Commentary Highlights:

For my money, the moment early in Part Three when the story’s subtexts start to work on the commentary team and they slip into a discussion about politics and why things didn’t get better in spite of what the story was trying to say.

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

Sophie Dahl is Julian Holloway’s daughter? New one on me.

-Fan Commentary

-Cat Flap, a two-part documentary covering the making of the story

-Deleted and Extended Scenes - a bit of an understatement but I’ll go into that more later

-Out-takes and other bit of silliness involving the cast

-Continuities (including another set of interesting mid-1990s BBC1 listings

-Endgame, the second documentary on the release covering the end of the series’ original run and the plans in place for the cancelled Season 27

-Search Out Science, in which Ace has a Jodrell Bank

-Little Girl Lost, a character feature on Ace

-Destiny of the Doctors, being Anthony Ainley’s last appearances as the Master in the links from the late-1990s computer game

If ‘New Beginnings’ had a somewhat uneven distribution of the additional material over the three stories in the set, the potential problem with ‘Survival’ is that being three episodes in length and dwarfed by some of the extras on the two-disc release, it’s in danger of being swamped by its own critical apparatus, rather like some of those scholarly editions of Shakespeare which devote three-quarters of the page to discussion of the half-dozen lines in the top quarter. This isn’t a criticism, however, because in falling at the end of the original 26-year run of Doctor Who, there’s a bigger story for the documentaries to tell, not just about the production itself but about the period immediately afterwards when it became apparent that the series was in the final stages of being run down and at best mothballed indefinitely. ‘Endgame’ is therefore probably the best place to begin, an impressive documentary which brings together not just the regulars and some of the production staff, but also previously-unheard voices like Colin Brake and especially Peter Cregeen, who introduces himself as "the man who cancelled Doctor Who". Fair play to the man for taking part and giving his side of the story, but I do think that what emerges from his testimony is a sense that no one person- not Peter Cregeen, not Michael Grade, not Jonathan Powell- can really claim that title. The picture Cregeen paints is one of chronic institutional indifference to a series which had been run down and disowned to the point where nobody in the BBC even wanted to give Doctor Who the publicity of being openly cancelled, and while Cregeen does say that he rested the series in the expectation that it would be picked up for a fresh start a couple of years later, the baggage which surrounded it was such that it took external interest to get the next attempt off the ground in 1996. But it’s also interesting to see the plans that were in place for Season 27 and beyond, particularly as regards replacing Ace with an aristocratic cat burglar- I suspect many fans are so used to the idea of ‘Survival’ leading into the New Adventures (which, incidentally, aren’t mentioned at all) that this lost season comes as something of a revelation.

Partnering this nicely is ‘Cat Flap’, a two-part feature (which presumably means that the distribution of the extras was originally envisaged differently) on the making of ‘Survival’ itself. While author Rona Munro is herself absent from the proceedings, several of the supporting cast take part and add their points of view and the whole runs to about an hour in consequence. It’s something of a coup to have secured Adele Silva’s contribution given that she’s probably more used to giving interviews to lads’ magazines and talking about her Emmerdale work these days, while there’s also a brave attempt at interviewing Lisa Bowerman on location which doesn’t quite work- while Bowerman can never be anything other than engaging and attractive, it was evidently done on a windy day so her hair’s constantly flying out of place and the sun goes in and out. It’s also interesting to see some of the location footage without the added video effects, and there’s more of that in the Extended and Deleted Scenes, although this is a slight misnomer as a fair bit of the deleted material takes the form of shots and scenes which were re-edited for transmission. There are plenty of out-takes, although there’s also a palpable sense of certain actors wasting time larking about- I can’t imagine every director having the patience to put up with the way Sylvester McCoy messes around with Hale and Pace, for example, although having said that McCoy’s (presumably) mock hissy fit on location is entertaining. The Continuities are also interesting to see, not least because it places ‘Survival’ firmly as a contemporary of Bergerac and Around the World in Eighty Days and also for the entertainment value of hearing a BBC Scotland continuity announcer reading exactly the same lame joke about the plot of Bergerac as her English counterpart, and with roughly the same level of disdain.

I have to say that I approached the fan commentary with a certain amount of trepidation, but putting my duty to my readers ahead of my own over-developed sense of embarrassment I found that it wasn’t anywhere near as embarrassing as it could have been. The fan commentators are a balanced trio- one English and middle-class, one Australian and one female- with Clayton Hickman as moderator, and the discussion is quite light-hearted as not only are these people enjoying their Doctor Who, they’re enjoying enjoying it and also enjoying talking about it. The remaining extras- ‘Search Out Science’ and Anthony Ainley’s links from ‘Destiny of the Doctors’- fall into what I tend to think of as the "nice to have" category, in that most people are unlikely ever to want to watch them twice, but what they have in common is that the schools’ science programme is the Seventh Doctor and Ace’s last real outing on BBC television, while Ainley’s material turned out to be his last job in the beard and the black costume. It’s surprising for several reasons that the ‘Search Out Science’ programme was made at all, or that it was made in the way that it was- in 1990 Doctor Who must surely have been yesterday’s news for most of the viewers, and K9 ancient history. That said, for the best part it’s a grounding in basic astronomy (i.e. pitched at a level I more or less understand) and it’s always good to have a bit of John Leeson as K9, although it’s rather out of character for the tin dog to be foxed by a question about the life cycle of a star. Anthony Ainley’s links are also interesting to see- in essence, what we get is a compilation of the linking moments from between the games within the game, and although they don’t add up to a great deal, still it’s a tribute to the actor who more than any other lived to play the Master.

So all in all, there’s a lot to digest in this particular release, and ‘Survival’ itself is only one of the attractions. By also covering the story of the series’ last days, some of the behind-the-scenes pressures and the abandoned plans for the future, it also fittingly includes a great deal about how it felt to be suddenly faced with the end of a 26-year run and why things worked out the way they did. It’s more open to revisiting than most of the DVD releases so far, even if there’s unavoidably a sense of the missed opportunities too.