STORY PLOTLINE

London, 1983: an old house mysteriously burns to the ground.

London, 1883: The Doctor and Ace arrive at a sinister mansion in the rural hamlet of Perivale. Horrors old and new await the time travelers amongst the peculiar residents of Gabriel Chase.

But it is Ace who must confront her own worst nightmares when she discovers that her past and the house's future are inextricably linked.

COMMENT  Spoliers ahead

I suppose it had to happen at some stage. The BBC has started releasing DOCTOR WHO stories in which the extras are more interesting than the stories.

I say 'started'; given that anyone who wants the things will already have a copy of some description or be resigned to it coming around on UK Gold every so often (yes this is the Internet but we're talking about a UK release so the point stands). So many of the stories, unless they've been revamped in some way as in THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH, depend on the extras to make them appealing but in the case of THE TWO DOCTORS it has to be faced - the story's rubbish, so the extras are all that's left.

And they're a mixed bag.

There are the featurettes, for example - 'Under the Sun' and 'Under the lights'. These are montages of takes, alternative and otherwise, which make up the making of a programme in its entirety. And they are dull, dull, dull - much of TV production consists of getting the lighting exactly right, getting the sound levels exactly right and if these compilations prove anything then it's that we're lucky someone else does this and we don't have to sit theough them ourselves.

Then there's 'Doctor Who In A Fix With Sontarans', a Jim'll Fix It DOCTOR WHO extra which oddly reflects everything that was wrong with the programme at the time: extra gore at the expense of genuine suspense. Which is fine here, if only the programme had been better. And of course there's Gary Downie's 'Adventures in Time and Spain', in which he reveals that he's affable enough, more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it and it all serves to emphasise that the Spanish setting was pretty redundant anyway. The Robert Holmes documentary is better but it rather rubs it in that the attached story isn't the man at his best.

Don't kid yourself. If we'd had this sort of material for THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN release, or THE WAR GAMES when they get around to releasing it, we'd be lapping it up. As it is, the repetition of an already-too-slow story serves to rub our noses in it rather.

This period of DOCTOR WHO really wasn't that great, and if the BIG FINISH's experience demonstrates anything then it tells us that both Doctors (not just Troughton as I thought at the time) deserved better.