Commentary Highlights: This is a really hardball commentary, with Christopher Hamilton Bidmead pretty much tearing some of Lovett Bickford’s direction to shreds while the man has to sit there and take it, although there’s also a point where Lalla Ward makes a joke about tacky onyx which nobody gets.

-A New Beginning, looking at the changes wrought on Doctor Who by John Nathan-Turner’s incoming regime, including contributions by Tom Baker, Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, Lovett Bickford and others.

-From Avalon to Argolis, in which David Fisher and Bidmead (separately) discuss the writing of the story and then in an archive interview JNT pops up and claims to have come up with the whole idea himself.

-Synthesising Starfields, in which Sid Sutton and Peter Howell (aided by some well-researched schools programme footage) recall devising a title sequence which served three Doctors.

-Leisure Wear, in which June Hudson discusses her costume designs with the aid of her original illustrations

-Blue Peter, an item which sees Tina Heath dispatched to Longleat for a rendezvous with John Nathan-Turner in the exhibition. JNT promises among other things for the forthcoming season, "some strange flying creatures which attack humans". That’ll be bats, then, John?

-Photo Gallery, slightly disappointing but then I suppose most of the publicity photos for Season 18 would have been done for the stories which went on location.

-Music-Only Option for anybody who hasn’t spent the best part of twenty years listening to Doctor Who-The Music on and off.

If it seems a little strange to go back to Tom Baker’s tenure so soon after ‘Pyramids of Mars’, the rationale at the time was that John Nathan-Turner had recently died, and so the next two releases in the DVD range bookend his producership. Not only that, but the radical nature of the changes which JNT brought in every area of the production mean that there’s a lot to be said about the story itself and what it was like to be involved in the making of Doctor Who at that particular point in time. This includes quite a few instances of people being at best tactless (Christopher Hamilton Bidmead criticising Lovett Bickford’s shots to his face and on the record, for example, or equally Lalla Ward defending K9) and at worst really quite harsh. It’s clear from the ‘Avalon to Argolis’ item, for example, that there still isn’t much love lost between Messrs Fisher and Bidmead- and this is before JNT comes in from left field and claims to have come up with most of the basic ideas. Then again, we also hear from people like Peter Howell, Sid Sutton and June Hudson who had a significant input into the look and feel of the new regime- and I’m still waiting for a coffee-table book of June Hudson’s costume designs.

In hindsight, one thing which the DVD range has often done very well is to foster an even-handed approach to the appreciation of some of the more controversial stories and periods in Doctor Who’s history, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the release of ‘The Leisure Hive’ sets the pattern. Individuals with differing points of view are allowed to say their piece, whether in discussion or in a solo interview to camera, and whatever they have to say is taken at face value without any comment from the producers of the DVD. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the individuals concerned come out smelling of roses, but it’s a fair approach and means that both sides of any controversy are given a hearing. Apart from anything else, it means that the overall tone of the extra material is slightly more analytical than on previous releases, but then again the behind-the-scenes story of Doctor Who in the 1980s is often at least as interesting as what was put in front of the camera. In fact, although the release was designed at least in part as a tribute to John Nathan-Turner, the selection of extras and clips does seem to favour the JNT era a little over-generously, seeing as we do at various stages Malcolm Terris’s costume malfunction from ‘The Horns of Nimon’ and (at Longleat) the Nucleus of the Swarm being supplanted by a Mandrel. But in the light of the more ambitious and increasingly analytical features which the good people behind the DVD releases would put together on subsequent issues, ‘The Leisure Hive’ feels like the beginning of a more ambitious and wide-ranging approach.