Season 12 on Blu-ray!

Season 12 on Blu-ray!

Season 12 of 'Doctor Who' has arrived on Blu-ray and a very fine thing it is indeed!

Quite simply, it's astonishing value for money and (even ignoring the stories themselves) presents you with the major problem of which disc to try out first.

Our old Blu-ray player has been refusing to play ball from time to time in the past few weeks, as though it was worried about the amount of use it was going to get once this release was welcomed into the house. Maybe it just thought it wasn't worthy and felt it had to give way for a newer model?

Anyway, we picked up a shiny new Panasonic job last Friday with Lisa getting a 10% discount, which is always welcome. We set it up Saturday morning and christened it by trying out the title sequence to 'Here Come The Double Deckers!'. Surely everyone tests their new player like this, don't they?

Given that we were concentrating on 'Juliet Bravo' for most of Saturday, we didn't get much of a chance to try out anything with better picture quality, but now we really have an opportunity to put it through its paces.

The brief bit of 'Robot' Part One we had a gander at looked fine and dandy, but it's all the stuff we haven't seen before that we'll be concentrating on for the immediate future.

So what have we seen so far?

First up was 'Behind The Sofa : Robot' which sees Tom Baker, Philip Hinchcliffe and Sadie Miller in one recording sesssion and Louise Jameson, Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding in the other.  Having done a couple of DVD commentaries ourselves (on our own sofa) this felt lovely and relaxed and it'll be interesting to follow this through the rest of the season.

We also had a look at 'Like Nothing On Earth', the documentary for 'The Sontaran Experiment' which even features Donald Douglas and Peter Walshe sharing some of their memories of recording in Dartmoor all those years ago.

But for us, today's highlight was definitely 'Doctor Who Times' on Disc Six. This takes a wider look at 'Doctor Who's place in the BBC schedules of the time and is something we're always interested in. We zoom through the pages of 'Radio Times' and are treated to a wide range of clips and continuity, some of which were old favourites from our YouTube browsing history, but many others were new to us.

Mind you, we must admit that we kept being distracted by seeing 'Barbapapa' popping up in the listings, but that's just us being odd, I think.

'Doctor Who Times' clearly involved lots of hard work from Ed Stradling and we hope something similar will feature on any potential future Blu-ray sets.

But we've only scratched the surface today and that's the really exciting thing!

(By Andrew Trowbridge)