By Paul Mount
It’s 1972, and Doctor Who is cooking on gas. Three years on from its first cancellation crisis in 1969, the show, given a last chance to justify itself following tumbling ratings towards the end of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton’s era and with no viable replacement option having presented itself, had triumphantly reinvented itself for the bright new age of colour television. Flamboyant Third Doctor Jon Pertwee had fully cemented himself as the face of the rogue Time Lord and teaming him with the bubbly Jo Grant (Katy Manning) in his second season and broadening the show’s ‘Earth exile’ format to allow the Doctor to venture back into space at the behest of his Time Lord superiors allowed to show to properly flex its creative wings. Season 9 arrives as the latest in the BBC’s Collection Blu-ray boxsets and – despite the fact that, ironically, the final two stories in the season are noble (and rare) Pertwee-era failures – it’s another superb release demonstrating the care and devotion lavished upon these sets by a behind-the-scenes team determined to make them the absolute last word in Doctor Who on physical media.
Season 9 was potentially a difficult set of episodes to prepare for delivery on the more unforgiving Blu-ray format – several of the stories were amongst the last casualties of the BBC’s 1970s policy of wiping or destroying master tapes of productions no longer deemed of commercial value. Stories such as Curse of Peladon and The Time Monster were ultimately either returned to the BBC from overseas broadcasters or retained only as black-and-white prints. Previous VHS and DVD releases have utilised available technology in attempts to restore them to an acceptable quality, but slightly blurred images with washed-out or indistinct colour betrayed their provenance as episodes sourced not directly from the BBC Archive. This eight-disc boxset is an entirely another matter, though; the soundtracks have been improved immeasurably – there’s even a 5.1 option for The Sea Devils, the classic third serial from the season that pits Pertwee and the Royal Navy’s finest against both the Master and the aquatic cousins of Season 7’s Silurians – and the images for Peladon, The Mutants, and The Time Monster are hugely improved, the former having lost much of the fuzziness of earlier releases. They’re still not perfect, of course, and never will be, but it’s surely a given that it’s not possible for them to ever look better than this, and only the most ardent, nit-picking fans [In Doctor Who fandom, are you sure? – Ed] would be minded to bother finding fault.
The stories themselves are, by and large, classics of the era. Day of the Daleks sees the return of the show’s most famous metal meanies after a five-year absence, and it’s a thrilling and imaginative action story let down by the fact that the BBC clearly only had three Dalek props available and had forgotten to employ the actors who provided the original, memorable voices (the upgraded ‘special edition’ version with new series voices, extra Daleks and a few new scenes, is also included here). Curse of Peladon continues the show’s clever contrivance to break the potential monotony of the Doctor’s Earth exile by virtue of the Time Lords dispatching the Doctor into space to sort out some bit of cosmic dirty business they’d rather not get involved with. It’s an immersive Gothic tale full of intrigue, betrayal, gloomy corridors, and palace intrigue – and a nice plot twist regarding a familiar old enemy. The ‘greatest hits’ theme of the season continues in The Sea Devils, one of the most memorable (and oft-repeated) stories from the classic series, a landmark serial from the Pertwee era despite the fact that none of the UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) regulars often associated with this period make an appearance. Despite the fact that the story could have been hand-crafted for them! The series is rounded off by two ambitious but flawed – and, it has to be said, slightly tedious – serials. The Mutants sees the Doctor and Jo dispatched to Solos in a thinly-disguised anti-Colonialism parable where the native Solonions are fighting for independence from their human ‘masters’ and The Time Monster is a rather silly pot-boiler that sees the Master (the irreplaceable Roger Delgado) trying to control an embarrassingly-unconvincing creature called Kronos for purposes of his own via an extended and largely uninteresting runaround in a very stagey-looking Atlantis where Hammer star Ingrid Pitt attempts to give her dialogue more gravitas than it deserves.
Even slightly shaky Pertwee-era Who is worth a look, though and despite the failings of its last two serials, Season 9 is still an essential purchase for fans and collectors. The specially-commissioned new features are again a highlight. The absence of an extended Matthew Sweet interview with some contemporary alumnus from the show is keenly felt, but a new ‘making of’ for The Time Monster taking Katy Manning and John Levene (UNIT’s Sergeant Benton) back to the filming location is good value, as is a feature looking at the work of veteran stuntman Stuart Fell, Katy Manning revisiting the season’s other locations and a fascinating piece on the career of director Michael E. Briant. There are some other new bits from the archive, including convention footage and features from the previous DVD releases and a lavish and informative booklet on the making of the season. Here the late Pertwee is quoted on his desire to turn Doctor Who into a science fiction version of James Bond; Season 9, looking bigger, brighter and better than ever on Blu-ray, is probably as close as he got to making that particular dream come true.
Doctor Who The Collection – Season 9 is available now on Blu-ray.
