audio pals in Doctor Who Magazine in 1988. As a result of having access to fans in other countries who also had tape recorders, and who could record interesting things about Doctor Who from their parts of the world, contributions increased from these countries. Being a free tapezine, Doctor Who 2000 was sent to fans in Canada, the USA, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and New Zealand.

A spin off series called SF 2000 was released featuring press released interviews with myself voicing the part of the reporter amongst other things, but with no real direction besides adding everything SF it soon fizzled and died. (And the interviews were really embarrassing!) Issue 3 was never even finished.

Issue 31 was made and released but, with such an excellent Issue 30 to live up to, it wasn't promoted as much and was quietly forgotten. It's possible only a few copies were made of this mysterious issue and sometimes I can't even remember if it really existed!

In 2004, there were tentative plans to track down copies of the series and release edited versions as podcasts, to fill in the gap left by the lack of a TV series. But then it was announced that Doctor Who was back so Doctor Who 2000 has now been buried, forever to languish at the bottom of fans' cupboards, gathering dust!

Neil Hogan, Producer, Doctor Who 2000

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