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  Specs
  • Full Frame
  • Dual Layer ( )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
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  Extras
  • Audio commentary
  • Photo gallery
  • 2 Documentaries
  • Trivia track
  • Short film
Dr Who - The Mind Robber
BBC/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . B&W . 100 mins . G . PAL

  Feature
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Doctor Who in his most irritable Patrick Troughton incarnation, escapes one crisis by sending his Tardis into a never-never land where fairy-stories come true, and fiction rules.

Is this the weakest of all Doctor Who episodes? I'm not an expert, so I can't tell .. but the background documentary reveals that the BBC gave its makers no budgets at all for special effects -- the entire episode was filmed in front of a giant white Cyclorama; the 'threatening robots' were found lying around in the BBC props department.

Usually, the BBC's frequent budget problems are outweighed by the sheer good fun of everything. But this time the good Doctor and his companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) are also weighed-down by one of the most asinine, totally juvenile scripts ever inflicted on them.

There are a couple of good things about the show -- mainly the sweetly-sexual Wendy Padbury and her very svelte metallic cling-suit. But this nursery-farrago really represents just about the nadir of Who-dom.

Watch how, partway into the show, the character of Jamie undergoes a complete makeover, emerging for a couple of episodes with a totally new face. Then he reverts to the old. There's an improbable plot-detail to explain this. The real reason, we learn, is that Frazer Hines had been exposed to chicken-pox -- and the BBC just could not afford to stop filming.....

Most Doctor Who episodes are fun, and some are actually riveting. This one is embarrassing and boring .. except for that cling-suit, that is.

  Video
  Audio
  Extras
Contract

Video and audio are as good as you could expect for black-and-white television footage from this period -- probably better than you might expect.

There's quite a reasonable audio commentary from Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury and director David Maloney and the second (for a short time) Jamie, Hamish Wilson.

The Making Of documentary The Fact of Fiction is pretty meaty, and manages, in its 35-minutes, to detail much of what went wrong with this episode, pretty well shafting the blame to the first-time writer Peter Ling. There is a 22-minute documentary, Highlander, in which Frazer Hines recounts the history of his time aboard the Tardis -- a sort of Companions and Monsters I Have Known.

There's a nostalgic vintage Basil Brush children's television film featuring a refugee Yeti from a Doctor Who episode. We're given an optional trivia subtitle track giving technical and production details, and a quite decent photo-gallery. Even when the episode is as poor as this, there is enough richness in the extras to make it desirable for Doctor Who addicts.


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  •   And I quote...
    "Strictly Doctor Who for the preschoolers -- bad, but sadly not quite so bad that it's good."
    - Anthony Clarke
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Pioneer DVD 655A
    • TV:
          Loewe Profil Plus 3272 68cm
    • Receiver:
          Denon AVR-3801
    • Speakers:
          Neat Acoustics PETITE
    • Centre Speaker:
          Neat Acoustics PETITE
    • Surrounds:
          Celestian (50W)
    • Subwoofer:
          B&W ASW-500
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