Commentary Highlights:

Probably not Caroline John’s cod Irish accent, although that’s slightly unfair as she and Nicholas Courtney provide a warm and informative commentary on something which was nearly thirty years in the past at the time of recording. Although both actors excuse their fallible memories, between them they remember the names of all the supporting cast without prompting. While it’s evident from Courtney’s comments that he’d spent much of the 1980s and 1990s rewatching his stories at conventions or fronting specials on the series, John’s exposure to the fan world has been much more sporadic, and their anecdotes about Jon Pertwee are particularly affectionate. Having said that, I’d be giving the game away if I explained why Pertwee suggested to Caroline John that she stick newspaper in the front of her jacket...

I Didn’t Know That Until I Read The Information Text:

The technique used to give 1970s BBC brown smoke that deep brown colour is now banned due to the harmful dyes used. As most of the smoke charges used in ‘Spearhead’ are sewn into the actors’ costumes (to represent the effects of the Auton guns) one hopes they weren’t too harmful in small doses.

The main one is the UNIT recruiting film produced in 1993 to accompany the repeats of ‘Planet of the Daleks’ ; there’s also a photo gallery which includes photos from Jon Pertwee’s initial photo session as the Doctor (and which also suggests that during the scene in ‘Spearhead’ where the Brigadier is surrounded by the press, at least one of the cameras was actually being used to take still photos). The package is completed by trailers from the 1999 repeats, which aren’t exactly enthralling but do at least give a different take on familiar footage, and the ‘Doctor Who Night’ of the same year- again, in hindsight it’s curious to see Who being promoted by the BBC as a nostalgia product.

By all accounts, ‘Spearhead’ was slipped into the release schedule as a comparatively rushed job when the good folks at BBC Worldwide decided that the market could tolerate more than one release a year; having recently been repeated on BBC2 in what at the time was the channel’s cult slot, there was a nice clean set of prints and trailers all ready to go on the disc without much effort being required except, apparently, to change the music on the Part 3 trailer. To that extent, it’s not a bad package for a thirty-year-old story and demonstrates just how determined the people behind the releases were to get the best possible end result- there are very few archive television releases even today which come out with commentaries on every single episode and other supporting material. With ‘Spearhead’ the information text makes its debut, and while this may not be to everybody’s taste, as the DVD releases progressed the text became more and more genuinely informative. As with many of the other features, however, this first effort isn’t quite sure of its intended market and tends to concentrate on the series’ internal continuity for the first couple of episodes at least, before offering a few more tantalising bits of trivia. It’s only in retrospect, and with the likes of ‘Robot’ and ‘Castrovalva’ out there, that we can see what it’s missing- if ‘Spearhead’ were released today, there’d be a decent length documentary on the change from monochrome to colour and Troughton to Pertwee- it’s one of the crucial points in the series’ ongoing development where everything took a definite change of direction. Perhaps when ‘The War Games’ finally comes out, we can have an upgraded ‘Spearhead’ with a few more bells and whistles- but for the range’s second release, it’s a promising step in the right direction.