Buying the new classic series DVD has become such a ritual for many fans in the last couple of years that it’s easy to lose sight of just how long the range has been going- although we tend to think of DVD as a 21st-century phenomenon, The Five Doctors was released as part of the initial batch of discs from BBC Worldwide in 1999. Several important contributors- Verity Lambert, David Maloney and Peter Moffatt are three who come to mind- have recorded commentaries or interviews for the range and subsequently died, while the small matter of a revived Doctor Who series on BBC1 has given a fresh impetus to the range and also allowed several new series writers to display their fan credentials. At the time of writing, the classic series range stands at some fifty plus releases (I’m not about to get up and count them all by hand), and what’s particularly interesting is that the classic Doctor Who range is one of the few around which has stayed more or less the same since the earliest days of DVD as a popular format. So it seemed interesting to me to look at how the DVDs have changed and are still changing, and also tease away at the relationship between the product and our expectations- there’s no doubt nowadays that we expect the most highly-regarded stories and those which make up key parts of the series’ ongoing history to be given a little more attention and have one or two more extras, but it wasn’t always the case; indeed, the earliest releases went for a mixture of Doctors and well-known stories with a fairly basic treatment, as nobody was really sure to what extent the paying public could be persuaded to part with their hard-earned for stories they already owned on VHS.

Of course, the selling points of DVD won out in fairly short order- better picture, better sound (although I’m not a sound system buff so I’ll take this one on trust), optional commentaries and the ability to access special features from the same menu as the feature rather than winding to the end of a tape, not to mention the compactness of the discs themselves. Pricing has also been a key factor in the popularity of DVD- taking up less physical space on the shelves means that the shops need not charge quite so much for them, and Internet retailing combined with Who releases’ tendency to sell very well early on means that there’s now a very competitive marketplace out there for a new disc. It’s also fair to say that the Doctor Who range has done very well indeed at taking advantage of the benefits of the format- it would be unthinkable now to have a release without a commentary, and certainly for the 1980s stories it’s the exception rather than the rule not to have the relevant Doctor involved. There’s also a wealth of additional material lurking in various corners of the BBC and private collections (not least the bits and pieces kept by John Nathan-Turner in the anticipation that one day there would be a format such as DVD which would allow fans to see more of how the series was made), and the dedication and enthusiasm of the team working on making each release as interesting and entertaining as possible is only matched by the willingness of many fans to contribute copies of off-air recordings and similar material which hasn’t been officially retained. So I think the story of the Doctor Who DVDs is worth starting to tell at this stage; there have been changes in the last couple of years and there may well be more changes before the range is complete and we can start buying the stories all over again on the next format.

My intention is that the format will grow as the ambition of the DVD releases themselves grew- by all accounts, the original Five Doctors is a fairly Spartan release, so there’s not much point having a dozen categories and marking each one "none". So there’ll be a bit of basic information and a description of the extras, interesting facts from the information text, commentary highlights and so on. The DVDs themselves are so varied in content and approach that any attempt to treat them as identical would miss as much as it covered, so here goes on what I hope will be an interesting little exercise and certainly one which should keep me out of the public houses for a while.