Review by Guy Clapperton
Stars Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen | Written by Malcolm Hulke, Terry Nation
UK certification PG | UK RRP £22.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 190 minutes | Directed by Paddy Russell, Barry Letts
This new box set, just in time to miss the Christmas market, is actually a bit misnamed. Yes, by all means UNIT, the Doctor’s military allies mainly from the Pertwee years, are in these stories, but it’s not much of a “best of” – the best stories are already out there on DVD. What we have is two very good tales with two superb Doctors but not something to represent the UNIT years overall.
We start with Invasion Of The Dinosaurs. It’s a cracking idea and the colourisation of the first episode is welcome – it hasn’t been seen other than in monochrome since its first broadcast in 1974 as far as I’m aware. The premise is simple: dinosaurs are coming to the 20th century and the Doctor (Pertwee) and new companion Sarah Jane Smith (Sladen) try to find out why with the help of UNIT.
I won’t spoil it any further but there are twists, betrayals from very unexpected quarters, attempted space flights … and all anyone ever remembers is the bloody awful dinosaurs. In the extras the producer, the late Barry Letts, remarks on how bad these were and he’s right. Nonetheless the conceit – that there are no actual villains, just people wanting to return the Earth to a mythical Golden Age – works very nicely. Characters are well drawn and the dinosaurs aren’t actually badly made – it’s just that they’re more or less immobile. It’s a shame; it undermined the story at the time and will do even worse for young viewers today. This is one of the reasons it only gets four stars – look beyond the effects and you have a lovely story in here.
The Baker offering is another story that ought to be a corker. The Doctor and a much more relaxed Sarah Jane arrive in an English village straight out of The Avengers and find it inhabited by white suited aliens (think The Stig en masse), with actual people being delivered by military trucks and acting almost like robotic extras on a set. The title – The Android Invasion – pretty much tells you they’re replicas and so are many of the UNIT soldiers.
They are under the control of the Kraals – a brutish race of rhino lookalikes who lurch around like primitive beasts but who are supposed to be sophisticated engineers and surgeons. As the actor playing them says in the extras, this subtracts from rather than adds to the story and again this is a shame because achieving the impression of an entire village being replaced by replicas of people is well achieved.
UNIT gets a bit of a walk-on part in this story and it’s an incomplete team. Nicholas Courtney was presumably unavailable for this one so the Brigadier is absent; of the older guard only John Levene’s Benton is present, and Ian Marter from the extremely early Tom Baker years (or “the other year” as it was then). Baker, in his second year, is a towering Doctor – dominating every scene effortlessly. Again, a cracking story let down by some effects and a bit of internal logic.
EXTRAS ★★★★½ Once again, 2Entertain has gone completely to town on some stunning extras. The Android Invasion has a great documentary on the absurdities of the stories other than the dinosaurs, with which I actually disagree; it also has a clip of Pertwee on Billy Smart’s Circus, Radio Times coverage, a semi-regular feature on returning to old locations. The high spot has to be script editor Terrance Dicks lamenting over producer Barry Letts falling for the company that told him it could “do dinosaurs”…
There’s less to say about the Android Invasion but the location is revisited and some of the kids who met Baker – now in their 40s – are interviewed alongside the cast and crew. The silliness with the eye patch – I won’t spoil it – is certainly explored for the umpteenth time, but the nicest element has to be the insecurity of the production team at the time. Baker’s first stories were just going out when this was being commissioned so nobody knew whether the new Doctor would be a success in the early stages of writing and filming.
There’s also a pretty decent look at Philip Hinchcliffe’s time after producing Doctor Who presented by his daughter Celina. It’s nicely made and she interviews her father well. It’s a little strange, though, in a set called The UNIT Files, that there’s no UNIT documentary. Yes it’s available on other DVDs but are they assuming everyone buys absolutely everything..? That alone knocks half a star off the score for the extras – in and of themselves they’re excellent.