Commentary Highlights:

It’s a dead heat between Barry Letts criticising Alan Bromly’s approach while at the same time justifying it on the basis of his background, and Terrance Dicks relishing Irongron and Bloodaxe’s dialogue.

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

Peckforton Castle was originally built in Victorian times by Cheshire MP John Tollemache- this won’t mean anything to anybody else reading this, but I used to walk up a Tollemache Road to school every day.

Extras:

-Beginning the End, covering the making of the story and its position at the last turn into the homeward stretch of the Pertwee/Letts/Dicks era

-CGI Effects, replacing some of the more pedestrian effects with nice modern ones

-Continuity Compilation

-The Doctor Who Annual 1974

-Radio Times Billings

-Photo Gallery

Given that it introduces both Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans, gives a name to Gallifrey and sends the Third Doctor on a rare foray into Earth’s history, the profile of ‘The Time Warrior’ has tended to be quite subdued over the years. Although it was one of the earlier Pertwee stories to be released on VHS, it was in the days of the compilation format and somehow never seemed to justify the episodic re-release which the other early releases received. So there was a certain hunger for a four-part ‘Time Warrior’ on DVD, certainly, some twenty years after its first flawed appearance on the nation’s shelves, and with the availability of several key players to shape an interesting set of extras, an interesting release begins to take form.

The commentary is straightforward enough- Elisabeth Sladen, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks are all familiar with the format by now, and there aren’t any appearances by extra personnel chosen for their novelty value. As the debutante, Sladen’s input is particularly important here, but equally Letts’s technical insight and Dicks’s enthusiasm for Robert Holmes’s dialogue as amended by his 1974 self, so there’s humour but also an informative side as we learn about Alan Bromly’s approach owing a great deal to his having directed in children’s television in the 1950s, become a producer, reverted to directing but in the meantime lost sight of much of the technical progress in television so that his effects work falls well short of what was possible even in 1974. And it’s fair to say that some of the effects in ‘The Time Warrior’ would probably have been acceptable in a 1960s story, but Bromly’s direction does seem at times not to have adjusted to the unforgiving nature of colour videotape recording. The introduction of CGI effects doesn’t seem quite so intrusive in the circumstances, as Bromly’s effects are replaced by shots of Linx’s spaceship hurtling towards Earth, the explosion of Irongron’s castle now at least looks like a castle and Linx’s weapon has a ray (a strange decision given that no director since has seen fit to give one to Sontaran weapons), and I don’t think one can argue too strongly given that Barry Letts heartily approves of it.

‘Beginning the End’ has to cover a couple of bases and does it informatively and neatly, with above-average visuals (although the conceit of using the architectural details of Peckforton Castle to frame stills and clips does eventually wear). The best thing about it is undubtedly the simplest- the idea of taking Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks to Peckforton Castle and just getting them to talk, initially about casting Elisabeth Sladen and then about the making of the story. What emerges, interestingly enough, is a picture of a story considered fairly routine by most of the people involved in making it- nobody could tell at the time that the character of Sarah Jane Smith would have a lifespan of 35 years and counting, or that the Sontarans would also crop up time and time again over the decades- and where the major selling point was considered to be the historical setting. The participation of the likes of Donald Pelmear, Jeremy Bulloch and Keith Cheetham adds considerably to the item’s value, not least when the likes of designer Cheetham are clearly enthusiastic in talking about their work at such a remove of time, and the added graphics show the amount of time and effort which has gone into the feature without being too intrusive. The Continuity Compilation marries up some audio recordings with visuals from the story itself, while the 1974 Annual is still very much mired in the era of Jo Grant and the Master, although one strip adventure has some very Daemon-like aliens helping to rid Earth of the dinosaur-like Molags in what starts to look like an alternative Pertwee era.

It’s in the Radio Times billings that much of the interest resides, however, as ‘The Time Warrior’ was treated to a cover, feature (in which the originator of the phrase "well-made hokum" turns out to be none other than Michael Parkinson) and Frank Bellamy-style illustrations next to the listings. With the Tenth Anniversary Special in the shops at the time, it’s interesting to see that the coverage of ‘The Time Warrior’ isn’t that much different from that given to ‘The Eleventh Hour’ only recently, and there’s a real sense of the importance of Doctor Who to the BBC of the time. With some of the DVD releases from the Pertwee era in particular, there can be a slight sense of disappointment in that there are a limited number of contributors available and the number of revelations in terms of unexpected participants is limited, however in the case of ‘The Time Warrior’ there were enough people available and enough additional material to give not only a sense of how the story came to be made the way that it was, but also of the story in its time. It’s probably not enough to justify a reappraisal of the story or to elevate it into the ranks of the very best, but in the absence of the story’s star, writer and major villain, it’s still a good account of how ‘The Time Warrior’ came to be.