So, I know some visitors will object, but I actually rewatched a couple of stories the other day on DVD:
I'll be upgrading to Blu when the S17 set comes out (though this looks very good on DVD), but since I happened to have a bag of jelly babies in the flat...
...but I don't have a review handy of that. But I do have one handy for the other:
The Ambassadors of Death is a decent rather than great Doctor Who story from the Jon Pertwee era – his third - that saw the show reinvented as almost as much of an action adventure series as a sci-fi one. The plot may revolve around the disappearance of British astronauts when their capsule returns to Earth after a rescue mission (the show fortuitously originally aired at the same time as the Apollo 13 crisis) and the question of whether it really is the astronauts who returned, but the first two episodes still find room for large-scale shootouts, kidnappings, hijackings, car chases, motorbike crashes and even helicopter stunts, all arranged by the boys at Havoc who got so much work in the third Doctor’s day. After that it settles into more of a mystery touching on layers of Whitehall secrecy, paranoia, xenophobia (or is it alienophobia?), murder and the inevitable race against time to save the Earth, throwing in some good cliffhangers, much aided by the fact that this was the story that introduced (or at least massively amplified) the famous electronic ‘scream’ into the end title music.
Its biggest problem is that after such a rip-roaring start the middle section comes perilously close to being too relaxed – one of the longer stories at seven episodes despite not having enough plot to justify it, you do feel that it could probably have been a little tighter and with less repetition at six episodes instead. That’s in no small part due to the script’s tortuous development: originally intended as a story for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, David Whittaker went through five rewrites before the uncredited Trevor Ray, Malcolm Hulke and script editor Terrance Dicks reworked it on the hoof. As Dicks notes on the DVD extras, it shows, but it does have its moments.
From a DVD point of view the biggest problem is there’s little appreciable difference in quality from the old VHS release (although unlike that this has all seven episodes in full colour throughout) because only the first episode survived in colour and the other six episodes have been colorised from black and white recordings that used a poor off-air US videotape recording as a guide, something the digital remastering can only do so much to improve (and which the DVD packaging makes no mention of). After recent collectors' sets I can't see the eventual Bluray offering much improvement, if any, unless any of the missing episodes turn up. The extras package isn’t as loaded as some other Who DVDs but is still good – an audio commentary recorded in 2009 before the death of co-stars Caroline John and Nicholas Courtney (the disc wasn’t released until 2012 in the hope of finding better quality versions of the show itself) also featuring Peter Halliday, Geoffrey Beevers, Michael Ferguson, Terrence Dicks, Derek Ware, Roy Scammell, Derek Martin and Toby Hadoke, an excellent 25-minute documentary on the making of the story that goes into much detail about the extensive stunt work, a brief look at newspaper coverage of the third Doctor’s tenure, stills gallery, trivia track and TV spot from 1970.
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