Special Features #3: Five Hundred Eyes

Posted on by James Lark

In Conversation: Sophie Aldred on The Collection: Season 26 (Blu-ray)

Even the earliest special features on Doctor Who DVDs had pretty decent production values and ambitious intentions, but the range has kept on pushing what can be done within the limitations of a tiny budget, and the documentaries of recent years are really spectacular achievements; in the age of GB News the term ‘broadcast standard’ has lost all meaning, but what we’re getting on the Blu-rays rivals BBC content for slickness. It would be tempting to think there wasn’t much more you could do for the range.

Thankfully, somebody had the bright idea to go back to basics and give us a new series of features that rely not on snazzy green screen, drone shots and snappy editing, but simply on an incisive, well-informed interviewer sitting with somebody integral to the show’s history for an hour. And you don’t get much more incisive or well informed than Matthew Sweet. Combining the rigour of a historian with the affection of a fan, his interviews have wielded brilliant new insights from Doctors, companions, producers and writers; he goes into these interviews clearly having done his homework and keen to chart previously unchartered territory, but the answers he gets are gently nudged out of his subjects, coaxed from them with boyish enthusiasm and subtle prompts. I don’t quite know how Matthew Sweet does it, but if there was a formula to being Matthew Sweet then we’d all be Matthew Sweet and that wouldn’t do at all. Like Michael Parkinson, his skill lies in saying very little and letting his guests do most of the talking.

His interview with Michael Grade on The Collection: Season 22 is perhaps the boldest mission statement to date – to take a person who has long been considered by fans (dismissed by them, even) as a villainous bureaucrat and, brilliantly, to get his take on a vital era of the show (a new perspective on ground already admirably covered, as previously discussed). Grade’s insights are fascinating (if not always persuasive), and it’s probably just as well that even as he refuses to accept that it wasn’t actually him that cancelled Doctor Who, Sweet is too much of a professional to shake him by the lapels1.

For me, however, the real litmus test was Sophie Aldred. Purely as a consequence of her willingness and devotion to the legacy of Who, Aldred is surely one of the most-interviewed-living-Doctor-Who-people-evs. Certainly for those of us who endured the ‘wilderness years’ (when we were absolutely surrounded by Doctor Who in every medium except actually on the television), Aldred was a constant and reassuring presence, always happy to indulge fans, reminisce, deliver an anecdote. So it’s not out of any lack of love for her that I did wonder if she had any stories left to tell.

The answer is, of course she does, and Matthew Sweet finds an entry point in the brilliant simplicity of asking what her first day of work was like. Aldred casts her mind back, and we’re away; from a vivid recollection of seeing her face in close-up multiplied across a bank of monitors we move backwards to the audition, then Aldred’s work as a freelance actress before Who, and we’re on a twisty, always-engaging journey through the eyes of one of Doctor Who’s most generous personalities.

For all that he lets Aldred tell her story without getting in the way (something that is far harder to do than he makes it look), Matthew Sweet’s presence is also part of the magic. Yes, he has the credibility and expertise of a respected historian, but he also has the confidence to wear his fan colours unapologetically, engagingly representing us viewers: a fan, an enthusiast, a devotee (indeed, he admits in this interview that he was one of the young fans present at Aldred’s first public appearance at a Doctor Who convention, so his personal angle follows the same timeline as Aldred’s involvement with the show). It’s a quality he brings to each of his interviews, regardless of the era of the show under discussion, and every time he uncovers gold. It goes without saying that his interviews with the Doctors are indispensable, but really it’s impossible to single out any of these features (that said, if forced to choose, I’d urge anyone to check out his interview with Nicola Bryant for the mesmerising and occasionally horrifying picture it paints of what-things-used-to-be-like-working-on-the-telly).

The results are pretty much the hallmark feature of The Collection; if you get the Blu-rays for one thing other than the best version of the stories themselves, then it’s these.

Next: “it’s like they’ve given the road a Brazilian…”

  1. Michael Grade was actually back with Matthew Sweet on the radio only this weekend, giving his ha’p’orth for a lovely programme about The Wilderness Years, and in a brief clip actually saying more than he does on the In Conversation interview with the frankly extraordinary admission that he told John Nathan Turner ‘I don’t like sci fi personally’. He was the Controller of BBC One, for crying out loud – would he have reshaped the channel accordingly if he didn’t like sport, or news? But at least Ben Aaronovitch can now consider his opinion thoroughly vindicated. ↩︎

Special Features #9: The Wall of Lies

Posted on by James Lark

Footage from Doctor Who conventions is, to be brutally honest, of variable quality, both technically and in terms of content. This is not to criticise the good folk who did a highly impressive job of getting the Doctor Who convention thing off the ground in the first place, but in the sanitised 21st century where all things Doctor Who have a carefully protected slickness to them, the wobbly video footage from last century’s gatherings can creak a little.

And yet, and yet… there’s an honesty to what’s preserved in these archives that we wouldn’t get from the overproduced present, as well as an anarchic quality that, when placed in the right hands, can yield absolute gold. And you don’t get more anarchic, or any righter, than the hands of the Fourth Doctor himself, Thomas Stewart Baker. I’m not denying the charms of a Katy Manning, or a McCoy and Aldred double act. But nobody owns the stage like Tom Baker, and nobody else can talk like him; he is perhaps the only Doctor Who celebrity (at least since Jon Pertwee died) to whom you could apply the label raconteur.

When I first watched these convention excerpts I was surprised by the fact that sometimes the stars were just announced and left to wander on by themselves, but any potential awkwardness is swept away when the giant (in every sense) form of Baker strolls on, sometimes wearing a coat and clutching a plastic bag as if he’s just walked in off the street and, grinning from ear to ear, begins to regale the audience with (it would appear) pretty much anything that pops into his head. He is effortlessly charming, occasionally savage (‘the lecherous old bags!’), unashamedly smutty (he knows his audience), verbose, absurd, and effortlessly turns out phrases that most writers would labour over for hours. And he is, it goes without saying, endlessly, brilliantly, quotably funny.

So number 9 on my countdown of best special features is The Panopticon Archive: Tom Baker 1997, to be found on The Collection: Season 17 (Blu-ray). I could just have easily chosen other appearances, but he is on particularly dazzling form here, spinning a yarn about ironing, John Lewis, The Royal Academy andl an encounter at his own gravestone, all the while ruminating on his favourite topics (God, religion and death), before he announces that he has written a book and charmingly fields questions from the justifiably delighted crowd.

Is any of it true? The odd detail, perhaps. It doesn’t really matter when you’re having this much fun – and, when a voice (which it turns out is that of Archivist Supreme Richard Bignell) asks how much of his book should be believed, Baker gives the perfect response.

Blissful, unmissable stuff. And if this isn’t the last time Tom Baker crops up on this list, you shouldn’t be too surprised.

Next: ‘somebody just said in my ear “I think that’s enough on Doctor Who“…’