Michael Hayes has a fund of anecdotes- the one about John Gielgud’s recommendation to an actor about to play King Lear raised a smile.

Declan Mulholland was cast as the original Jabba the Hutt. And by demonstrating that degree of ignorance, my sci-fi geek credentials are hereby rescinded.

-The Humans of Tara (see what they did there?), being an account of the making of the story

-Now & Then, a look at the Leeds Castle locations and how the last three decades have treated them

-Double Trouble, "a brief history of doubles in other Doctor Who stories".

-Radio Times billings

With ‘The Androids of Tara’, the Key to Time season begins to take a turn for home, and the DVD set begins to hit some slightly choppier waters as it comes up against a story which isn’t quite as highly regarded as its predecessors in the season and struggles to an extent to come up with additional material. Tom Baker, Mary Tamm and Michael Hayes do well enough with the commentary, in no small measure due to Hayes’s wealth of anecdotes and experiences from a wide-ranging career, while ‘The Humans of Tara’ adds Paul Lavers, Neville Jason, David Fisher and Anthony Read for a variety of viewpoints. A recurring theme throughout this set is the contribution made to the Williams era of Doctor Who by the likes of Anthony Read, Michael Hayes and so on- experienced BBC hands who knew the system inside out, but were drawn to the creative and technical challenges of a series which could so easily have been beneath them, and Hayes in particular seems to have relished the night shoots and teamwork on location.

It’s perhaps inevitable that the DVD producers would want to revisit Leeds Castle; as an attractive historical location, much of the setting is (give or take thirty years of undergrowth) still recognisable, but on the other hand, it’s a private estate and so doesn’t have the access to vast pots of money that National Trust and English Heritage houses can call on for restoration. Unfortunately this means that some of the buildings have been selectively restored and maintained, and while some have been refurbished and made more accessible, others haven’t been quite as fortunate and are closed off awaiting funds. Having been there myself some fifteen years ago, I’d say that the feature does it justice as along with the dramatic castle buildings, there are also quiet and overgrown corners (although both the Doctor Who and DVD crews seem to have avoided the copious population of ducks which had colonised most of the estate). ‘Double Trouble’, in contrast, really does feel like unimaginative filler; whereas ‘Hammer Horror’ on ‘The Stones of Blood’ disc takes a theme from the story and does at least try to run with it, ‘Double Trouble’ just seems to take the basic premise that certain Doctor Who stories have featured doubles of various regulars and doesn’t try to analyse, make any arguments or draw any conclusions, which to my mind is lazy.

The Radio Times listings are, with the exception of a cartoon by somebody called Marc, fairly perfunctory as one might expect by this stage in the season, while the Photo Gallery is more notable for the quantity of pictures rather than the interest they contain- evidently Michael Hayes or somebody equally well-connected had a word with the BBC photographer and told him that it’d be worth their while to come down to the studio. But overall there’s a fairly strong sense of limitation about the disc as a whole- it says everything that can be said from a 2007 perspective about ‘The Androids of Tara’, and there isn’t much of a sense of anything having been missed out, but somehow it feels unsatisfying, as if there wasn’t quite as much lying around to be picked up, cleaned off and bolted onto the DVD package. Almost certainly the first disappointment of the ‘Key to Time’ set, but that’s nobody’s fault as such, just unfortunate that a fun little story should lack the resources to sparkle on DVD.