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 I’ve been very lax recently in reviewing the Dr Who DVDs, so I thought it was time to remedy the situation and review a Tom Baker classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
Our copy came courtesy of Blackstar for £17.99 (we either pre-order from there or get them from play.com) and I was really looking forward to watching this one when it arrived in a little padded envelope. We had just been to a Dr Who convention in Northampton which involved going to the little Victorian theatre that featured in this story, so not only was I going to re-live a great story, I was also going to see somewhere I KNEW. Before I go into detail about the quality and the special features on this DVD release it’s necessary to give you a plot outline…if you don’t want to know what happens, skip the next three paragraphs and rejoin later!
THE PLOT
Talons (as this story will now be known; for brevity’s sake) is a six part adventure set in the foggy streets of Victorian London. It is apparently loosely based on The Phantom of the Opera, Fu Manchu, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and even Dracula. The story involves the fourth Doctor (the inimitable Tom Baker) and his current companion Leela (played by Louise Jameson ~ famous for being in such programmes as Eastenders, Bergerac and Tenko) battling against someone or something horrible lurking in the sewers.
Tom Baker puts in a wonderful performance with shades of Sherlock Holmes and Louise Jameson plays the “savage” in a style not unlike Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (she swaps her regular “dad pleaser” skin outfit for Victorian dress and is taught that killing people is most unseemly for a young lady!). It’s a classic melodrama of a story with creepy misty streets, Gothic sewers and the flamboyancy of the Victorian Music Hall. The characters are strong ~ the Watson to Tom’s Holmes is Professor Lightfoot (a pathologist), the villain of the piece is Li H’sen Chang (an oriental magician) and the wonderfully cowardly Henry Gordon Jago (the self-important and thoroughly out of his depth Music Hall owner).
There’s plenty of murder, comedy and tragedy lurking in this one ~ you’ll find giant rats, a murderous ventriloquist's doll (Mr Sin), a time travelling criminal driven mad by thoughts of revenge (Magnus Greel) and the mysterious disappearances of young women who have been hypnotized by Li H’sen Chang in his theatre act. Talons is Dr Who at its best ~ it’s dark, dramatic and very atmospheric.
Talons was originally broadcast on TV from 26th February to the 2nd April 1977. The DVD release date was 28th April 2003 and it is a two disc set.
THE DVD
Disc One.
The first disc has the actual adventure on it. The only special features are the commentary and the On Screen Production notes, along with the interactive menu.
COMMENTARY
On this story the commentary is provided by David Maloney, Louise Jameson, John Bennett and Christopher Benjamin. I’m never really too bothered by the commentaries but I do try to have a listen. This one is a little difficult to follow because the group don’t all comment on all of the episodes. It’s a case of having to guess who has been paired up with whom! They all appear for the last episode, but the whole feel of the commentary is a bit disjointed I’m afraid. They all have something interesting to say and some amusing anecdotes to impart, but it doesn’t gel together for me.
ON SCREEN NOTES
I really enjoy reading these useful facts about location, the actors and production details about the story. The only is that the notes now seem to steering more towards just saying what was in the original script and what dialogue the actors were going to say. This begins to get a bit distracting at times and isn’t what I really wanted to know ~ I’m much more interested in finding out where things were filmed and trivia. I hope that future releases will see a turning away from the current trend for script deviation notes!
Disc Two.
Disc number two has the remainder of the special features on it.
WHOSE DOCTOR WHO
I really enjoyed this interesting documentary that was originally shown on BBC2 the day after the last episode of Talons was shown back in 1977. It was part of the Lively Arts series and was presented by Melvyn Bragg. I found this particularly informative because it goes through both the history of the show and also how it was seen to be affecting families in the 1970s. The behind the scenes stuff is great, as are the “typical” seventies families ~ it’s worth watching for the fashions and some of the people interviewed alone!
BLUE PETER THEATRE
This is fascinating! John Noakes, Peter Purves (a former character in Dr Who) and Leslie Judd build a miniature theatre, scenery and characters to put on a show inspired by Talons and Dr Who in general.
I really liked the sound effects section where the presenters learn how to make “realistic” sounds using slime, bubble wrap, etc. Another noteworthy part of this special feature shows Blue Peter being filmed on the Dr Who set when there is a strike at the BBC! A good chance to see behind the scenes of another Dr Who story ~ The Robot.
UNSEEN FOOTAGE
This was quite entertaining to begin with but got a bit tedious after a while. Included are around 25 minutes of extremely poor quality black and white footage from the studio recording of Talons. It’s good to see some scenes and dialogue in a way that I hadn’t seen before, but after 25 minutes I was a bit bored.
INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP HINCHCLIFFE
This is a bit of a continuation of the themes of the impact of television violence as discussed in the Lively Arts documentary. It features a 1977 Pebble Mill interview with Philip Hinchcliffe filmed just after he finished working on Dr Who. I enjoyed this because, at around 11 minutes long, it isn’t too long and gives Philips interesting views on the programme. A good feature!
TRAILERS
I love wallowing in nostalgia, so I always enjoy the contemporary continuity announcements and trailers for the show. The ones that appear here are for Talons and for the Who’s Dr Who documentary, so you get a little shot of what the BBC produced in the seventies ~ I love the spinning globe that used to appear on the continuity and the extremely posh announcers!
TARDIS CAM NO 6
I was never too sure about what this whole TARDIScam thing was all about. It features unusual artwork of the TARDIS in strange locations ~ they are in conjunction with the BBC website and are often very well produced, but I still don’t look at them more than once. It says on the DVD box that this is the final installment, so maybe everyone else has got a little bored of them too!
PHOTO GALLERY
This is another pretty standard addition to Dr Who DVDs at the moment. Although I find some of the unpublished and rare photos fascinating I still find that it is something I will look at infrequently. My hubby and I flick through the pictures and quickly get fed up! That said, there are some pretty good photos of the cast in this selection so I am quite glad I persevered and looked through them all.
EASTER EGGS
When these little bonus extras first started to appear on the discs I was told (erroneously) that I could only watch them on my computer. Now I know that I can get them by pressing sequences of buttons on my DVD remote control I rather enjoy trying to find them. Alun has cheated, surfed the net to find out what they are and where and how to find them ~ can’t fault him though, because some of them are a little tricky. As fare as I know there is just one Easter Egg extra on Talons, but you never know if someone has missed one! I think that the Easter Eggs are a nice extra and add to the feeling of interactivity on the discs.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Talons is a great DVD let down by a couple of annoying extras! I love the story and enjoyed the majority of the special features, so I can excuse a couple of weak links for the sake of the whole viewing experience. The sound and picture quality is a little less crisp than on some of the previous releases, but they are still a whole lot better than when it was previously released on video….and the quality will last longer than my extremely stretched and over-watched cassette!
I would thoroughly recommend that anyone thinking of adding this to their DVD collection should certainly do so. As well as being a cracking story it has a good and varied selection of special features. If you already have it on video it’s still worth getting, not only for the quality but also for the documentaries and other extras. Thoroughly recommended!
» Review by Andrea Waterhouse, Copyright 2005.
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