Doctor Who: Peladon Tales review (DVD) ★★★★

There’s a generation of Doctor Who fans for whom you only have to mention the word "Peladon" and we get all misty-eyed. Jon Pertwee is the Doctor, we’re seven years old again and the European Union is something we’ve just joined…

Whoah. Europe? Yes Europe, we’re just about members and Doctor Who, bless it, is showing us its take on the subject. The fondly-remembered Curse of Peladon is all about an established order accepting new members and submitting to old prejudices. The villains may not be who they appear to be, the Doctor and Jo might be good guys but they’re also impostors- it’s a deceptively simple tale, nobody is quite what they seem. Watch for the old enemy the Ice Warriors, is all I’m saying.

The programme, in short, is taking straight lifts from current affairs. And it works. There’s this bloody awful talking shop, some abysmally indecisive aliens (Ysanne Churchman’s voice for Alpha Centauri is a study in how to annoy people while remaining endearing) – and it happens again in The Monster of Peladon, only this time the subtext is ‘there’s a miner’s strike everyone’. It’s wearing a bit thin by this time; here’s a headline, here’s a story, it was fresh in 1972 and vastly less by 1974.

There was noting subtle about Doctor Who at the time. The Doctor was always right, his companion was docile (a little less so with Sladen who even this early gives a good account of herself as Sarah Jane Smith, than with Manning’s Jo Grant), everybody was ever so posh and that was the BBC in the 1970s.

It’s brilliant, brilliant fun. Of course the effects have dated and the costumes are a joke by today’s standards but probably they hadn’t anticipated a 2010 audience watching the thing and expecting it to stand up. These are rattling stories, particularly the first of the two, and if it takes slightly rose-tinted glasses to appreciate then then fine, it just does.