Commentary Highlights: Probably the opening, where Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred start playing Just a Minute with Nicholas Parsons- you know it’s going to be a fun commentary after that.

Photo Gallery: A good selection, with a nice balance between shots of the characters and coverage of the story being made. Particularly interesting is one of Sylvester McCoy in the graveyard wearing his light-coloured Doctor jacket.

Nebula ‘90: Highlights of a Fenric-themed panel from the third in a series of conventions held in Liverpool in the late 80s and early 90s. Funny to think that only the year before I’d met many of the same actors at the second convention in the series- my main souvenirs being an autograph from Tomek Bork which I could only read after taking a Russian class two or three years ago, and the embarrassment of saying something to Sophie Aldred in a hormonal teenage moment which will live with me forever.

Take Two: A short feature on the making of ‘The Wolves of Fenric’ (yes, I know) also notable for Phillip Schofield’s bizarrely dark hair- but then Gordon the Gopher wasn’t around.

Modelling the Dead: A five-minute segment showing Sue Moore and Steve Mansfield (now there’s a pair) making haemovore masks and giving a few suggestions as to what you can do with a bit of latex and some leftover lentils.

Claws and Effect: Footage from the location recce and various head-dissolving visual effects tests

Title Sequences: Clean versions of the McCoy opening and closing titles. If you concentrate on a fixed point in the closing titles you can make yourself dizzy- try it one day.

Shattering the Chains: In which Ian Briggs gives an in-depth interview about the writing of Fenric and some of the themes and inspirations behind the tale.

Recutting the Runes: I can barely tell a 5.1 mix from a Bombay Mix, but this is Mark Ayres taking about how the Special Edition was put together.

Costume Design: Ken Trew on the practicalities of designing costumes for humans and Haemovores.

Special Edition: A feature length re-edit of the story including a lot of missing bits and pieces.

As you might gather from the above, the selection box of goodies which makes up ‘The Curse of Fenric’ on DVD is an embarrassment of riches and then some. You don’t so much watch it as live it for a couple of weeks until you’ve seen everything, because the number and quality of the extras wouldn’t disgrace a modern Hollywood special edition. Clearly with items like the Take Two extract and the Moore/Mansfield segment from the early 90’s BSB Who weekend, somebody did a lot of research to get some extra bits and pieces which already existed into place, but particularly for any viewers not familiar with Ian Briggs’s Target adaptation of the story, his interview is a particularly good insight into his influences and ideas. Following on from this, the Special Edition reinstates a lot of character lines and scenes which were trimmed to bring the story down to length, including things like Judson and Millington’s shared history, and it adds to the viewing experience to have Briggs explain that his intention in having Judson as wheelchair-bound was to use it as a metaphor for the social constraints preventing the character (and his real-life equivalent Alan Turing) from living a full life because of their homosexuality. And by and large, it works- as Mark Ayres (who, coincidentally, seems barely to have aged between the 1990 convention panel and the 2003 interview) explains, one of the main ways that the story was edited down to get the timings right was to cut material from the middle of a scene and intercut a conversation with the next scene, so that the story seems to be going faster than it actually is.

One of the other things which comes out of the convention panel (which is very crowded, by the way, and also features a cameo by Nicholas Briggs, New Who’s answer to Roy Skelton) is Tomek Bork’s contribution- from the perspective of 2009 it’s slightly weird to realise that in 1989 it was unusual to meet a Polish person other than the occasional ex-serviceman, and yet nowadays most people have Polish colleagues or know shops owned by Eastern Europeans. Certainly in my case Tomek Bork was either the first or the second Polish person I ever met (the other possibility being my schoolfriend Richard’s dad). This dovetails nicely with the way in which the Special Edition also brings out some of the differences between the individual Russian soldiers who were hard to identify in the transmitted episodes.

Although the visual effects footage duplicates part of the Take Two segment, it also includes some interesting footage in its own right, not least some of the underwater filming for the shots of the Russian dinghy passing overhead. The shots themselves are beautiful, but what you tend to forget (and what the DVD brings home) is that behind the camera was some poor soul in a wetsuit taking direction through an earpiece. John Nathan-Turner is probably present on this release more than on any other released up to this point in the range in one form or another, glimpsed on the location recce and overheard directing the underwater filming but also in his office as Take Two also filmed a production meeting. And to be honest, the release of this story more than vindicates his policy of keeping all the scraps of additional footage and other bits and pieces- it’s not often that you get two stories for the price of one, but equally to have one of the candidates for the Seventh Doctor’s strongest story so well provided for with supporting material does make this release quite a treat.