Doctor Who DVD

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Again this is an entertaining listen, although Cartmel and Curry do occasionally get just the tiniest bit self-regarding. I’m genuinely not joking that in the space of just a few minutes they relate The Happiness Patrol not only to the work of Jonathan Swift, but also to the Chilean disappeared, the Argentinian disappeared, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Uprising and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Enigmatic All-Mighty Mr Fix-it Show

There’s no doubt that elements of the production are not just average but actively shambolic and characteristic of the era’s weak points. Some of the acting is so bad that you want to hunt down the performers and their families in order to exact fitting retribution. The monsters, in this case the Mandrels, look like a portly Animal Kwackers tribute band, while the sets manage to be both drab and overlit simultaneously.

The Lair of the White Witch

The Master does his best to delegate but Bok clearly does not feel empowered enough to make decisions when the Master isn’t present, even straightforward ones such as zapping a defenceless Doctor armed only with a trowel and a song. This must be a burdensome managerial overhead for the Master who has enough on his plate with ceremonies to organise and backward nursery rhymes to learn.

Le Boucher

Boucher is one of the most successful writers to have worked on Doctor Who, and the fact he did his best work outside of the programme and yet was still responsible for an acknowledged classic is a remarkable thing.

The Old Refrain

Doctor Who: Revisitations 3 on DVD

What do you give to the Doctor Who fan who has everything? A year or so ago Revisitations 2 offered an extreme answer to this question by re-releasing some middling stories that barely needed further restoration, alongside some average but hardly vital extras in a package that even fans may have thought twice about buying, before surrendering to a deep compulsion and shelling out for it anyway. Fortunately, although its successor Revisitations 3 is a curate’s egg, it contains more good than bad, and some parts are very good indeed.

It helps that all three stories included in this set, regardless of the current state of opinion about their respective merits, feature important elements in the mythology of Doctor Who. The Tomb of the Cybermen was (for a time) the legendary lost adventure featuring the finest moments of the series’ second-best monsters. As well as being the tenth anniversary story, and starting the tradition of multiple Doctor adventures, The Three Doctors introduced Time Lord history in the form (or non-form) of demented solar engineer Omega, and saw the Doctor released from exile. The Robots of Death may seem to be a self-contained murder mystery but it has led to a whole range of spin-off fiction set in Kaldor City. They all continue to be deeply influential stories, and so carry the justification for re-release much more naturally than, for example, Resurrection of the Daleks.

There are also practical reasons for the selection of stories. The original release of The Tomb of the Cybermen was too early in the run to benefit from VidFIRE; The Robots of Death was the second release and didn’t even have production notes; whereas The Three Doctors featured an authoring error at the end of episode two which resulted in a UNIT Guard doing a double-take as his HQ disappeared. In addition, none of them had accompanying ‘Making Of’ extras, and the commentaries left a little to be desired: for example, no human being has listened to more than five minutes of Philip Hinchcliffe and Chris Boucher on The Robots of Death without contemplating trying to move a wall with his/her face. On the whole then, the arguments for another pass at these stories are relatively strong.

Before I go on to describe the new features, it’s worth mentioning quickly what isn’t carried across from the original releases. Tombwatch, a 30 minute recording of the video launch of The Tomb of the Cybermen from 1992 has not made the transition, and nor has the PanoptiCon ’93 footage featuring Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning and Nicholas Courtney. There’s already been some gnashing of teeth about these rights-related omissions but if anybody is that bothered about them (or the absent and obsolete five minute feature Remastering for DVD) then just hold on to the originals. I don’t think forgoing the £2.49 you’d get for them on eBay should be that big a deal, unless the problem is that duplicate DVDs will cause a shelf display crisis but as I’m not a trained psychiatrist I can’t really comment on that.

