watching Dr WHo this sort fo meddling with the time continuium is frowned upon on Galifray all that will happen is you'll tweak the past and we'll end up with a present were Steps are number one forever or where Katherine Tate is the new doctor's assistant....

oh and your cool picture looks like a weetabix packet give away scene top stuff.

...sod the A-levels and gone to Wembley to see Elton John, the Beach Boys and the Eagles, summer 75, all acts being way more hip than current mores would suggest. I even had a ticket.......

... go and see Robert Petway and Tommy McLennan performing in some low down dive in the Missippi Delta in 1941. I would stick out like a sore thumb though.

Big band jazz was dead. Then Duke Ellington came and proved them all wrong. You can at least hear the results on the album.

bedroom at 2400 Fulton Street, SF. Phwoar.

What's been has been and who knows what the future holds. Think I would just use the T.A.R.D.I.S it to get to A and B, quicker then the buses round here anyway.
The only thing it would be useful for is to go back in time to Westlife's first recording session;grab them before they could "sing" a note, bundle them in the time machine, dump them on the nearest suitble planet for earthlings and leave them there. Forever.

I'd go back in time and made sure Russell T Davis didn't get the gig to remake Doctor Who and spawn the televisual calamity that is Torchwood. I realise that I'm probably on my own in this viewpoint, but even as a fanboy of all things both fi and sci, I just loathe these two programmes. I watched an ep of Totchwood t'other day when some former lover from the future of Captain Jack's returned to Cardiff '08 and wrestled with some of the clunkiest riscible dialogue like evaah! - Brokeback Mountain it weren't!

As for gigs never attended but ones which I'd wish I'd had, my first choice is hardly in the same cultural big bang league as the Pistols in the Free Trade Hall or the Dylan / 'Judas!' embrolio, but it would be Simple Minds at Barrowlands in 83 where Bono came on for a rousing encore of the ethereal yet propulsive synth-anthem "New Gold Dream". Maybes also seeing Japan at the Budokan at the height of their powers. Or indeed any Ian Dury gig - never did get round to seeing the old chap doing his thang on stage, and of course now never will.

....but I would be lying. Saw him twice, towards the end of his days,at the original Loseley Park Guildford festival, I think, and at Bracknell festival. Both absolutely marvellous, despite the clear (and his) acknowledgement of failing strength, health and voice. BTW, have seen the Blockheads twice subsequent to his death, without famous friends like the fat bloke off Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and they remain shit hot. Especial mention for Norman Watt-Roy grimacing thru' those fantastic Rhythm Stick basslines, whilst casually sweating thru and soaking a 3piece suit. Still likely to tour at a town near you, I would say and hope.

..this time travelling is all well and good, but don't forget Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty,the Observer Effect and Chaos Theory. That is to say, you change an event, or a body, merely by observing it.

For example. You fly back to the early nineties, in your TARDIS. You're at King Tut's in Glasgow. Alan Magee is there. He's waiting to see a new bunch of upstarts called Oasis. You arrive from 2008, pay your three pounds fifty, push your way to the bar for a pint of bitter. You elbow your way to the front of the crowd as Oasis take the stage. Alan reaches for his cheque book. You trip, fall forwards and spill your pint over Noel's amp. It's ruined. The band have hardly played a note but the amp has blown and they can't continue. Alan shakes his head and puts his cheque book away, deciding that he'll stick with Teenage Fanclub and Ride after all.

The rest, as they say, isn't history. You travel back to 2008 and Slowdive are the biggest band in the country.

In the US time travel flick "Peggy Sue Got Married" Kathleen Turner finds herself back in her teenage body in the very early 1960's. At one stage she has an argument with her parents. She storms out of the house and they ask her where she is going and she yells out, "I'm going to Liverpool to discover The Beatles" which is precisely what I would do.

First I would dazzle them with my otherworldly knowledge of their backgrounds, "Didn't you used to be Johnny and the Moondogs?" Then I would offer my services as manager.

It would be hard work getting all the right ingredients to come in at the right time such as going to Hamburg so Astrid could persuade them to change their hairstyle but would be worth it.

I could make myself useful to them, "Paul, your song Scrambled Eggs needs a better title. How about Yesterday? Just a suggestion."

While I think of it, there is also a great Twilight Zone episode from the 80's where an Elvis impersonator goes back in time to the early 50's and meets the young Elvis. I haven't seen it in 20 years but I still remember the plot in great detail. Its worth seeing.

..the Nicholas Lyndhurst sitcom shitefest "Goodnight Sweetheart" where our hero would travel back to WW2 and perform Beatles and Stones hits at the piano, passing them off as his own.

I guess I would travel back in time to the mid 70s and invest a few hundred quid in Microsoft.

I would take a short hop back to the early 1980s, to the day when proto-ravers chanced upon an incapacitated Dalek in an abandoned warehouse. Having broken the cyborg down to its component parts, they redeveloped the alien biotechnology and created the Roland TB-303 synthesiser.

It is ironic that the second summer of love was soundtracked by a device that tweaked the nervous system of one of the most feared, despotic and intolerant species in the universe; it's electronically modulated cries of pain, providing acid house with its trademark squelch. Up and down the country, illegal warehouse raves heaved to the repetitive thud of a Dalek's heartbeat, its palpitations crudely manipulated by feeding the hapless creature handfuls of uppers and downers.

I remember the Aphex Twin bragging in the pages of Melody Maker that he had been getting some "really lush" sounds out of the partially-dismembered Dalek that he kept plugged into an electrical wall socket behind his sofa. Dr Robert Moog hailed Dalek creator Davros as an innovator in the field of electronic instrumentation. Meanwhile more socially conscious bands grappled with the morality of making music using an instrument of genocide, that had made numerous unsuccessful attempts to invade earth.

As a compassionate Timelord, who sees the big picture, I must balance the rights of the Dalek with the need to preserve the culturally important Acid House movement and its subsequent influence on space travel. At some point in the early 1990s, I will remove it to the Dalek Sanctuary orbiting Zeta Leonis, where it can be cared for by dedicated volunteers, who will scrub the smiley stickers off its bodywork, prise the Spiral Tribe flyers out of its face grill and help it come to terms with the time it was forced to wear a giant novelty top hat and used as a mobile lost and found message board at Glastonbury. By this time the Dalek will have spent a terrifying weekend in the company of Shaun Ryder. It will have suffered enough.

(the space travellers Swiss Army Knife )has autotune as one of it's tricks, could be very handy.

Just a thought.