Special Features #2: All Roads Lead to Rome

Look Who’s Driving on The Collection: Season 20 (Blu-ray)

This feature has no right to be as entertaining as it is: in short, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and Peter Davison drive from Ramsgate to a convention in Kassel, taking in various European locations along the route. It sounds like the kind of lightweight filler that wouldn’t be out of place on daytime television, and there are moments when that’s what we get – scenic aerial panoramas accompanied by jaunty stock music give us a glimpse of the feature that the production team perhaps thought they were making.

But as soon as the early 80s TARDIS crew get into a car together, something a little bit magical happens. We have already seen the easy banter between them in the Behind The Sofa Blu-ray features, in which Fielding entertainingly butts heads with Davison in what has become a trademark display of snark and grump (I have commented before that I would happily see a feature in which Janet Fielding provides a commentary on everything from now on – not just Doctor Who, *everything*); but somehow, with the need to talk about Doctor Who removed, the repartee moves up a gear and the result almost achieves an arthouse level of absurdity. It is also genuinely, tear-inducingly funny.

There must have been a point where the team making the feature realised what they had. Perhaps it wasn’t even until they started editing. But at some point it stops being a film about three people driving to Europe and becomes a film about three people being filmed driving to Europe; the whole piece is as self-aware as the three travellers staring at a row of cameras following their journey, and it is much the richer for it, because acknowledging the nature of the project removes any sense of artifice – there’s no pretence that we’re spying on three people journeying in private, they know full well that we’re watching them because they’re being followed by a crew in a van and a drone. So whilst the picturesque stop-offs are perfectly diverting, the focus becomes their conversation in the car, which, thanks to the amount of time they have known each other, the length of the journey and the acknowledged absurdity of the situation, sparkles with the kind of eloquent spontaneity that many loftier endeavours have aspired to and failed to capture.

Fielding ruminates on the deceptive nature of cows and does her vocal exercises, to Davison’s consternation. Sutton misunderstands an instruction to ‘drive slowly’ and they spend about ten minutes trying to understand directions, talking and shouting over each other as if the scene has been orchestrated by Robert Altman. They are entertainingly rude to each other, but their mutual fondness is also evident throughout, so the exchanges are caustic without being abrasive, charming without being twee.

By the end of the feature it feels a little like you have spent two days on the road with them yourself, but honestly I could have spent twice as long in their company and not grown tired of it. The only whiff of regret it left me with is the thought of how much more entertaining those TARDIS scenes in the 80s would have been if they’d given us something more along these lines.

Next: “It will be a bad cold if I go to the party. Perhaps I shall die.”