Moving on to the main package, the richest selection of material accompanies The Tomb of the Cybermen. The story’s reputation has wavered over the years but both the ‘Making of’ documentary The Lost Giants and the new commentary take it as read that it’s an undisputed classic. That’s a reasonable stance to take as with some stories, like some footballers, form is temporary but class is permanent. Almost regardless of our current view of this story and its manifest problems, it remains a significant moment in the development of the series with the Cybermen fully established as the second best monsters, the striking images of the tombs, and a really graphic approach to horror and the big scary moments. In addition, the fact that it was once lost, indeed the most famous lost story of them all, adds to its significance in the wider history of the show.

Steve Broster’s The Lost Giants features pretty much all of the surviving cast and crew and theie contributions are very engaging. There’s perhaps not a lot of new information in here, but certainly plenty of extra evidence to support the idea that director Morris Barry was a bit of a pain in the arse. This and other aspects of the production are expanded on in the all-new commentary. The original featured only Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling, but here our cup runneth over: moderator Toby Hadoke is accompanied on this occasion by Victor Pemberton and Bernard Holley for episode one and then Frazer, Deborah and Shirley Cooklin for the rest of the story alongside Reg Whitehead for episodes three and four.

It’s a very jolly affair, and I was particularly impressed that when Deborah asked Hadoke where The Tomb of the Cybermen was rediscovered, he managed to say “Hong Kong”, a) without doing an impression of his questioner, and b) without laughing. Also interesting was the moment when Shirley Cooklin revealed that Pauline Collins once played her in the Screen Two play ‘Knockback‘ and seemed about to expand on this. The coversation was shifted along at that point, but I’d love to hear Cooklin talking about her life outside of Doctor Who as I suspect it would be more interesting than her approach to Kaftan’s death scene.

The other two supporting features are also of a high standard. In James Goss’s The Curse of the Cybermen’s Tomb, Sir Christopher Frayling and Dr Debbie Challis outline the cultural and historical roots of The Tomb of the Cybermen with particular reference to Sir Howard Carter’s uncovering of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The influences are quite convincingly teased out, and there’s a particularly good moment when Frayling recounts his personal memories of Kit Pedler. This welcome level of intelligence is maintained in Matthew Sweet and Thomas Guerrier’s Cybermen: Extended Edition. As its title indicates, this film was originally featured in a slightly shorter version on a previous DVD release, but as that was a repackaged set of David Tennant Cybermen adventures, I suspect there’ll be quite a few who missed out on it. If you did, or even if you didn’t, then you’re in for a treat. It’s always been one of the best Doctor Who extras, and as an in-depth roam through Cyber history it’s hard to imagine that it could be bettered.

Sweet, as ever, deftly takes us through the stories and the contexts within which they were created, while never forgetting to throw in some belly laughs – his canter through some of the Cybermen’s bizarre and convoluted plans is a real highlight. Cybermen is about two minutes longer than the original version, which is mainly to allow the Tennant Specials and Series Six to be covered, although there is some other re-editing, and (I think) the odd line missing. So you might need to keep your original of that as well. But frankly if, like me, you’re the kind of completist who’d already bought The Cybermen Collection, then you’ll be keeping it anyway.

It doesn’t end there. The Magic of VidFIRE showcases the wonderful technique which causes actors to look sweaty in black and white. Certainly the improvement in picture quality from the original release is stark, and justification for the re-release on its own. But my word the Sky Ray Ice Lolly extras run it a close second. Not only is the original television advert featured which includes a Patrick Troughton imposter menaced by Flesh Gordon Dildo Spaceships, but there’s a stack of PDF material as well. If the full set of collector cards and album weren’t enough, there’s promotional material, design roughs and even storyboards for the adverts. These daft little touches are part of what makes the range so special, and are the icing on an already nice cake.

Unfortunately, it all goes a bit awry with The Three Doctors. The “double-take” fault with the original release has been corrected, but I can’t see any obvious other improvement with the picture (which was fine anyway), and in fact (as others with keener eyes than me have already noticed) a moment with Jo and Tyler at the beginning of Episode 3 seems to have regained some CSO fringing issues on their faces which appeared to have been corrected in the original release. This is hardly a big deal, but the lack of a new commentary (although it didn’t need one) and compelling features make The Three Doctors very much the runt of the litter even allowing for new production notes by David Brunt.

