Doctor Who: The Dæmons [DVD]

The Pertwee era is my favourite from Doctor Who - although the Tom era runs it close. The Daemons epitomises my first-hand memories of the show when I was a child - the Doctor/Jo pairing, the Master, Unit, but all fans of the show will know the plot.

The restoration is a step up again from the previous attempt 20 years ago - advances in technology having made this possible. For the first time, we see the raw material they had to work with and appreciate how much work has gone into this. See the decidedly mediocre picture quality on the Tomorrow's World clips, the terrible picture sparkle on the closing stages of the restoration test, and hear the wobbly sound particularly on the closing credits !.
To be picky, in general I think the location material looks a little inferior to the parts recorded in studio - just a little grainy, but nothing to worry about.

The extras are very well done. It's a pity that rights issues prevented Return to Devils End being included, but in its absense a nice "making of" story has been assembled - featuring some of the surviving cast and crew (but why no Stephen Thorne, who gave a good contribution to the recent Three Doctors rerelease ?). The tribute to Barry Letts is a fitting one to the late producer whom Who fans have much to thank for. And like the similar Hinchcliffe feature from the recently-released "Android Invasion" it prominently features his children, who knew him best. Some nice colour film from location,
the Tomorrow's World feature and colourisation test I have already mentioned and the usual photos and trailer (in this case for Nightmare of Eden) round things off.

Thoroughly recommended.

The fifth and final story from Jon Pertwee's second year as Doctor Who comes to DVD, with all five episodes on one disc. Plus a second disc full of extras.

At this time in the show's history, the Doctor was still exiled to Earth, and was working with U.N.I.T. to combat menaces that came their way. Such as rogue Timelord the Master. Who was up to no good in every story of the season.

In the usually quiet village of Devil's End, strange things are going on. An archaeological dig is about to open up an ancient burial site. One local eccentric predicts trouble will follow, but nobody takes her seriously. The new Vicar though looks a lot like the Master, and is very interested in what the dig will unearth. A deadly threat to all life on Earth.

Can the Doctor and U.N.I.T. save the day?

There comes a point in the life of many TV shows when they know exactly what they are doing and all involved, as a result, are at the top of their game. Thus whatever the quality of the script, anything they produce will always be something worth watching.

The Daemons does have a very good script. Coupled in this instance with a cast and production team who had settled into their roles and were producing quality work, the Daemons is a classic of the show because of that. With great moments for all the regular characters, a good setting, memorable monsters, and some very quotable lines of dialogue, the Daemons is a perfect example of the best of it's era. And it was a very good era. So it's a great story as a result.

For many years, as a result of the old BBC practice of wiping video tape they thought they'd never need to use again, the original colour copies of almost all of the Daemons were no longer with us. The BBC held black and white ones, and rather poor quality colour ones obtained from American broadcast of the show. Back in the 90's when it was first released on VHS, it was re-coloured, using techniques that were pretty new and very advanced. At the time.

But technology marches on, and this version has been re-coloured again. Using much more advanced techniques for that. The picture quality isn't one hundred percent perfect, but it's still entirely watchable. And you probably wouldn't even notice anything amiss if you weren't aware of the history of this aspect of the story in advance.

Disc one of this two disc dvd has all five episodes of the story.

The language and subtitle options [for this as well as the extras on disc two] are as follows

Languages: English.

Subtitles: English.

It's also English audio captioned.

Disc one also has a commentary on the story from three of the cast plus the director.

Disc two has the following extras:

Radio Times listings for the story as a PDF file.

Production information subtitles.

A photo gallery of stills from the story and it's production.

A trailer for the next release in this dvd range [epileptics beware some fast editing in this].

There's also:

The Devil Rides out: a thirty minute [approx] long and typically excellent making of documentary.

Remembering Barry Letts: a thirty five minute long feature about the producer of the Pertwee era of the show. A good tribute that also covers his earlier years as an actor. And offers some interesting glimpses of long forgotten tv.

Location film: a six minute long film of the story being made on location. There's no sound but some memorable images of actors and crew at work and waiting to work.

Tomorrow's world: a five minute long clip from a 1990's edition of the bbc show about new inventions that looks at the way the story was re-coloured for the VHS release.

And there's also colourisation test: the first episode of the story after the original test, back in the 90's to see if it could be re-coloured. This test wasn't quite successful thus the version shown here is of less quality than the one on the VHS release. But it's an interesting curio should you be interested.

The Daemons is, in my humble opinion, one of the higher ranking stories during the Pertwee Era. I'm not going to recap this story, because any web search on this will give you approximately four hundred million billion hits. Research the story line elsewhere if you must, but I'm not going to beat a dead horse, or sacrifice a live goat. I will tell you one thing about this story though, for all of you Bible thumpers out there, no churches were blown up in the making of this story.

The picture quality of this DVD has improved considerably, as we would hope it would. Additionally, the text and audio commentaries, as well as the other special features, do their usual job of enchancing the viewing of this story which I appreciate. Regarding the audio commentary, it consists of director Christopher Barry, and the actors, Katy Manning, (Jo Grant), Richard Franklin, (Captain Mike Yates), and Damaris Hayman, (Miss Hawthorne, the white witch). Listening to these four was delightful, insightful, and entertaining. Better still, Toby Hadoke was NOT in any way a part of the commentary.

Now as much as I love to gripe about 2|entertain, I have to say that this release did make it over the Devil's Hump, but just. It's too bad that they were not able to include "Return to Devil's End" with this release. Although from what I understand, it couldn't be included due to some copyright matter. In its place, a `making of' feature is included which helped to partially fill that void. I feel that the most notable extra is a tribute to Barry Letts. At the time of writing this, it has been a little over two years since he was given his own TARDIS, and departed from us. You may think me strange for saying this, but I truly miss this man whom I never met. But thanks to his numerous commentaries on other Doctor Who DVDs, and the special features he took part in, I can honestly say that, in my opinion, he was one THE BEST producers to date.

If I were able to give a fractional rating, I would give this 3œ pentagrams, due to the fact that I feel that this release should have had MORE special features. Only two or three of them were worth taking the time to watch. One of the special features is little over 6 minutes of silent footage which was somewhat interesting, but the "Colourisation Test" was just the first episode with crappy colour. A side by side comparison of the picture would have been interesting, but to just show us the crappy version is just lazy. But since I cannot give a 3œ pentagram rating, I'll round this up to 4 pentagrams.

My bottom line is... (I REALLY need to come up with something more original than "My bottom line is")... any fan of the Pertwee Era, as well as that of Roger Delgado and U.N.I.T., should make this a MUST HAVE for their collection.

Referring back to the content of this story, which again you should know by now before reading my review, let's just say that for those of you who have a problem with the idea of Devil worship, well then, the Hell with you. Just Kidding.

I hope that this review was helpful to you, and please tell me your opinion(s) on my review so that I can hopefully improve upon future ones. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and hopefully, consider my humble opinion(s).