Where Are You 'Planet Of The Daleks' Episode Three?

Where Are You 'Planet Of The Daleks' Episode Three?

Just when you think you've sussed the way the 'Doctor Who' schedule on Twitch works, they throw you a googly by jumping from 'Planet Of The Daleks' Episode Two to 'Planet Of The Daleks' Episode Four, which begs a question or three...

Now once upon a time, it was standard practice for PBS stations in America to do this, as Episode Three had the audacity to only exist in black-and-white.

But those days are long behind us and we've got a very good colour copy sitting on our shelves. There's even a DVD extra that details all the clever technical jiggery-pokery by people such as the Colour Recovery Working Group that have led us to this happy situation.

So you can imagine the confusion in the chatroom last night when Episode Four made an unexpectedly early appearance. The idea that Episode Three could still cause a problem was so far off our radar that we didn't even think about it beforehand.

But with Warren coming round to record some material for a future edition of 'Round The Archives' (more on that in a later blog post), we thought we might as well do something to cover the gap.

We briefly considered acting out the script using soft toys and our trusty Palitoy talking Dalek, but it wouldn't have been easy to do in one take, which is still currently the limit of our ability, at least when it comes to stuff on video.

We've done a couple of reaction videos, which involve watching the production notes, consulting BBC Genome and glancing at the odd reference work beforehand, but this time we threw caution to the wind and had a bash at doing a live commentary. Bung the episode on, switch on the subtitles, turn down the volume and hope we can come up with something vaguely entertaining to say...

We have recorded a DVD commentary before (for Nick Goodman's 'Tide Of Freedom') so it was not completely new territory, but there's definitely a knack to keeping it going without everyone talking over each other.

But at least it's given us a bit more experience and maybe amused a few people along the way. And at least it's in full colour!

Unless, of course, we chuck the colour copy away and have to get some clever sorts in to help out...

And we'll find out whether ther're going to skip or show 'Invasion [Of The Dinosaurs]' Part One in a few hours, so that will be exciting, too...

Our 'Planet Of The Daleks' Episode Three commentary video can be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)