I’ll leave you to choose between "How are you feeling yourself?" and "Don’t have the cabbage!".

Pretty much every speaking part in the story apart from the regulars was offered to at least one other actor who declined for one reason or another before being given to the actor who eventually played the role.

-Variations, a BBC local news report on the location filming

-In Studio, for those people who prefer old studio footage to old location footage

-There’s Something About Mary, in which Mary Tamm looks back on her time as Romana

The revelation above about the casting of ‘The Power of Kroll’ says it all for me- this is a story which was unloved long before it even entered production, and in the absence of most of the people involved in making the story, it was always going to be a difficult one to bring to DVD. The commentary is the original one recorded for the American release (Tom Baker refers at one or two points to making Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) at the time) and to be fair, it’s a good one considering that there are only two participants over the four episodes- Tom Baker and John Leeson spark off each other and the end result is relaxed and entertaining even though it isn’t always necessarily about ‘The Power of Kroll’. The absence of a new commentary, or indeed sufficient participants to make the standard item on the making of the story worthwhile, pretty much determines the shape of the rest of the disc’s contents, although the individual items themselves are often as interesting in their own right as a short factual feature could have been. ‘Variations’, for instance, is an item from the regional BBC news programme for East Anglia covering the five-toed people making magic pictures in the Suffolk marshes, although it does feature quite possibly the first recorded instance of the Begonia Pope anecdote and there’s a sense of Tom Baker and Mary Tamm not being quite as guarded as they might have been on a nationally networked programme; the other interesting moment is when one of the Swampies talks about the experience of bumping into black American servicemen at the local air base which puts another perspective on things.

The surviving studio footage, although in black and white and timecoded, gives a good impression of what the story must have been like to make and why nobody involved rates it particularly highly- there’s a lot of sitting around on a visually uninteresting set with technical dialogue which can’t have been very enjoyable, apart from Philip Madoc’s "it seems to have a highly developed sense of...." and an insight into how a lot of the interesting detail in Tom Baker’s performance seems to have been worked out on the hoof. The items on Mary Tamm and Philip Madoc are very similar, in that both consist of extended interviews peppered with various clips (although for Madoc’s, somebody was evidently prepared to fork out for a couple of clips from Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD, which adds a certain something to the proceedings). Although it might seem a little odd to put Tamm’s feature on ‘The Power of Kroll’ rather than ‘The Armageddon Factor’, it does mean that her voice is heard on a disc from which she would otherwise have been absent, which makes a certain amount of sense, although compared to her contributions to the other discs in this season there aren’t many revelations or anecdotes to make it truly worthwhile. Madoc’s interview is more interesting; it feels as if he’s put his Doctor Who experiences into perspective in the context of a full and interesting career, and he takes a balanced point of view as to where criticism and praise are due. The disc also has one of the better selections of continuities- including the 1978 BBC1 Christmas logo, no less- from which we can see that in 1978 Christmas Day included such treats as The Spinners at Christmas, the Queen’s speech (running to twenty minutes- either she had more to say for herself back then, or there might have been some film of post-Silver Jubilee touring to fill out the time) followed by Larry Grayson’s Christmas Generation Game- history doesn’t record whether the continuity announcer succumbed to temptation doing that particular link.

There’s very little to the Radio Times listings, as one might expect from this stage in the season, however the Photo Gallery does have some interesting pictures of things being put together on location, and that’s about it for this particular disc. It’s perhaps a good example of how interesting material can be found to add to the experience of viewing an unprepossessing story, and also gives an insight into the reasons why it’s never been remembered with much fondness. It might have been interesting to have had a bit more on the realisation of the Swampies and their culture- in my opinion at least one of the story’s better points- but it’s the original material on this release which carries most of the interest (not least when your reviewer has quite strong memories of watching the original story on transmission around Christmas 1978).