Probably the several occasions where the participants apologise to the viewer for having such a good time reminiscing that they’re not actually following the story.

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

The character of Sir Keith Gold went through a couple of name changes and Gold wasn’t arrived at until after Christopher Benjamin had been cast, presumably as a nod to the heritage of the actor playing the role.

-Can You Hear The Earth Scream?, in which numerous personalities recount the making of the story

-The UNIT Family (Part One), being an overview which takes the UNIT story from ‘The Web of Fear’ to ‘Inferno’

-Deleted Scene, in other words the one with Jon Pertwee as the radio announcer.

-Visual Effects Promo Film, including model footage of the Inferno project blowing up as well as bits of ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ and Doomwatch.

-The Pertwee Years, namely the opening section of said video special in which the man himself talks us through the beginning of his era and introduces the last episode of ‘Inferno’.

-Radio Times Billings, including a feature on the production office of the time and a colour photograph of Jon Pertwee as included in the magazine during the story’s run.

-Doctor Who Annual 1971, interesting and very pink

-Photo Gallery

Ever since I acquired my first video copy some twenty years ago, it’s been an ambition of mine to be able to watch ‘Inferno’ all the way through in one sitting and this morning I finally achieved it. It’s also (as far as I’m aware) one of the only DVDs that I’ve ever received before the official release date, although once you take the pleasure of spending a Saturday evening watching all the extras out of the equation, there’s very little to show for that kind of achievement. But it’s particularly poignant that this should be the first disc that I’d come to review after the passing of Barry Letts, particularly when it’s one which would have been much less impressive without his involvement.

The commentary arrangements are unusual, but sensible for a seven-part story in that Barry Letts, Terrance Dicks and Nicholas Courtney carry most of the weight for episodes 1,2, 4, 6 and 7 with occasional recorded interjections from John Levene, who also has episodes 3 and 5 to himself. It’s transparently clear from the commentary that the main trio have been fast friends for 35 years plus and are thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to reminisce together and be paid for the privilege- to the extent that the anecdotes sometimes wander off at a tangent and the team lose track of where the story’s got to. Nicholas Courtney is genial as ever, Barry Letts reflective and informative, while Terrance Dicks is never one to let the obvious joke pass him by and provides much of the humour. John Levene’s gone all Transatlantic on us, though- his voice has softened, and he continually refers to the monsters as Primoids- which makes them sound as if they’re invading the Bronx- while coming out with an anecdote about Alan Chuntz going to the emergency room (not in England in 1970, he didn’t!). Much of this spirit carries across into the documentaries- the "making of" feature also includes contributions from Caroline John, Ian Fairbairn and Derek Ware, while the UNIT Family item is particularly well-researched in terms of clips and so on, going back to the then-fairly-new censor clips from ‘The Web of Fear’. To talk about the UNIT Family in 2009 may sound a bit hackneyed, but when you look back at the production teams which followed Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, there’s nearly always somebody prepared to make capital or a joke out of the inadequacies of the series. To this day, I think it’s rare to hear anybody from the Pertwee era do that- as far as the cast and crew were concerned, they were making the most exciting show on television and most of them are still more than happy to talk about it today.

The deleted scene is of course the one where Jon Pertwee voices a radio announcer in the alternate fascist world, although what the information text makes clear is that it was also intended as an impersonation of Lord Haw-Haw. It’s a funny thing about Lord Haw-Haw- you weren’t supposed to listen to him and it was considered unpatriotic bordering on the criminal to do so, but everybody who lived through the Second World War seems to know what he sounded like. The Visual Effects promo film was presumably intended to be viewed by producers and directors to show what in-house visual effects could achieve without the need to go elsewhere, particularly important with the advent of colour in 1970 as some of the early colour productions show just how many directors had to re-learn how to make a television programme. We see some of the effects boffins at work, albeit mostly on Doomwatch, but having said that, the episode in question no longer exists in the archives. While the introduction from ‘The Pertwee Years’ bulks the release out, it’s mostly filler with a couple of excerpts from ‘Spearhead from Space’; the selection process for the episodes included on the video special meant that only final episodes and those existing in 625-line or black and white film formats were considered, so whereas I suspect Jon Pertwee might have preferred to have been introducing one of the alternate-universe episodes with the cast playing dual roles, he’s left introducing the last appearance of the original TARDIS console. The Radio Times material is particularly interesting because the billings are supplemented by a feature on the making of the series, and there’s a real sense of the rebooting brought by colour, a new Doctor and a new production team with a lot of emphasis put on Silurians, dinosaurs and Ambassadors, while the 1971 annual has a rather attractive innocent streak- having been put together in the year after the moon landing, perhaps it’s riding on the contemporary interest in and enthusiasm about space. It’s tied nicely to the Photo Gallery by the way in which the artists made use of many of the familiar stock photos of the Doctor and Liz, although the Photo Gallery also has the added advantage of using Delia Derbyshire’s seductive ‘Blue Veils and Golden Sands’ without any interruptions.

An impressive collection, then, for a story of 1970 vintage, with a good range of contributors from both sides of the camera. The challenge with a colour seven-part story is the question of disc space- if you’re to have any extras at all, they need to justify going to a two-disc release, but there’s certainly more than an hour of interest and entertainment on the second disc so it’s more than worthwhile. Given the scale of Barry Letts’s involvement in this particular serial, it’s difficult to imagine how the release could have been even half as good without him, and future releases will no doubt be all the more sparse in his absence. But the release of ‘Inferno’ is as good a place as any to see him and hear him in conversation with his longstanding foils Terrance Dicks and Nicholas Courtney- informative without being opinionated, polite and good-humoured to a fault.