Commentary Highlights:

For my money the highlight is the very opening, when an unbilled Barry Letts begins the proceedings and adds some extra value.

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

Michael Kilgarriff appeared in Tipping the Velvet- presumably as one of the really butch ones.

-Are Friends Electric?, combining the stories of the making of ‘Robot’ and the casting of Tom Baker

-The Tunnel Effect, in which Bernard Lodge takes us through the art of making Doctor Who titles

-Blue Peter, being a couple of minutes of an instalment recorded on the sets of the early episodes

-Radio Times Listings

Now if there’s one thing the people behind Doctor Who DVDs don’t like, it’s people leaking the release schedule, so when Tom Baker casually mentions on the commentary of ‘Logopolis’ having recorded a commentary for ‘Robot’ only the other day, somebody evidently decided that it was better to bring it out sooner rather than later and save themselves the bother of having to field queries about when the story was coming out. We Doctor Who fans aren’t generally known for giving a good account of ourselves to people who might work for the BBC but have other jobs to do, and no doubt somebody dreaded receiving a daily postcard written in green crayon asking when ‘Robot’ would be unleashed on the shelves of Britain. Nevertheless, it’s an important story in the series’ ongoing narrative, albeit one which tends to inspire affection rather than admiration. We fans also tend to lump stories together into "eras", and ‘Robot’ doesn’t fit neatly into one- it occupies a narrow crevice in between the Pertwee era and the Hinchcliffe era, and this is reflected in the commentary. The one-off combination of Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks is an interesting one; as always, Letts is informative without ever being over-technical and it never feels as if he’s repeating things he’s been saying in interviews for the last thirty-five years, while Tom Baker and Terrance Dicks are entertaining as ever.

The main documentary on the disc is ‘Are Friends Electric?’, which covers the casting of Tom Baker and the making of ‘Robot’ itself and does very well to gather together a good selection of interviewees from both sides of the camera. In addition to the commentary team, Patricia Maynard, Alec Linstead, Michael Kilgarriff and Edward Burnham are complemented by Philip Hinchcliffe, Christopher Barry and George Gallacio from the technical side of the production. This means a wealth of anecdotes and recollections and an engrossing documentary is the end result, whether it’s Barry Letts discussing (with due professional discretion) why Tom Baker became the Fourth Doctor and some other people didn’t, or Michael Kilgarriff on the discomfort of wearing the Robot costume. ‘The Tunnel Effect’ is the other factual item, consisting of just shy of fifteen minutes in the company of Bernard Lodge as he first discusses creating the Doctor Who title sequences from 1963 to 1974 and then demonstrates some of the techniques and equipment involved. I don’t think I’d ever really thought of the Who title sequence being filmed before seeing this, but seeing the various components on the rostrum shows Lodge’s creation in a whole new light. The Blue Peter item is there for curiosity value as much as anything else, and while showing the whole episode broadcast from the set of ‘Robot’ would no doubt be very expensive indeed (particularly if the Dagenham Girl Pipers showed up), the segment cuts off after Peter Purves’s mention of those wacky Americans and their dog horoscope LPs with no mention of what the other items were that week, which is a mild disappointment.

What’s striking about the Radio Times listings is just how minimal they are for a story introducing the new Doctor- we can be reasonably confident that when Matt Smith makes his first full appearance, there’ll most likely be a cover and several pages of features inside, but all Tom received was a rather odd series of doctored (ha!) photos showing Jon Pertwee transforming into the new incumbent. By contrast, the new Doctor dominates the Photo Gallery- it has to be said that the BBC photographer probably came on the wrong day, as the majority of official photos are of Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney (with an undressed upper lip) on the lab set. There are a standard set of photos of the new Doctor in Bessie taken on location, but otherwise the most interesting ones are undoubtedly the ones of Michael Kilgarriff rehearsing in various part-costumes. Overall, it’s a good package for a story which is important without being a classic by most standards, and the wealth of interviews alone is impressive- I came away knowing one or two things about ‘Robot’ that I’m not sure I did before, and that’s always a good sign.