Commentary Highlights:

Undoubtedly the anecdote about Tom Baker, Bruce Purchase and the Lucky Dip lottery ticket, not least because you have to listen to both commentaries to get the full story!

Extras:

-Parrot Fashion, covering the making of the story

-Film Inserts, Deleted Scenes and Outtakes

-Weird Science, a "spoof 1970s schools programme"

-Continuities

-Radio Times Billings

If I thought that covering the Key to Time set was going to be a long haul, that was before I picked up the disc for ‘The Pirate Planet’ and noticed that there were two separate commentaries. Being a conscientious reviewer, I was however unfazed by this and put my duty to you, my readers, first and watched the story with both commentaries; the first is the big-name affair, with Tom Baker, Mary Tamm and Anthony Read, while the second (presumably the one done for the American release) has a more understated and relaxed affair with Pennant Roberts and Bruce Purchase. Both are good in their own ways; Tom Baker can spin an a commentary out with yarns and anecdotes until the cows come home, but Roberts and Purchase also come across well, with something of the feel of two people looking back fondly on something they enjoyed making a long time ago.

One of the problems I have watching ‘The Pirate Planet’ is that I invariably come away from watching it with a yearning for my own Polyphase Avitron. I suspect that I’m not alone in this, as the animation used for the subtitling and credits of ‘Parrot Fashion’ shows- there’s a very cleverly-animated Avitron which just adds to the sense of frustration that Character Options didn’t exist in 1978. It’s another well-made half-hour documentary which covers the detail of the story being made, with contributions from many cast members and also Douglas Adams’s half-brother and biographer, so it also has one or two more curious sidelights on some elements including Adams’s apparent ongoing fascination with parrots. The other original production for this release is ‘Weird Science’, an item with David Graham (looking rather better than he did on the extras for ‘City of Death’, but apparently dressed as an octogenarian Eleventh Doctor) and Mat Irvine setting out to make a spoof schools science programme of the 1970s. I think it was when I reviewed ‘City of Death’ that I made the point that if you’re going to make a comedy extra, you don’t put one on a DVD of a Douglas Adams story because you’re never going to be funnier than the story itself, and this holds true here- in fact it’s even more true when ‘Look Around You’ parodied a similar style of programme much better. There’s nothing actively wrong with it, and Graham and Irvine do manage to keep their faces just the right side of straight, but it feels as if it was put on the disc as a bit of a giggle and that’s more or less all it is.

One particular piece of good fortune for the team behind the DVDs was that the film inserts had survived and were available for cleaning-up, so the location footage looks absolutely superb but the inserts themselves are also included as a separate extra- those scenes without dialogue are generally silent and of course the video effects are missing too. The deleted scenes naturally include the moment where the Doctor explains the symbol of the concentric circles to the Mentiads, but otherwise it’s just a small amount of material begging for a timing cut. The Continuities are above average, including as they do a preview of Saturday night television 1978-style with Larry Grayson apparently doing some sort of especially camp Maori dance with pom-poms on strings (then again, it could have been a particularly savage war ritual until Larry Grayson started doing it), Eddie Large in one of the most politically incorrect outfits you’ll ever see and top-flight Crystal Palace scoring a goal- none of which would be permissible in these enlightened times. So it’s another interesting little collection which places the story firmly in its context, with a lot of happy memories from some interesting people- although I do wonder whether Bruce Purchase (who, incidentally, comes across as the most genial and laid-back person you could hope to have met) ever did get to buy a copy of the DVD, or whether Tom Baker paid him the £1.2 million.

COMING SOON: PLANET OF EVIL

(wait for it...)