For the first time since taking over as the Doctor, Jon Pertwee gets to step outside the cosseted confines of UNIT Headquarters and leave his enforced exile on Earth behind, venturing off to a muddy quarry of a planet in the year 2472.
The Doctor and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) encounter some colonists and interplanetary miners arguing over who has rights to the land whilst trying not to slip over in the sludge – muck dodgers in the 25th century, you might say. Halfway through a wannabe western so gargantuan it makes Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West look like a five-minute short, the Master (Roger Delgado) turns up, pretending to be an Adjudicator come to sort out the dispute, and steals the show.
‘What – no interplanetary travel permit? No registration for your TARDIS? No personal identification?’ he purrs after realising the Doctor has none of the impeccably forged documents he possesses. ‘Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo,’ the Doctor retorts, crabby that the infinitely cooler of the two Time Lords has upstaged him – and so it goes on for the rest of the story.
Roger Delgado’s assured and authoritative charm is a pleasant change from the preternatural pomposity of Pertwee, but even he can’t save a story that is so overstretched it becomes interminable, with the return to Planet Earth at the end of six long episodes a welcome relief.
‘Colony in Space’ isn’t as much the first Doctor Who space opera of the seventies but the televisual equivalent of that other doyen of the seventies, the progressive rock concept album – and even now, decades after punk blew the old dinosaurs out of the water, there can be fewer harsher comparative criticisms than that.
Extras: Unusually for a classic Doctor Who DVD release, there isn’t a great deal of bonus material on offer. There’s a documentary themed around the tired conceit of a recruitment video for the Interplanetary Mining Corporation, ‘IMC Needs You!’, which features contributions from the usual suspects of the era (the late Barry Letts’s calm recollections – ‘It was the quarry to end all quarries’ – contrast nicely with the excitable reminisces of Katy Manning: ‘It was like we all had terrible flatulence!’ she guffaws before sagely noting: ‘it’s really hard to work with an entire crew when they’ve seen you sitting on a Portaloo’) amid some deliberately cheesy visuals.
There’s also a selection of soundless film outtakes in ‘From the Cutting Room Floor’ that aren’t particularly fascinating without audio – lip-readers might know what Jon Pertwee is saying in-between takes of his fight with the giant lizards – even if there is something faintly charming about seeing the actors, particularly Pertwee and Delgado, in the middle of creating the show that came to define their careers.
There’s little else of note but, thankfully, the commentary on what is an overlong and tedious story goes a long way to make up both for the quality of the serial and the relative paucity of the extras. Actors Katy Manning (‘I only got the part because I had a few frocks’), Bernard Kay (‘It was ludicrous – but it was a special kind of ludicrous’) and Morris Perry (‘One is very thankful for the credits at the end – you can actually read the actor’s names … you can’t nowadays’), script editor Terrance Dicks (‘It was enormous fun – and the fact that I had no memory of it whatsoever, it all came as a surprise to me, which is rather nice’), director Michael Briant (‘This is something which, I think, any director would be totally ashamed of’) and Assistant Floor Manager – and subsequently director of modern Doctor Who – Graeme Harper (‘I don’t know how much this would have cost in its period but today, I think they spend £1million an episode, maybe more’) reminisce fondly about the past and grumble good-naturedly about the present in the usual entertaining fashion.
Released on DVD on Monday 3rd October 2011 by 2Entertain.
Watch a clip about the models that were created for ‘Colony in Space’…