Commentary Highlights:

Either Julian Glover’s awful joke ("did you get the chickens in specially or did they come from stock?") or the point where Michael Hayes, Tom Chadbon and Julian Glover go off on a complete tangent reminiscing about Charles Gray.

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

The costume designer originally had a lurex catsuit in mind for Romana- fortunately Lalla Ward had a better idea.

-Paris in the Springtime, one of the more comprehensive making-of documentaries in the range

-Paris, W12- twenty minutes or so of monochrome studio footage recovered from timecoded Shibaden tapes

-Doctor Who Annual 1980, a melange of disturbing artwork and hack prose

-Prehistoric Landscapes, being a few minutes of model footage, not all of which was used in the finished episodes

-Chicken Wrangler, in which Ian Scoones attempts to get several chickens of various sizes to stay the hell still and stop looking at the studio floor

-Eye on...Blatchford, the much-maligned comedy extra from the ‘Oh Mummy!’ team

-Photo Gallery, with some interesting shots from both location and studio

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson...just some of the actors whose real-life romances spilled over into their acting careers and helped to infuse their performances with a certain spark, an elan...and as with the cinematic greats, so with the small screen. One of the potential difficulties with the DVD release of ‘City of Death’ was always going to be finding sufficient participants- Graham Williams and Douglas Adams being sadly deceased, and while Lalla Ward has recorded several commentaries, it’s interesting that the only commentary that Tom Baker has recorded so far for any of her stories was for ‘The Armageddon Factor’, so perhaps the idea of getting either of them, let alone both, for a story which relies for much of its charm on their own particular brand of witty flirtation, was never going to be realistic. That said, it does mean that the commentary can take a different line; the interesting thing about bringing Michael Hayes, Tom Chadbon and Julian Glover together is that they’re of a more or less similar age and background and so have a milieu in common. It’s always interesting to hear some of the more unusual voices recounting the experience of making Doctor Who in particular eras, and so the commentary is perhaps a bit more anecdotal and detailed than most, precisely because it isn’t led by people who’ve spent twenty years recounting anecdotes at conventions and so on. Similarly, the quality and quantity of detail in the information text is impressive- if you want to know how impressive, get the disc out and look up the amount of research and work which went into one of the paintings in the background of Leonardo’s studio.

‘Paris in the Springtime’ is a suitably wide-ranging feature, taking in two separate archive interviews with Douglas Adams but also Michael Hayes, David Fisher, Pennant Roberts, Julian Glover, Catherine Schell and Tom Chadbon as well as new series perspectives from Steven Moffat and Robert Shearman. As well as a fittingly sparkling script by Jonathan Morris delivered with aplomb by Toby Longworth and with illustrations, documentation and so on, it takes a broad perspective, starting with the complicated genesis of the story and taking in the actual production and Douglas Adams’s involvement with Doctor Who as a whole. ‘Paris, W12’ is equally interesting, consisting of twenty minutes of somewhat iffy but otherwise irreplaceable monochrome footage of the studio sessions, with optional subtitles; it’s clear that Michael Hayes’s studio was generally a happy and good-humoured one, and if Tom Baker is occasionally temperamental, it comes across as the outbursts of somebody who is working hard for the series, expects everybody else to work just as hard and gets frustrated when presented with dud props which don’t do what they’re supposed to. Two other interesting survivals are the footage from ‘Prehistoric Landscapes’ and ‘Chicken Wrangler’, while the photo gallery also has a couple of oddities- not least what appears to be a shot of Tom Baker immediately after setting off the burglar alarm at the Galerie Denise Rene.

‘Eye on...Blatchford’ is much maligned, I think possibly for not being quite as clever or as funny as ‘Oh Mummy!’ by the same team on ‘Pyramids of Mars’; there are certainly plenty of jokes, but then again so is the script of ‘City of Death’, and if you’re setting yourself up as a comic extension of a Douglas Adams script then you’re just making things hard for yourself. It’s almost certainly easier to pull off the trick when you’re in contrast with a Gothic Robert Holmes script, and ‘Oh Mummy!’ had a basic respect for the source material combined with the conceit of making Sutekh a genuine actor and the involvement of Gabriel Woolf. If the Jagaroth here had been voiced by Julian Glover and the script had been half as funny again, it might have had a chance, but for all the attention to detail in the visual jokes it never really takes flight. It leaves the extras package a little bit unbalanced to my mind- the documentary really can’t be faulted, and while there are some interesting extras presented well, it only just manages to escape from the shadow of the non-involvement of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. Not necessarily a bad thing when it allows somebody with Julian Glover’s experience and personality to spread their wings in the commentary and interviews, but it does mean that we’ll almost certainly never hear the final word on ‘City of Death’.