Commentary Highlights:

Tom Baker (perhaps unsurprisingly!) after Elisabeth Sladen and David Maloney have commented on the Dalek operators being good movers: "They used to be at the Royal Ballet...on the clerical side".

-Genesis of a Classic, nothing less that an 62-minute documentary on the making of the story

-The Dalek Tapes, running to a mere 55 minutes and telling the story of the Daleks’ evolution between 1963 and 1988.

-Continuity Compilation, a collection of announcements and trailers from the story’s various repeats over the years

-Blue Peter, being an item roughly contemporary with the first screening of ‘Genesis’ and showcasing a collection of models made by a fan

-Radio Times Billings , with a rather fine piece of Frank Bellamy artwork that I’m not sure I knew about

-Doctor Who Annual 1976, being the usual annual feast of text stories, filler and artwork by the criminally insane

-Photo Gallery, nearly eight minutes’ worth of shots from location and studio

The main issue facing the producers of the DVD release of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ was always going to be the audience’s familiarity with the basic material. Numerous repeats- not least the dubious honour of being the last original series story to be repeated in its entirety on terrestrial television- meant that if the DVD release was going to be worthwhile and do justice to the original episodes, it was going to have to find something new to say. This, I’m pleased to say, it does- as somebody more aware than most of an over familiarity with the story and not particularly looking forward to getting up on a Sunday morning to endure two and a half hours of it, the commentary in particular is worthwhile, entertaining and adds to the viewing experience. Tom Baker is on particularly good form and evidently comfortable with his co-commentators Elisabeth Sladen, David Maloney and Peter Miles, and it’s the banter between all four which acts as a counterpoint to the bleakness of the story, particularly Baker’s wicked ability to interject a tongue-in-cheek anecdote into any discussion. There are one or two particularly sad observations about Ian Marter, though, and particularly about how his diabetes- which seems to have been of a particularly rapacious kind- affected his ability to work as an actor.

To move on to the documentaries, ‘Genesis of a Classic’ is pretty much everything you could want to hear or know about ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ , interspersed with Roy Skelton slipping effortlessly into Dalek mode; it’s not difficult to imagine the crew begging him to do Zippy and George after recording had finished. This particular documentary goes back a little further than most accounts, winding things back to the story’s conception in the Letts/Dicks era, and takes in accounts not just from the regulars and the obvious members of the production team but other areas such as lighting and an archive interview with Michael Wisher, who comes across as quite affable; stick with it until after the end of the closing credits, however, and you’ll hear a wonderful retort by Elisabeth Sladen to a slightly inept question being asked from off camera. ‘The Dalek Tapes’ is perhaps a little conscious of following very closely on the heels of a feature on the creation of the Daleks on the immediately preceding release, but combines footage from different stories well in an attempt to tell the story of how the Daleks evolved within Doctor Who and over the course of the series’ original run.

The Continuity Compilation is probably one best left to the fans of BBC idents down the years, although it’s strange to feel quite so nostalgic about the mid-1990s BBC2 logos which usually meant Deep Space Nine or The X-Files, with possibly a hint of Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased or The Late Show thrown in, and it’s also nice to see the Doctor Who Night Dalek logos as well. The Blue Peter item is far more interesting, though, based as it is on the models produced by a viewer from somewhere near Oldham who decided to start making models of Doctor Who monsters from modelling clay and wire. Starting with the Zarbi, the keen modelmaker moved on to a pretty good recreation of the Queen Spider’s control room from ‘Planet of the Spiders’ and a Dalek control room. All the more impressive when one realises that the amount of reference material available in 1975 must have been a fraction of what we have now and the modeller must have scoured every Radio Times anniversary special and Weetabix card within ten miles of Oldham for his reference material. The highlight of the PDF items is probably the Frank Bellamy artwork accompanying the Radio Times listing for Part Six, while the photo gallery contains mostly location and rehearsal photos- shots of the characters in full costume are unusual, but perhaps the more interesting pictures are those which show cameras and microphone booms intruding. As Elisabeth Sladen points out, the sets for ‘Genesis’ have ceilings, with implications for lighting and sound apparatus, and these shots give a bit more of an idea as to how David Maloney dealt with these constraints.

As a package, then, the DVD release of ‘Genesis’ clears the hurdle of having new things to say about a familiar story with some style, and there’s enough here to divert the fan who’s known the story for a decade or two. The commentary doesn’t really flag very much and the features all have things to say and put them across in interesting ways, while the small-scale extras are also nice to have. One question that I’ve become used to asking when writing these reviews has been whether a release leaves me feeling that there was more to be said about a particular story, and in the case of ‘Genesis’ all the major points of view have been covered more or less- archive interviews and clips cover Terry Nation and Michael Wisher- and it does feel like complete coverage of the story, although it’s a little disappointing that at no point does anybody ask why fans might have decided that it was the "No.1 Story Ever".