10 Secrets We Learned From Doctor Who Season 17 Boxed Set
K9's tell-all memoir, romance, leggy Daleks and more!
Tom Baker's penultimate season as the Doctor is released this week, and alongside the upscaled versions of stone cold classics like City of Death and The Horns of Nimon there's the usual wealth of special features.
Quite simply, the Doctor Who Collection is the gold standard of archive television in the home entertainment market. The love, care and attention to detail ensures that new life is breathed into what could look like a creaky old telly show from the 1970s.
These special features, both informative and informal bring multiple perspectives to each story in the set, contributing to a definitive presentation of Classic Who. Amongst all the convention anecdotes that you've heard a hundred times before, the new documentaries and commentaries bring forth some new stories, revelations and surprises.
To whet your appetite, here are just a few of the new gems to be found. And of course: Spoilers, sweetie.
10. The "Silliness" of Taking Hitchhiker's Guide to Hollywood
Season 17 is notable for the involvement of science fiction legend Douglas Adams as script editor. On the cusp of making it big with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams put together one of Doctor Who's most inventive, intelligent and comedic series ever. The silliness and excess is too much for some fans, and it was certainly not to the taste of Adams' successor Christopher H Bidmead.
One of the many documentaries included in the new boxed set is a tribute to Douglas' work on Doctor Who, and Bidmead pulls no punches on the science fiction authors predilection for daftness. Whilst he clearly admires Adams, he also wonders why the author ever dreamed of taking Hitchhikers to Hollywood. Citing the usual comments about "Brittishness", Bidmead believes that the silliness took over Douglas Adams in the end and he was on to a loser. Easy to say when no Hollywood studios are battering down your doors to adapt The Leisure Hive.
One of Adams' former friends does rather poignantly point out that the author was disappointed with the amount of time he had put into getting the project off the ground, wondering what else Douglas could have achieved instead before his untimely death in 2001.