I know several people who will get hot under the collar at some of Nicola Bryant’s comments about being in for a good night- as Peri is led off in a neck restraint.

I don’t think I was aware of just how much the popular press were billing ‘Timelash’ as a possible last chance to see Doctor Who before the "cancellation" took effect.

-The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, being a look at the making of ‘Timelash’

-Radio Times Listings

-Coming Soon, the first in a series trailing future releases.

At some point in the spring of 2007, ‘Timelash’ was announced as a forthcoming Doctor Who release, to be greeted by fandom with an almost universal chorus of "Whuh?". Once said fans had calmed down and rediscovered the ability to swallow, the second reaction was more along the lines of "But what about ‘The Seeds of Doom’? ". Well, that’s a question which at the time of writing has yet to be answered, but ‘Timelash’ is out and proud- perhaps a victim of Colin Baker’s enthusiasm for collaborating with the DVD range, but there you have it.

Perhaps wisely, being faced with a story widely considered to be a turkey of Bernard Matthews proportions, the good folk behind the DVDs put the extras together in such a way so as to help give an impression of why one story succeeds while another fails so badly. The impression which emerges from the commentary and also from ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ is one of a director who wasn’t over-impressed with the script, a producer far too preoccupied with a vanity project and a script editor whose priority was getting the season finale written- not to mention two regulars who were by all accounts shunted from pillar to post, under-rehearsed and not given the time to do their best work. From Colin Baker’s remarks in the commentary, it’s clear that the story never did hang together properly for the actors, who after all need a sense of their character’s motivation to be able to give a good account of themselves, and it’s no surprise that Paul Darrow took it upon himself to start playing Tekker as Richard III when he seems not to have been getting much help from the script or the director. If anybody comes out at all well from the affair, it must be Robert Ashby, who struggled beneath the Borad make-up to create a predominantly vocal characterisation and, in all fairness, did well with what he was given.

There is however a sense with the DVD release that the people behind the range knew their market very well and realised that for all their efforts, there’s very little you could put on a DVD of ‘Timelash’ to persuade somebody to buy it ahead of something else. This is of course deeply unfair- there’s a certain fascination in watching a story which continually wrong-foots the viewer as just when you think that it’s reached the ultimate in awfulness, it manages to find something even more dire to throw at you. Train wreck Doctor Who it may be, but apart from an intelligent analysis of why the story doesn’t work, there’s very much a sense that there isn’t anything else to say about the tale. The photo gallery bears out much of what Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant have to say about being pulled out of rehearsals, as many of the shots are of the supporting cast on a particularly dull collection of sets, and apart from that, there’s not very much to add, apart from the debut of the "Coming Soon" previews- an interesting idea which might perhaps have been better left until a couple of stronger stories came along- then again, most people who were prepared to part with money for ‘Timelash’ probably would fork out for ‘Time-Flight’ and ‘Arc of Infinity’. The saddest thing about ‘Timelash’ is surely that when the idea for a Doctor Who story which "explained" the inspiration behind H.G. Wells’s novels landed on Eric Saward’s desk, it must have looked like a classic in the making, but what we’re left with on DVD is a story which nobody remembers with particular fondness, and is redeemed only as an object lesson in how a story can go wrong if the people who are supposed to be paying attention aren’t.