Sadly, instead BBC WORLDWIDE released THE THREE DOCTORS.

It’s nothing special, or challenging. A ‘stroll-of-the-mill’ (the pace hardly accelerates into a ‘run’) that epitomises the laxity that seemed to be emerging across the series at the time. The cast and crew strive unsuccessfully to even meet mediocrity, as if they knew that they were backing a winner and didn’t want to try too hard.

An apathy-versary special. Then and now.

Firstly, the strikes that the picture quality and sound of the ‘main feature’ is no better than the version included in the recent TIME LORD BOXSET (released by UK retailer, W H SMITH). Its picture colour is jaundice, dusty & ’hair-gated’ and quivery. Perhaps, it was a hurried release, with the fan group, RESTORATION TEAM, challenged for the first time.

This assertion is strengthened by the weakness of the ’extras’, all of which are ‘existing’. No new material but nonetheless absorbing for the most part.

For many of a ‘certain age’ (those who remember the days when VHS Tape Machines were only available from GRANADA RENTALS and a Remote Control was the stuff of science fiction), THE FIVE FACES OF DOCTOR WHO was the first full-length experience of both the First and Second Doctors. The season’s Trailer is like finding a Wonka Bar Golden Ticket - it merely whets the appetite for more. Will the Trailers for the 2005 New Series create the same buzz?

Unlike finding a Golden Ticket, I always feel that most Troughton archive material is like finding out that the Wonka Bar is past its ‘best by’ date. Expecting something tasty and sweet yet it is a little rancid. Why is Troughton material so sought and regaled? He says very little and what he said was randomly trite and befuddled. However, in this interview for PEBBLE MILL AT ONE he seems to more coherent as he recounts the perils of 1950s ‘live’ TV drama, how he wanted to play his Doctor styled as a ‘blacked-up’ Turkish souk trader and how the character was a ‘serious part’.

Will the real Patrick Troughton please stand up?

Additional material from PEBBLE MILL AT ONE features stalwart FX supreme, Bernard Wilkie, an assortment monsters and knives that seemingly cut theough his flesh. 70s daytime telly at its most insipid. If only it had been affected by the 3-day week and national power cuts we would be know saved.

Twenty years after the transmission of THE THREE DOCTORS, Jon Pertwee attended (yet another) DWAS PanoptiCon to captivate and engage the audience in the way that only he could.

Like CARRY ON… actor, Kenneth Williams, Pertwee was a master raconteur. However, during this on-stage footage Pertwee dominates only during his ‘solo’ performance and generously supports during the joint panel with Katy Manning.

Pertwee selflessly acknowledges that “I’m a complete burke” when commenting about doing too many of his own stunts, whilst Manning discloses that she and Jon, whilst travelling to a location created “an entire Opera to Brussel Sprouts” as Jon loathed them. Wonderful stuff.

An exuberant Nicholas Courtney joins them briefly on stage. The team back together. Happy times.

The BLUE PETER archive was raided again, wheeling in the Whomobile, Pertwee and a river of past clips. This is an interesting example of how superbly blurred the boundary was between Pertwee the actor and the Doctor character. Inseparable. Pertwee in Doctor ‘uniform’, driving the DOCTOR WHO car, yet being Jon.

I wonder how Eccleston will handle this - if at all.

Thankfully, the Easter Egg is missing. It a little depressing to be patronised by another set of off-air Continuity Announcements. Why are these so allegedly electrifying for fans? We have better things to do - like breathing.

THE THREE DOCTORS. It does exactly what it says on the box. Nothing more.