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DOCTOR WHO THE COLLECTION – SEASON 24

Written By:

Paul Mount
who season 24

It’s generally agreed that Season 24 of ‘classic’ Doctor Who – the first to star the lively Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor – is pretty much the nadir of the original series. Where just ten years earlier the show was in its Gothic prime, presenting chilling, complex tales like The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, its 1987 incarnation entertained audiences with McCoy pratfalling and playing the spoons on guest star Kate O’Mara’s chest and later dicking around with companion Bonnie Langford in a rundown holiday camp on Barry Island. It was a slap in the face – if not a stab in the back – for long time fans who couldn’t quite get their heads around what had happened to their family favourite sci-fi adventure series.

Time is, though, if not necessarily a great healer in this case, capable of allowing us to put the series into a proper perspective thanks to the accumulated knowledge of the following years which has explained quite how this season came into being in the face of utter disinterest and disdain from the BBC who would really have quite preferred it if the entire series disappeared into a wormhole and never showed its face again. Doctor Who was on the backfoot in 1987, its confidence and popularity still reeling from Michael Grade’s attempt to kill it off forever in 1985 and, as we now know, it was living on borrowed time, the axe swinging above its head every step of the way for the next three years. Producer John Nathan-Turner, desperate to move on to other projects after six years steering the show through increasingly turbulent waters, handed much of the show’s narrative heavy-lifting to incoming script editor Andrew Cartmel who attempted to rebuild the show from the ground up once the dire and hurriedly-written season opener Time and the Rani – scripted for previous Doctor Colin Baker and giving McCoy little to do except play the clown because he wasn’t directed to do otherwise – was out of the way. And in fairness, with the benefit of hindsight, the following three stories have a lot of potential but much of it untapped due to the show’s broad, light entertainment tone and production styles that were looking increasingly old-fashioned.

This lavish new eight-disc Blu-ray set does its very best to rehabilitate this lacklustre run of fourteen episodes with varying degrees of success. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) plenty of cut-offs and unscreened material for this season lurked in the BBC Archive and much of it has been dusted down and presented for public approval or disapproval here. There are several ‘extended’ episodes, deleted material seamlessly reinstated and much of this works rather well and to the benefit of the stories. For example, the first episode of the aforementioned holiday camp romp Delta and the Bannerman now runs to just under thirty minutes and adds several scenes that give the episode a bit more room to breathe – there’s one interior TARDIS scene that was cut entirely from the transmitted version, for example – but few will welcome the arrival of extended episodes of Time and the Rani.  There are clearly attempts here to find a new path for Doctor Who as McCoy started to find his feet and Cartmel began to shape scripts rather more to his taste and design, a so-called ‘masterplan’ that worked best in the following season before falling apart in McCoy’s third and final year. But the tone is all wrong, everything is too breezy and comedic even when it’s trying to throw a dramatic punch or two and the whole season has an unwelcome stink of broad, slapstick children’s television about it that makes it an unpalatable experience for those who had revelled in Doctor Who’s glory days only a few years earlier.

In truth, Season 24 isn’t actually quite as dire as our memories might remind us – perhaps this is just because the rebooted show endured such indignities and genuinely shockingly bad episodes between 2010 and 2017 and we can now recognise that however shonky Season 24 is, it does at least look and feel like Doctor Who, trying to tell actual stories with proper dramatic beats, albeit targeting a younger demographic. Scrubbed up on Blu-ray and with new sound mixes season 24 has a certain throwaway charm – Delta and the Bannerman is actually quite good fun and ‘Dragonfire’, introducing new companion Ace (Sophie Aldred)  has its moments despite that inexplicable cliffhanger to episode one. The draw here, as usual, are the reams of specially commissioned supporting material, the best of which is easily Matthew Sweet’s fascinating conversation with Sylvester McCoy whose life story outside the world of Doctor Who is possibly far more intriguing and fascinating than anything on the show itself. The Doctor’s Table sees McCoy, Langford, Aldred and ‘Paradise Towers’ guest star Clive Merrison enjoying a meal and sharing memories at the Ivy in Richmond, Here’s To The Future is an eighty-odd minute documentary that tells the whole story of Doctor Who’s parlous state in 1987 and the set also includes a new 45-minute making-of for Bannermen and Behind the Sofa in which McCoy, Aldred and Langford and a quite grumpy Peter Davison and his on-screen early ’80s companions Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton watch and comment on the episodes. There are also literally hours of raw studio and location footage which will surely tax the patience of even the staunchest Who completist and, of course, all the bonus material already available on the previous DVD releases of the episodes.

Season 24 is probably still the nadir of classic Who but at least this new set gives us the opportunity to make allowances for its shortcomings and allows us to actually appreciate those moments where it gets things right as it does the very best it can under the circumstances in which it was made.

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