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 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 3½ 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 3½ 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).

I've only one thing to say, really, about this excellent story. Why isn't there an option on the DVD, among the Special Features, to view the story in black-and-white; the b/w versions of the recolourised stories are actually of better quality because colourisation can result in bleeding etc and the overall look isn't, in my view, quite so satisfactory. After all, b/w is how I first watched the story way back in 1971! I hope the option will be taken up for The Mind Of Evil and Ambassadors Of Death. There will be different opinions on the subject but we should at least have a choice.

It was the first one I watched all the way through and as such has special memories for me. I used to imagine the village was the one in Worcestershire where my great-aunt, who we often used to visit during my child- and young adulthood, lived and of which I have many fond recollections. I'm pleased to see Daemons appears to have been rehabilitated, along with Planet of the Spiders, because it's nowhere near as bad as its reputation at one time would have had you believe. Azal is particularly impressive, and one of the better examples of the use of CSO in the series, along with the Krynoid and K1 Robot later on. And of course Daemons is definitive of the whole Pertwee era. Nice to see Yates and Benton in civvies and acting as investigators as much as soldiers, which was meant to be part of UNIT's function. In both capacities they're quite well-used. By contrast - and this is my only real gripe about the story - the Brigadier comes over largely as a figure of fun. He spends a lot of time trying to break through the heat barrier and once he does plays no useful part in things, attempting with a total lack of success to get past Bok and into the church and losing personnel in the process.

As a Christian I'm not offended by the fictional blowing up of the church; it's only drama. It's more worrying that the Vicar seems to suddenly disappear and be replaced by a phoney who's up to no good without the religious authorities suspecting anything. We're not THAT useless in the C of E!

Guy Blythman