Commentary Highlights:

Well, all of it, really. It’s like a Doctor Who equivalent of something like Friends or Seinfeld - a group of people (Peter Moffatt, Peter Moffett, Janet Fielding, Matthew Waterhouse and Sarah Sutton) with twenty years of history behind them, sparking off each other and occasionally referring to what’s on the screen in front of them. As they say at one point, when the DVD comes out they’re going to have to watch it properly so they can work out what ‘s actually going on.

Extras:

Directing Who: a 25-minute extended interview with director Peter Moffatt, touching an all the stories he directed in the 1980s.

Writing a Final Visitation: Eric Saward discusses the commissioning and writing of his script

Scoring the Visitation: Paddy Kingsland in discussion with Mark Ayres

Film Trims: About five minutes of additional shots and cut dialogue from the location sequences

Music-Only Option: An isolated music track for Paddy Kingsland’s score, if you still want to listen to it after Peter Moffatt’s comments that he didn’t actually care much for it.

Photo Gallery: Quite a generous selection of shots from location and studio.

In contrast to ‘The Curse of Fenric’, ‘The Visitation’ (which has always been something of a special story for me in any case) has a rather neat little collection of extras which take a rather different approach to the material. The commentary is enjoyable from beginning to end, with several of the participants in very good form, not least Janet Fielding and Peter Davison, but the extras package concentrates on three interviews with behind-the-scenes personalities and their input into the serial. Peter Moffatt’s interview is particularly enlightening and while his directorial style tends to be criticised these days, it’s evident from the way that he talks about casting that he had the contacts to persuade a number of quite distinguished old-school actors to appear in Doctor Who- and it goes without saying that it was a particular blessing that he was able to give interviews and commentaries for the DVD range in the last few years of his life. Eric Saward concentrates on the experience of being "discovered" by Christopher Hamilton Bidmead and commissioned to write the story, while Paddy Kingsland’s interview is rather more technical- once he’s actually been able to get a word in edgeways with Mark Ayres, he tends to go on about underscoring and cues in a way which just reminds you that these are two incidental music composers talking to each other with a nearby camera left on.

The film trims are an interesting curiosity, with one or two of Mace’s lines in particular which were cut from the finished story, while the photo gallery is particularly generous- I’d guess that as one of the first (if not the first) of Peter Davison’s stories to go on location, a lot of photos of the regulars in a woodland setting were made for publicity purposes. So rather than the sprawling ‘Fenric’ package, what we have with ‘The Visitation’ is a very pleasant afternoon’s viewing which doesn’t lose its focus or become a chore. At the remove of over twenty years, it’s pretty much everything you could expect to have said about the story, and as an avowed fan of what was after all my first full season of Doctor Who, it does feel as if the story has been very well served.