With Doctor Who’s 60th-anniversary episodes now just a few weeks away, the latest BBC Blu-Ray Collection boxset from the ‘classic’ series whisks us back in time forty years as the show celebrated its 20th anniversary in Fifth Doctor Peter Davison’s second season. The series was just starting to exploit its history at the time as producer John Nathan-Turner, basking in the success of the 19th season’s Earthshock, which saw the return of the Cybermen to the series after a six-year absence, decided to court continued fan approbation by seeding elements from the past in every serial in an anniversary year run that would end in spectacular style (for the 1980s) with the all-star reunion feature-length special The Five Doctors in November 1983. Season 20 ended up being a curious beast; Nathan-Turner’s promise turned into a bit of a damp squib with ‘returning elements’ amounting to nothing more than a rematch with 10th-anniversary adversary Omega, the return of the Mara from the previous season, three stories linked by the reappearance of Valentine Dyall’s Black Guardian from the 16th season (with a long-overdue guest turn from UNIT’s Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now retired and working as a teacher in a boys’ school in Mawdryn Undead) and another TARDIS team tussle with Anthony Ainley’s Master to bring an underwhelming season to an underwhelming close. A Dalek serial planned to round the season off had to be abandoned due to one of the bouts of industrial action that often bedevilled the BBC in the 1970s and ’80s, and indeed, several other serials were almost lost but were salvaged and remounted – Nathan-Turner’s plans would have been utterly torpedoed if the season had been abandoned after only twelve episodes had been recorded.
Season 20, scrubbed up and sparkling on this lavish new nine-disc box set (three discs are devoted to various iterations of the anniversary special), is a frustrating experience. Fairly typically of Doctor Who, the episodes are bristling with big, bold and often rather clever ideas, but all too often, they’re undermined by standard-issue contemporary BBC studio production problems – clunky, clumpy sets, horribly unsympathetic lighting and flat, unimaginative direction. The season also feels a bit dreary as it doesn’t really offer any memorable “creature” designs, with most of the Doctor’s adversaries here being distinctly humanoid. Season opener Arc of Infinity is a dreary four-parter that involves too much creaky melodrama on the Doctor’s home planet Gallifrey (and some runaround location footage shot in Amsterdam for no other reason than just because) and a ludicrous chicken-headed alien called the Ergon, Stephen Gallagher’s Terminus offers a new spin on the creation of the Universe but its script is far too ambitious for the BBC’s mid-’80s resources and The King’s Demons is a frivolous two-parter that sees the Master downgrading his usual galaxy-dominating ambitions by plotting to foil the signing of the Magna Carta. However, Mawdryn Undead offers an interesting take on the curse of immortality (a busy serial that reintroduces the Brigadier and debuts duplicitous new companion Turlough, played with sly menace by Mark Strickson) as does the imaginative and atmospheric Enlightenment in which the immortal Eternals entertain themselves by organising races across space in spaceships resembling historical sailing vessels – a wonderfully Doctor Who idea. Best of the bunch, though, is Christopher Bailey’s Snakedance, a highly literate and intelligent script that sees the Doctor’s companion Tegan (Janet Fielding) still under the thrall of the insidious snake-like Mara from the previous year’s Kinda.
A bland and often too colourless collection of episodes is again enlivened by some generous and hugely entertaining special features dominated by the presence of Janet Fielding, who now fully embraces and understands her place in Doctor Who and the show’s importance in popular culture. She and her co-stars Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) and Peter Davison are all over the special features like a rash, and they’re a joy to spend time with as they bicker and take potshots at one another in a way that only people who have been friends for over four decades can. The special features here are an embarrassment of riches; Davison, Fielding and Sutton travel across Europe by car to attend a German convention, and the trio (and Strickson) nip across to Amsterdam by train (the long sequence of the quartet shooting the breeze during the journey is fascinating in itself) to revisit the Arc of Infinity locations (also making the day for a group of location-visiting fans), Matthew Sweet is back to interview Sutton and Fielding who also take a tour of Jodrell Bank where their interview was taped, Fielding spends time with actor Martin Clunes whose first TV appearance in Snakedance, resplendent in a fetching toga, is often wheeled out to embarrass him in chat shows. Add to the mix the usual ‘Behind the Sofa’ features where the episodes are viewed by the cast and other luminaries such as Sophie Aldred, Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker, archive material ported over from previous DVD releases and lots of newly-discovered old treats, updated effects on several episodes (and three different versions of The Five Doctors) and once again, despite the frankly disappointing run of episodes themselves, it’s another stellar presentation of classic Doctor Who, assembled with staggering thoroughness. 1980s Doctor Who isn’t the show at its best by any means, but with so many of its cast and crew fortunately still round to tell the tale, the attendant boxsets are always a delight and, despite the inessential nature of many of the episodes, the Season 20 boxset is right up there with the best of the sets previously released offering up hours of engrossing entertainment.
