The Cybermen Box Set review (DVD) ★★★★

A Cyberman box set ought to be a treat. It ought to contain Tomb of the Cybermen (buy it, it’s brilliant), The Invasion (less of a Cybermen story than a tale of a megalomaniac with Cybermen overtones), Earthshock (buy it as before) and maybe the David Tennant stuff. Stories for inclusion only for completists are the Tom Baker Cybermen story, Revenge of the Cybermen, and Sylvester McCoy’s Silver Nemesis – and guess what, that’s the two stories you get in this box.

The Baker story is the better of the two. It suffers from everybody talking about the Cybermen and how scary they are during the first episode (rule 1: show, don’t tell) and the Doctor not meeting them until the end of episode 2 (rule no. 2: this isn’t the 1960s, you have to get on with it). The Cybermen themselves, used probably because nobody was sure how the new Doctor would go down, are an oddly Americanised bunch who suffer under the harsh studio lights compared to their counterparts in the previous decade. Their enemies, the Vogans, look unconvincing and overact as if their employment depended on it, and it’s left to the humanoid characters to generate the interest this story holds. Given that these characters are played by Baker, Elizabeth Sladen, Ian Marter, Ronald Leigh-Hunt and others, that interest remains intense. Nonetheless this was a muted end to Baker’s first series, which included the incredibly atmospheric Ark in Space and the seminal Genesis of the Daleks. In spite of the addition of a subplot about goldmines, there just isn’t enough story to sustain these episodes.

The reverse is true of Silver Nemesis, the 25th anniversary story broadcast during McCoy’s middle year. There’s a lot of plot in these three episodes – two different time zones, a Cyberfleet, a group of old Nazis (yes, that hoary old chestnut) – and yet the first episode meanders around introducing a jazz player for no better reason than – er – actually for no reason, a visit to Windsor Castle so some extras could get some work, it’s really not great. Things move a bit more once the Cybermen arrive but having Ace kill them by flicking gold coins at them undermines their menace. The elements are held together too loosely and they fail to gel. Ratings were falling by this stage, the seasons were only 14 episodes long and even then this story has the same plot as the story-bar-one before, Remembrance of the Daleks. In both stories the Doctor is revealed to have planted an ancient Gallifreyan weapon on Earth and it comes back to haunt him. Why someone didn’t slap the script editor around the head for letting this same idea through in two stories out of the four that year I don’t know. With hindsight it was a kindness that the series was “rested” a year later.

Luckily the whole package is lifted by the extras, particularly the documentaries about the making of the programmes. “The Tin Man and the Witch” speaks loudly about the frustrations of the people making “Revenge”; producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s problems getting the script into shape, his dissatisfaction with the Cybermen’s helmet guns and his frustration with the music. He’s actually quite harsh on himself in places, it’s actually still quite watchable if slow to start. “Industrial Action”, meanwhile, shows us the makers of Silver Nemesis still delighted with the casting of the American tourist, the inclusion of the skinheads, Courtney Pine and the in-joke of having loads of crew and former cast turn up as extras, failing completely to spot that none of this laboured padding took the story forward a single jot. They’re clearly convinced they were taking part in some sort of masterpiece. Writer Kevin Clarke talking about how dated the older Cybermen stories were by comparison is a particularly cringe-making moment – Silver nemesis hasn’t worn well either, mate, but the sixties stuff can still grip. It could have been worse – they could have put his idea that the Doctor is in fact God (I am not making this up) on screen. You can almost taste the smugness of the later team (this could of course be in the edit) – the earlier group show a lot more humility and realism about what they produced, which is ironic as they actually made the better programme.

For people of my generation, though, the whole enterprise is worth its purchase price (and gets the box set an extra star) for the “Cheques, Lies and Videotape” documentary all about the lengths people used to go to in order to see older Doctor Who when it wasn’t around on DVD or video. Took me right back to…er…some friends I had who used to furtively swap incredibly poor quality tapes. Oh all right, it was me, but I never paid over the odds, unlike the gentleman who admits to paying £300 for a single story once in the 1980s.