Pretty much every anecdote about Beatrix Lehmann, quite frankly

-Getting Blood from the Stones, or how the story was made

-Hammer Horror, looking at the influence of horror films on Doctor Who

-Stones Free, in which Mary Tamm revisits the Rollright Stones

The number and quality of the extras on the first two Key to Time DVD releases is such that one of the first questions the following stories have to answer is whether they can keep up the standard set by ‘The Ribos Operation’ and ‘The Pirate Planet’. It doesn’t take more than a casual glance down the list of contents to see that we have yet another collection of well-made and researched extras, and yet again the original American release’s commentary is supplemented by a second one with more participants. Where the quality is perhaps compromised is no fault of the DVD producers; as the hundredth story and also the one in this season which most obviously references classic horror styling, it’s also been one of the most exposed because in fan logic, horror=good (if not classic), so there are slightly fewer revelations and new insights left because the story has already been analysed halfway to death.

Fortunately, the commentaries and ‘Getting Blood from the Stones’ between them round up all the major participants who are still with us. Susan Engel’s contributions are good (not least because as an otherwise-respected actress she could easily have declined the invitation, but seems to have enjoyed taking part in the production) and David Fisher can always be relied upon for some apposite comments on his stories while Darrol Blake has some worthwhile comments on the use of outside broadcast, Honor Blackman turning down the role of Vivien Fay and eliminating creaks on the spaceship set. It’s fortunate in having so many participants still living and willing to contribute, and the net result is that there’s a balance between actors, writing and production which not all stories can have. Of the shorter items, the better ones are ‘Stones Free’, which takes Mary Tamm back to the Rollright Stones to meet with locals and experts (and could only really have been improved with a line or two about Tamm’s own impressions of the circle and its significance) and the Robert Symes item; Symes is probably now one of those figures who have slipped into obscurity, but for some years he was a regular feature on the BBC whenever anything involved modelmaking or gadgets. So despite the title, his item with Mat Irvine doesn’t see them at a poolside bar evaluating the talent, but rather a discussion of how the hyperspace ship from ‘Stones’ was designed and made to fly.

Equally interesting are the Blue Peter and Nationwide features- the Blue Peter item has Lesley Judd and Simon Groom talking us through what was probably the series’ standard Doctor Who script which they dug out every couple of years and just updated (although clearly the researcher found everything they were looking for in Episode Ten of ‘The War Games’) while the Nationwide nugget has Frank Bough interviewing first Carole Ann Ford, then Tom Baker and Mary Tamm. The Continuties don’t have as many treats as some others have done, which is a shame as twenty-odd years ago I had a VHS copy with some announcements about the ‘Radio Times’ only being in black and white that week because of a printers’ strike, while ‘Hammer Horror’ is a slight disappointment because it feels as if it’s just repeating things which have been said dozens of times before about Doctor Who in the 1970s; the only difference is that this time somebody paid for some clips of Hammer films, but nobody ever mentions casting when discussing the connections between Doctor Who and Hammer, and it might have been interesting to have heard somebody talking about the way that Doctor Who was by and large casting from the same pool of talent as Hammer. But there’s something ever so slightly reheated about the whole thing, particularly when a caption on screen refers you to the DVDs of ‘Pyramids of Mars’ and ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’.

But these are secondary considerations- by the standards of many stories, this is a very good collection of extras indeed, and some of them will have taken a fair amount of researching- the Nationwide item has clearly been restored from two separate off-air copies, as there’s a drop in picture quality when Frank Bough starts to move onto the next item before going back to a clip of ‘The Edge of Destruction’ in Arabic, which is evidently where one of the people recording switched off and then started again. There’s no doubting that the quality of the previous releases is maintained, even if it does feel at times as if the essence of the story has been captured less completely, but as the third story in the set, it leaves a lot for the stories in the second half of the season- generally considered to be the weaker ones- to achieve if they’re to match the standard.