Commentary Highlights:

"Ooh! Knickers!" - Nicholas Courtney’s comment on the helicopter escape in Episode 4- somewhat worryingly, this is the animated episode...Although it’s also hard to look at Gregory in quite the same way after Frazer Hines’s comment about him looking like somebody wearing one of those joke shop Groucho Marx disguises.

-Flash Frames, a short look at the process involved in animating the two missing episodes

-Love Off-Air, being an opportunity to investigate the murky world of recording Doctor Who soundtracks from transmission

-Trailers (for the animation)

-Character Design, a closer look at the character drawing and test footage from the animation process

-Evolution of the Invasion, a thorough and extensive opportunity for a number of the cast and crew to recall the origins and making of the story

-VHS Links (Nicholas Courtney’s from 1993)

-Photo Gallery

If ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ was a Special Value Edition, then ‘The Invasion’ is a Special Edition- methinks somebody needs to sort out their branding. But to balance out the fairly slim pickings of this release’s immediate predecessor, ‘The Invasion’ couldn’t include much more. The highlight is of course the Cosgrove Hall animation of the missing episodes 1 and 4, about which I don’t doubt much has been said- a cursory comparison with Nicholas Courtney’s in-vision links from the VHS release (which seem to have been recorded in a Turkish bath) is double-edged, however, in that the nature of the plot is such that you don’t need to see every single moment of the story, and it’s also odd that both the information text and on occasion Mark Ayres pick up some of the mistakes in the animation- Zoe’s costume, for one, which is clearly shown in the BBC publicity photographs from the first episode as being her ‘Mind Robber’ sparkly catsuit. What it does give back, however, is a sense of the original pacing of the story, which is in itself odd because ‘The Invasion’ has never felt like an eight-episode story, although elements like the splitting of Zoe’s destruction of the Cybermen’s fleet and their bomb over two episodes perhaps suggest how it would have played over six episodes.

The main commentary is generally warm, entertaining and well-balanced; Frazer Hines tends to take the lead with Nicholas Courtney and Wendy Padbury chipping in (Hines and Courtney between them clearly never believe in letting a double-entendre pass by, and the commentary is all the more fun for that) and Chris D’Oyly John supplying a lot of the factual information which the actors haven’t retained. What emerges from the commentary and some of the other features is however a widely-felt respect for Douglas Camfield, which is interesting when Camfield’s name tends to be associated with military precision in his organisation and a certain edginess to the production. Perhaps it’s a case of the hard taskmaster getting the best work, although personally I find most of Camfield’s stories lack the warmth I look for in my favourite episodes. The big ‘Evolution of "The Invasion"’ documentary brings in practically everybody still alive in 2006 who worked on the story, so it’s particularly notable now for contributions from Kevin Stoney, who was very near the end of his life, clearly quite elderly and frail but nevertheless had things to say- similarly Edward Burnham is equally lucid and adds his own recollections. It’s put together well, doesn’t drag and puts across what the production team was trying to achieve with the story, as well as a sense of what it was like to make the episodes.

To concentrate on the extras surrounding the animation for a moment, ‘Flash Frames’ is 15-20 minutes of the various Cosgrove Hall people explaining how it was all done, with only the soundtrack, the remaining episodes and some publicity photographs for reference. The style and duration of the item are about right and it was clearly put together by people with a strong sense of when things are getting too technical. Similarly, it’s nice to have the animation design on one of the discs, although this was surely aimed in part to enable people on message boards to take screen captures of the animated characters to use in their avatars- not that this writer would ever be caught doing such a thing. The commentary on the first episode is a little bit of a drag, though- unfortunately, although Mark Ayres has done many brilliant things with Doctor Who soundtracks over the years, he doesn’t really have the kind of voice or presence which makes you want to listen to things- particularly the first line of the commentary where he talks about the various technical people clustered around his laptop in the BBC Media Centre in White City. And you just know it’d be the most high-end MacBook that money can buy. Turned on its head, however, it’s rather a nice touch not to allow Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury to see their animated selves until the commentary recording. There’s no doubt that the animation is an excellent piece of work and shows a rather more imaginative approach than the 1993 VHS links which appear to have been filmed in Nicholas Courtney’s local Turkish bath, however I’m not sure that the animated episodes can ever overcome the obstacle of not being the real thing- the fact that the 1993 version managed with no more than five or ten minutes of links suggests that the missing episodes may not have been all that crucial to the overall story.

I haven’t mentioned ‘Love Off-Air’, which delves into the dubious realm of recording Doctor Who episodes on audio tape, thus enabling people thirty or forty years in the future to produce audio CDs and reconstruct episodes for DVD. Given that the likes of Gary Russell are prepared to own up to it, I’ll admit that my own audio phase ran from ‘The King’s Demons’ to ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ and included an odd version of ‘The Caves of Androzani’ where I’d evidently put the C120 tape in the wrong way round to record the last episode and ended up recording it over Part 2, creating my own abridged version of the story. To be honest, given that using the off-air recordings from the 1960s now forms part of a profit-making enterprise for the BBC, it’s reassuring to see that the fans of the 1960s who dutifully recorded each episode are now being recognised rather than being made to feel one step removed from peope selling bootleg DVDs from a suitcase in the market, but what’s just as interesting is that Doctor Who evidently fired the imagination of enough technically-minded youngsters to the extent that we have a record of what every episode sounded like, even if we seem to be having a slight problem with the pictures. And when all’s said and done, a story like ‘The Invasion’, properly presented and with a varied selection of supporting material, gives something of an insight into just why somebody might be prepared to spend their pocket money on audio tapes and spend twenty-five minutes on a Saturday evening crouched in front of the television ans shooting particularly hard Paddingtonian stares at anybody who so much as hiccuped.