January 23rd, 1980 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

If there's anything I'm famous for, it's my uncanny psychic powers which defy both sense and credulity. Therefore, let me see if I can guess what you were up to on the 20th of January 1980.

If you're British, I'm going to guess you were watching Live and Let Die on ITV.

That's because a walloping 23.5 million viewers were tuned in to it, meaning 42% of the entire UK population were watching. Needless to say, this was an all-time British record TV audience for a movie.

I suspect slightly fewer people were watching BBC Two on this night in that week when that channel's Arena arts show was broadcasting Lene Lovich Sleeping Beauty.

Perhaps its greatest revelation was that Lovich had been a professional screamer in horror films. This is a discovery that definitely needs further investigation to discover if I've seen any movies in which she screamed.

Wikipedia also claims she was part of the audience singing along with Chuck Berry on his 1972 Number One smash My Ding-a-Ling.

However, it also says, "Citation needed," so take that bombshell with a dose of salt.

Hold on, what's happening?

With one mighty leap, Hulk Comic suddenly becomes The Incredible Hulk Weekly and gains an extra eight pages. Dez is clearly tireless in his endeavours to shake up Marvel UK.

So, what do we get in those extra pages?

We get the arrival of the Beast's very own solo strip and the start of a Spider-Man tale in which the wall-crawler has to seek out Reed Richards when a group of Russian super-doers including Darkstar, the Crimson Dynamo and that bloke with the hammer and sickle kidnap Peter Parker's female college friend whose name I've forgotten.

In the main strip, the Hulk's still in the Andes and enmeshed in Tyrannus' plot to regain his lost youth.

Valkyrie's in a bad mood when her sometime husband Jack Norris is abducted by Nick Fury on behalf of Scorpio.

The Silver Surfer's still having his scrap with Thor.

The Black Knight's still having his scrap with a fire-breathing dragon.

And Ant-Man defeats Mr Mysterious, or whatever he's called, and saves the Avengers Mansion from whatever dire fate the villain had in mind for it.

Hooray! Marvel UK's most profitable mag hits the Big 100!

There's not much I can say about this issue. I don't even know if the normal back-up strips are in it; or if it's all Star Wars this week, like I suspect it is.

I do know the comic contains a listing and plot summary for every Star Wars tale that's so far featured in the book, and also a very brief retrospective on the various back-up strips it's given us over the years.

It also has a wrap-around cover with the comic's rear featuring the TIE Fighter that the front cover's X-wing fighter is shooting at.

I do believe this is William Hartnell's first ever cover, which I would have thought is quite a brave thing, sales-wise.

I do remember that, back in the 1970s, William Hartnell seemed a very mysterious figure indeed, as I'd never seen any of his episodes and they'd never, to my knowledge, been repeated, meaning that all I knew was that he was the Doctor who was so incredibly old it was a miracle he could even move.

He was in his mid-fifties.

Elsewhere, the fourth Doctor's still up against the City of the Damned. I like to think that's a city in which everyone dresses like the punk band the Damned, and that Captain Sensible is the mayor.

We also get a text article dedicated to the inside of the TARDIS, more of Marvel's adaptation of The Invisible Man, a text retelling of the First Doctor story The Romans (I wonder if it includes the fridge jokes?) and a story called Death World which seems to feature Ice Warriors and Cybermen.

Spidey's mag doesn't get eight extra pages this week, nor does it get a wrap-around cover but Spider-Man does at least get a good strangling as he tangles with the Iguana at Bronx Zoo.

Fortunately, our hero survives that murder attempt but how long before he succumbs to another one?