The connection between Robert Holmes and Louis Marks goes back to the late 1960s when Marks was script editing No Hiding Place and Holmes was submitting scripts.

-A Darker Side, with new and archive interviews charting the making of the story

-Planetary Performance, which specifically looks at the making from a thespian angle

-Studio Scene, a tiny sliver from the recording of the end of Part One

-Continuity Compilation

-Photo Gallery

I hope that any regular readers can forgive any jumping forwards to ‘Planet of Evil’, however in view of the wealth of content on ‘The Armageddon Factor’ and the recent death of Louis Marks, it seemed appropriate to nip forward if only for a single release. In fact, the information text gives quite a good summary of Marks’s career, taking in not just Who but No Hiding Place, The Stone Tape and the later classic serials, and he’s present in ‘A Darker Side’ courtesy of an interview recorded in 2005. Fortunately some comments from David Maloney on directing the story were also recorded, and so we have input from the writer, director and producer as well as the stars and indeed the designer, as Roger Murray-Leach contributes a great deal as well as popping down to Ealing Studios to meet Philip Hinchcliffe. ‘A Darker Side’ is one of the better "making of" documentaries and covers most of the main topics without overstaying its welcome- it runs to 25 minutes and still covers the origins of the story in ‘Forbidden Planet’ and ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde’ and that jungle in detail thanks to a wide variety of viewpoints and good organisation. Equally, the commentary is good-humoured and informative although it perhaps doesn’t sparkle quite as much as some others; Tom Baker isn’t perhaps his usual anecdotal self, and while the four participants keep things going well enough over the duration, there aren’t any great insights or tales- we don’t hear about Frederick Jaeger’s passion for origami or Ewen Solon’s collection of beer mats.

You could be forgiven for leaving with an overall impression of ‘Planet of Evil’ as a production where everybody came in, did a good job and went home again without really bonding or creating something special, were it not for ‘Planetary Performance’, which is subtitled ‘Acting in Doctor Who ‘ and attempts to use ‘Planet of Evil’ as something of a case study in the making of a story specifically from the actors’ point of view. This is perhaps making the best use of the availability of actors from the supporting cast such as Prentis Hancock, Graham Weston and Tony McEwan, but it also allows Elisabeth Sladen and Tom Baker to add some generalisations about the best way of delivering dialogue during a corridor scene. Splitting it off from the main documentary is an interesting take which wouldn’t work with every story, but here it allows the likes of Tony McEwan the chance to add their experiences to the general record, rather than just looking at the things everybody knows about ‘Planet of Evil’. The studio scene is little more than a fragment from the recording of Part One, essentially the moment immortalised on the DVD cover where the Doctor and Sarah are backing off from the anti-matter creature, but it includes a longer dwell on our heroes and also moving in and out to get some reaction shots which would be intercut with shots of the monster itself in the finished programme. The Continuity Compilation is a rather grand name for what’s essentially the end titles of ‘Terror of the Zygons’ Part Four trailing ‘Planet of Evil’, another trail for ‘Pyramids of Mars’ following ‘Planet’ Part Four and a trailer for the following summer’s repeats of ‘Planet’ and ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, while apart from a drawing of Tom Baker’s eyes, the Radio Times billings don’t have that much to offer us. It was perhaps inevitable, however, that the Photo Gallery would be a bit special, including as it does a lot of colour photos of the jungle set including a few angles which didn’t make it into the episodes themselves, although it has to be said that many of the images have also become very familiar over the years.

It would be difficult to find much about ‘Planet of Evil’ on DVD which could have been done better; indeed, the producers did well to track down some of the supporting cast and persuade them to share their memories of the series, and taking Philip Hinchcliffe to the BBC Written Archives to film some of his material allows him to say a few more interesting things about the evolution of the story than might otherwise have been the case. We also have Louis Marks on record as having been impressed rather than dismayed with what the production team did with his scripts, Roger Murray-Leach’s studio plans and on balance, as much as most people could reasonably want to know about how "Planet of Evil’ came to be written, how it was made and what it felt like to be a part of that production. Thirty years after the event, we’re fortunate to have had so many points of view available to us and to have them presented in an accessible and entertaining way.