Doctor Who: Colony In Space review (DVD) ★★½

This is one of those stories that works brilliantly on paper, and indeed I remember reading the book (called “Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon”) eagerly as a child. The Time Lords send the Doctor to planet Uxarieus to recover a weapon. This was exciting, the third Doctor hadn’t been away from Earth before. There he encountered a group of colonists being pushed around by this huge mining conglomerate, Interplanetary Mining Corporation. It became like cowboys and Indians in space, with aliens, servo robots and in the third episode it became apparent that the Master was involved! What could be better?

Hmm. Well, a much shorter story would have been considerably better, for a start. At six parts this is way overstretched. Maybe then the pace could have picked up a bit; this one really drags. Without the Brigadier and the rest of the Unit crew to back them up, Pertwee and Manning go for portentous and humourless as the Doctor and Jo, and it really doesn’t help – Pertwee seems to be sleepwalking his way through most of this. Of all the Doctors he was the least experienced actor – radio performer and cabaret artiste by all means, but you can see him thinking “I’d better make this bit sound important”, doing it and moving to the next important bit. It doesn’t really work. Many of the rest of the cast take their cue from this and the whole thing is very po-faced. The basic set-up – big corporation versus the little guys – would be done far better elsewhere in the Pertwee era. It’s probably not fair to use future stories as a stick with which to beat this one, but hindsight is a factor in DVD releases.

The inclusion of the Master, too, is ill-judged. This was from the 8th season of Doctor Who, the Master season – he was in every story, and by this time it’s getting a bit much, to be honest. Roger Delgado plays him like the charming, caddish villain he always did and he’s a joy to watch, but by this stage you were looking out for him. And he’d turn up every time.

So, thin plot, wooden leading performance…Pertwee would recover and become a very compelling Doctor again by the end of this season – sometime they’re going to release The Daemons and it’s a joy – but this story’s beyond rescue. Sadly the effects let it down badly too. The servo robots make William Hartnell’s War Machines look high tech, and whereas I appreciate it was very cold for the actors playing the primitives it’s obvious they’re wearing long johns under the costumes. The vehicles looked very futuristic and slick at the time; obviously times have changed and they now look like really basic trucks. Don’t forget in 1971 four-wheel drive was seen as some sort of miracle..!