Commentary Highlights:

A difficult one, this, and not always for the right reasons, but on balance I’d say John Bennett’s input.

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

It’s surprising just how much of the story (the Palace Theatre and Litefoot’s mortuary in particular) were actually locations recorded on outside broadcast equipment rather than in studio.

Extras:

Whose Doctor Who- the famous documentary in which the winners of a Radio Times competition to find people more disturbing than Melvyn Bragg discuss the series. Includes several children with weird and sadistic tendencies which make Robert Holmes look like Cliff Richard by comparison and a mild-mannered housewife who yearns to dress up in a monster suit.

Blue Peter Theatre- In which John Noakes, Peter Purves and Lesley Judd demonstrate how anybody can put on their own Doctor Who productions, using only a few cardboard tubes, several underpaid researchers and the assistance of Dick Mills.

Behind the Scenes- 25 minutes of timecoded black and white footage from the recording of the last episode of the story. Includes Chinese extras being berated for failing to writhe on cue, Christopher Benjamin fluffing the name "Li H’sen Chang" in the very last scene where he has to say it and the strangest TARDIS dematerialisation noise ever, as it’s wheeled off set by several BBC minions.

Philip Hinchcliffe Interview- Hinchcliffe himself interviewed on Pebble Mill, possibly most notable for revealing that he’s the same age as my dad.

Trailers and Continuity Announcements- Mostly announcers failing to get to grips with the name "Weng-Chiang", but also some interesting ones for Whose Doctor Who.

Photo Gallery- It has to be said that we’ve seen most if not all of the good photos many, many times although there are some of cast members rehearsing while not in full costume.

TARDIS-Cam 6- The last of these little diversions is a CGI affair featuring the Ship moving between several large objects looking a bit like a cross between a whale and Nemesis the Warlock.

One of the biggest of big-hitters among Doctor Who stories, it’s perhaps no surprise that the story commanded a high-profile release in the fortieth anniversary year and equally unsurprising that it should be accompanied by a generous package of extras. The story is of course a treat in itself, but it’s also fortunate in that the end of the 1977 season saw a particularly good crop of associated supporting material which has survived to the present day. There’s Whose Doctor Who, of course, with its generous scattering of clips (although barring one or two moments, anybody watching in 1977 could have been excused for thinking that Jon Pertwee’s stories were all made in black and white) and a good range of interviews, from schoolchildren and students through education professionals to an intensive care consultant and of course the notoriously staged script conference, although it’s fascinating to see the sewer sets laid out in studio as a series of wooden tubes and for 1977 the clips are selected with more care and attention to detail than might have been expected.

The Blue Peter theatre segment is essentially a series of items from several episodes edited together with the regulars appearing on the set of ‘Robot’ to make a faux-episode, although having said that it does work very well. Although the idea of a Doctor Who toy theatre is patently odd (says the man with a Dracula one he’s never put together), I do remember toy theatres being pushed as an educational toy around this time and although the Blue Peter team do go through it at a breakneck pace, Peter Purves does at one point announce that the office is snowed under with requests for the instruction leaflet, so a fair few must have been made. Most fans will have an ironic smile when Lesley Judd discusses making her set out of tin foil and a polystyrene fruit container as, let’s face it, that isn’t a million miles away from what designers were doing in the 1960s, although after John Noakes shows how to make trees out of scrunched-up tin foil painted brown, it’s difficult not to notice the name of Sarah Hellings in the Blue Peter production team and reach your own conclusions about the prop trees in ‘The Mark of the Rani’.

The remaining items each have a certain amount of interest in their own way- the studio footage is sometimes difficult to follow but more or less follows the scene order of Part Six and if anything the timecoding adds to the sense of the episode being recorded under the pressure of time. With the last scenes committed to tape with about 45 minutes to go, it’s not difficult to feel the tension in the studio and particularly in the production assistant’s voice as scenes have to be reshot because an actor fluffs a line or has a mouthful of muffin, or because the studio fog happens to drift in front of somebody just as he’s speaking. The Pebble Mill interview with Philip Hinchcliffe is worthwhile for what it shows of a young and unrepentant Hinchcliffe speaking eloquently on issues of taste and violence, although the research is occasionally patchy ("the first three Doctors all became household names...but we’re not going to tell you who they were"). It’s fascinating that so many trailers and other announcements have survived, but the slight disappointment of the Photo Gallery is that the vast majority of the studio photos from this story have become very well known over the years, and apart from a couple of pictures of Tom Baker rehearsing in shirt sleeves and deerstalker, there aren’t too many revelations here.

If there’s a disappointment on the disc, it’s probably the commentary- from the perspective of 2008 we’re fortunate that David Maloney and John Bennett did commit some of their thoughts on ‘Talons’ to posterity, but with five people coming and going from the commentary box, it makes for a very "busy" commentary which doesn’t always allow the viewer to follow the story as well, particularly on the final episode where the commentary amounts to five people saying "they don’t make them like this any more". Although having said that, from the perspective of 2008 it’s also rather nice to hear Christopher Benjamin talking about Part Six as his last Doctor Who in the knowledge that subsequent events have conspired to correct matters. That said, the extras package is equal to the story and provides a good all-round release which must come in at not far short of five hours’ viewing in total, providing excellent value to boot.