Happy Birthday to Who is the obligatory ‘Making of’, in this case directed by Richard Higson. Perhaps it’s because the story is so well-documented that I found this film rather uninspiring. Toby Hadoke provides the voice-over and it ticks all the boxes, but some of the content (for instance, it’s revealed that Jon Pertwee “liked gadgets”) left me disappointed. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the standard in the past, and I’m being unfair. But I’m certainly not being unfair about Was Doctor Who Rubbish?, a bemusing and irritating piece, in which fans of the show attempt to explain why Doctor Who was always great despite all those nasty people saying that it featured silly monsters, bad acting or wobbly sets. To say this comes across as overly defensive is an understatement, but it does serve to demonstrate the extreme self-flagellating tendencies of Doctor Who fans. What other programme would have a DVD range that includes a feature going into great detail about the reasons some people don’t like the show? It’s insane, especially at a time when Doctor Who couldn’t be more popular. At one point, a contributor says “We can look back on old Doctor Who and put these criticisms to bed about silly sets, costumes and bad acting” – well good luck with that. Another option would be to let people say what they like (who knows they might even have a valid point on occasion) and get on with enjoying the show yourself rather than trying to change the weather.

Girls Girls Girls – 1970s was a positive relief after all that nonsense and it features Caroline John, Katy Manning and Louise Jameson discussing their time on the show. There’s a striking moment when they debate whether they’d choose a great role over a great relationship, and they cover some interesting areas, but like the 1980s version of this show it could have perhaps done with a little more structure to guide the conversation and I’m not really sure why Peter Purves needed to be there at the beginning.

After the mixed bag of The Three Doctors, it was a relief to turn to The Robots of Death, a story I find so enjoyable that I almost missed my stop on the train the other day when watching Episode One. Both the main supporting feature The Sandmine Murders (by Steve Broster), and the newly recorded commentary make it clear that the cast and crew loved making the story, but no-one had a very high opinion of Chris Boucher’s script. Director Michael E Briant has been particularly vocal about this in the past, although he’s toned it down a bit here even though Boucher doesn’t feature other than on the dreaded original commentary. I’ve always found this a bit unfair, as Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe specifically asked for a country house style whodunnit in space, so blaming Boucher for cliches seems unreasonable. One wonders what Briant would have made of some of the Hammer Horror pastiches offered up in the previous seasons if he thought this script was old hat.

But there’s no argument that the elaborate costumes and robot designs are a key part of the story’s success so costume designer Elizabeth Waller rightly plays a major role in the documentary, and there’s also a great deal of interesting material about designer Ken Sharp and visits to Cornish Clay Mines. Tom Baker is good value as usual, particularly with his panegyrics to Pamela Salem’s beauty, and we also get the chance to enter the Manichean world of Brian Croucher where the safe actors go to the cafeteria and the dangerous ones go to the pub. He also comes up with the priceless quote “Tom Baker is a creative terrorist” which certainly made my day and will be on a t-shirt in the near future.

The new commentary features Tom Baker, Michael E Briant, Louise Jameson and Pamela Salem, and there are new production notes by the estimable Martin Wiggins, who incidentally also wrote the new ones for The Tomb of the Cybermen. As for the final accompanying feature Robophobia, I prefer to paraphrase Wittgenstein and simply say that whereof one doesn’t find funny, thereof one should be silent. As with The Three Doctors I could detect virtually no improvement in picture on the main feature, but that might well be my mundane equipment. Overall, while Revisitations 3 doesn’t hit the heights of the first Revisitations release, which had a very strong set of features, but it’s worth getting for the picture quality of The Tomb of the Cybermen and the plentiful extras, particularly those sumptuous Sky Ray PDFs.

Revisitations 3 is released on Monday 13th February in the UK.