This strip brought forth a lot of comments from my reglar readers – some had never heard of the phrase ‘behind the sofa’, while others brought forth memories of hiding from the monsters that appeared on the television in Doctor Who.

My period of hiding from the monsters would have been during Patrick Troughton’s reign as the Second Doctor. His main foes at the time were the Ice Warriors, the sibilant martians who pioneered Darth Vader’s respiratory problems – just the sound of their raspy breath would scare the willies out of me. The sofa was on legs so hiding behind it didn’t give the four-year-old me much protection from the space lizards in screen, so instead I hid in the dining room and waited for the hissing to stop.

Of course, Doctor Who was at its best when it scared you just when you weren’t expecting it. The one that really disturbed me was in Jon Pertwee’s second series. The Nestene Consciousness had returned, an entity with the power to control and animate anything made out of plastic. Normally it would send out showroom dummies to do its dirty business – creepy enough in themselves – but this time round it had spread its influence to household items and furniture. Remember those egg-shaped chrome and PVC chairs that were all the rage in the early 70s? We had one of those. So did a disposable guest actor in the show. The chair came to life and swallowed him like a fly in a venus fly trap. I didn’t sit in that chair again for a good two years.