Commentary Highlights:

This is a difficult one- given the shortness of the story and the complexity of the scripts, much of it consists of people asking Marc Platt what it was actually about.

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

John "Light" Hallam played a Burpa in Carry On up the Khyber. It’s just as well Jamie wasn’t in the story, then...

Extras:

-Light in Dark Places, in which several of the actors, Mark Ayres and Andrew Cartmel discuss the making of the story

-Deleted and Extended Scenes, being a fair amount of additional material, from the odd trimmed line to whole lost scenes

-Shooting Ghosts, nothing less than a compilation of material from the last studio session from the original run of Doctor Who.

-Writer’s Question Time, in which Marc Platt answers a series of questions posed at a convention in 1990

-Photo Gallery, in which most of the main characters are preserved for posterity, although it’s interesting to see just how completely different the sets look in photographs.

If the release of ‘The Leisure Hive’ was intended at least in part as a tribute to John Nathan-Turner, it’s fitting that it should be followed up by the last Doctor Who story produced by the BBC for some sixteen years, neatly book-ending the JNT era and demonstrating that however questionable some of the producer’s decisions may have been, his tenure ended with the series aiming for quality and unafraid to address complex ideas. As will no doubt prove to be the case with most of not all of the Seventh Doctor’s stories, it benefits from the availability of a generous amount of surplus material and judicious use is made of the additional scenes to add to the viewer’s understanding of the story. However, if there’s one weakness, it’s that the story itself being shorter than most and so intricately plotted, there’s rarely time for the commentary to consist of much more than somebody asking Marc Platt (or occasionally Andrew Cartmel) what one particular bit was getting at, before it’s time to move on-and Sylvester McCoy’s absence from the commentary begins to look like a deliberate decision to keep the number of participants manageable. There’s not much of a sense of what it was like to be on the studio floor or in the gallery making the story itself, which is a disappointment when the ‘Shooting Ghosts’ segment shows the Doctor Who studio in 1989 as a chaotic place with the director and actors seemingly working out their movements on the hoof five minutes before shooting the actual scene.

It goes without saying, however, that the footage from the last block of studio recording is of particular interest to fans because of what it represents- the last time until 2004 that a crew would assemble on BBC premises to record Doctor Who. That said, what we see of the studio is presented unsentimentally- the cast and production team weren’t to know that they wouldn’t be coming back, and so there’s no sense of occasion to the recording itself. It’s also interesting to see Marc Platt discussing the story within a year or so of its broadcast, particularly as I was at a convention in the October of 1989 which actually took place in between the broadcast episodes- it’s a shame they couldn’t have put that particular panel on the disc as well, as all the participants contribute to ‘Light in Dark Places’- and have a particularly strong recollection of his assertion that "all the clues are there and it’ll all be explained in the last episode"- yes, well...What the disc is missing (apart from better lighting of some of the contributors to ‘Light in Dark Places’- Katharine Schlesinger in particular seems to have a spotlight smack in the face which makes her look really quite pasty) is a bit of commentary from, say, McCoy, Aldred and Cartmel, over the studio footage to give an impression of how it felt to be recording particular scenes, or whether the atmosphere on the floor was quite as manic as it seems.

In a sense it’s ironic that one of the things that the DVD release of ‘Ghost Light’ does is to take a story about the inevitability of change and evolution and crystallise it for posterity- the thoughts of the cast and crew in 2004 have been committed to the shiny silver disc, and as far as we can tell, they won’t ever fade or change. But it’s also as good a record of how Doctor Who was made at the end of its original BBC run as we’re likely to get, and while the complexity of the story tends to dominate any attempts at discussion, the other aspect which enters the discussion is just how fortunate ‘Ghost Light’ was with its casting. Between the two of them, the emphasis on scripting and casting show just how much for all its faults, Doctor Who in 1989 was still aiming for quality, and to that extent it’s a worthy follow-up to ‘The Leisure Hive’ as a second tribute to John Nathan-Turner and his producership.