Commentary Highlights:

I’m not a fan of hers by any means, but I’d have to say Jacqueline Pearce. If anybody else mentions herpes in a Doctor Who DVD commentary by the time they finish turning them out, I’ll eat my hat, followed by a course of antibiotics.

A Fix with Sontarans - the Jim’ll Fix It segment, with no indication of what happened to Gareth Jenkins afterwards- but if you ever see a Mezon gun and "Jim Fixed It For Me" badge on Ebay, you might find out...

Behind the Sofa: Robert Holmes and Doctor Who - in which Barry Letts, Philip Hinchcliffe, Terrance Dicks, Chris Boucher and Eric Saward remember Holmes’s contribution to Doctor Who. Except for ‘The Space Pirates’, ‘The Ribos Operation’ and ‘The Power of Kroll’, which are conveniently ignored.

Beneath the Lights - a 28-minute collation of studio footage from some of the space station scenes. I bet nobody crossed Gary Downie twice.

Beneath the Sun - about 35 minutes of third-generation footage (a VHS recording of film trims- kind of a reversal of the way most of the Hartnell and Troughton episodes were made into film prints) of the location filming.

Adventures in Time and Spain - Gary Downie’s combined reminiscence and masterclass in how to organise a location shoot.

Photo Gallery - one of the most extensive so far, running to eight minutes, but no real revelations.

Wavelength - a surprisingly unpatronising schools programme which takes a look at the making of Doctor Who, incorporating a number of interviews.

Conventional wisdom has it that one of the weaknesses of ‘The Two Doctors’ is that it’s a monumental example of why you can’t make good Doctor Who by ticking boxes- which, oddly enough, is one of the reasons why it made such an obvious choice for Colin Baker’s second DVD release, when those boxes include the Second Doctor and the Sontarans. Add to that the numerous behind-the-scenes stories which have been doing the rounds for the last couple of decades of actors and production team having a whale of a time on location, and it’s clear that the raw material for some good supporting material is there too. In fact, all told the extras run to more than the running time of the story itself, which is no mean feat with a story almost as long as an old six-parter.

The commentary never really falters- indeed, with entertaining personalities of the calibre of Colin Baker, Frazer Hines and Jacqueline Pearce, how could it ever?- while what’s interesting about ‘A Fix With Sontarans’ is just how long the sketch goes on without ever quite descending into farce. It’s also intriguing to speculate just what Janet Fielding asked for when she went to the hairdresser that morning. The Robert Holmes feature is interesting if selective (and includes a shot of him in his Regency costume for ‘The Brain of Morbius’ which I haven’t been able to find on the subsequent DVD of that particular story), however with the benefit of hindsight might have been better saved for another release which wouldn’t have quite as much available in the way of extras. What ‘Beneath the Lights’ and ‘Beneath the Sun’ share is an insight into just how unglamorous and repetitive making a television programme can be, particularly when you don’t have several cameras available to record the action- it’s fairly clear from the location film trims that Peter Moffatt was trying to get two or three takes of each shot even if the first was fine, purely because the unit wouldn’t be able to go back to Spain to re-record anything which didn’t work. Similarly, the studio footage has a lot of repetition and retakes, which must have been particularly trying for Nicola Bryant, who has to spend a lot of the time hanging around for the odd moment when she has to feed Colin Baker his cue or react to what he’s saying. From the behind-the-scenes footage, it’s clear that the wrong side of Gary Downie was not a very good place to be, and yet the opening shot of his own little feature ‘Adventures in Time and Spain’ (perhaps there should have been an accompanying feature on John Nathan-Turner’s Who-themed pantomimes called ‘Cinders Floating Around in Spain’) of him watching the sea washing over Brighton beach is rather sad in context. A fairly controversial figure with a number of fairly cutting remarks about certain trends in fandom, it’s nevertheless good that he had this opportunity to reminisce about the making of ‘The Two Doctors’ and also talk about some of the practicalities of his trade- and it’s evident that most of the memories are fond ones, although I suspect that the visual effects men who spent all day and all night driving across Spain and back called him every name under the sun.

‘The Two Doctors’ is one of the first releases to benefit from the amount of material that JNT and others retained in anticipation that there might one day be a format such as DVD which would be able to make use of the footage- we’re certainly unlikely to see much behind-the-scenes footage of Patrick Troughton on set from his 1960s stories, for one thing. That there’s over an hour of such footage just assembled into some sort of meaningful form on these discs is certainly special; the additional Robert Holmes documentary and Gary Downie’s piece really do go to show that when the material is there, a 1980s story can be backed up by a really good extras package, particularly when the story is, like ‘The Two Doctors’, one with a chequered reputation. If you include Wavelength- a curious programme, which addresses its audience as if every school in 1984 had synthesisers and video projects, but is actually quite a good summary of what different people do in order to make a television programme- there’s a good five hours’ viewing and listening between the two discs. But then again, that’s where the story’s reputation comes back into play- if you don’t like ‘The Two Doctors’, then you aren’t really going to want to spend five hours of your life reliving it.