Review of Doctor Who: The Claws Of Axos

Introduction

This is a story I`ve been looking forward to for years. It`s from the Pertwee era of the show, when the Doctor dressed like Austin Powers and sounded like Worzel Gummidge. Jon Pertwee has always been my favourite Doctor, as he was running the TARDIS when I was growing up in that wonderful taste-free era of the early 1970s. Or as I like to call it, the Golden Age of television.

I`m serious. Between 1965 and 1977, television was full of wonderfully light, imaginative tv shows like Dr Who, The Avengers, Jason King, The Persuaders, The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Ghosts Of Motley Hall. Thick-ear television like The Sweeney hadn`t arrived yet, and the News was so dismal that anything was a blessed relief.

Claws Of Axos came out in the middle of that era. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth by the Time Lords, and he had taken a temporary position as Scientific Advisor to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) while he tried to mend the ship. Unfortunately, his exile coincided with Earth`s becoming particularly attractive to the scum of the universe and he found himself defending the planet against a variety of foes including the Autons, Silurians, Daemons and of course the ubiquitous Daleks.

The Axons came to Earth ostensibly in peace with great gifts to honour mankind. Beautiful, golden-skinned and benevolent, they were just the sort of extraterrestrials a planet could hope to make first contact with. Of course, the fact they had offered the Master a lift to Earth indicated their real intent, and in their real form they looked like ambulatory spaghetti-and-meatballs.

Jon Pertwee is in top Who-form in this episode, ably assisted by scatty assistant Jo Grant played by Katy Manning. The gang from UNIT are present as ever and there`s plenty of action to be had.

Video

Presented in its original transmission format of four twenty-five minute episodes (4:3), Claws of Axos has gone through quite a bit to get here. The story is one of the many that suffered an ignominious fate during the 1970s when its original colour videotapes were wiped as part of the BBC`s internal economy. Programmes of every kind were considered ephemeral and beyond overseas sales, little consideration of value was attached to them. Claws Of Axos was, like much of the rest of that season, transferred to black-and-white 16mm film for overseas sales and the tapes flagged for re-use.

By the time BBC policy to its library had changed and older programmes were being preserved, only episodes one and four survived in their original 2" videotape format. Episodes two and three only survived as film copies, and even film copies had been destroyed on a regular basis in the past.

Then a while later, the two black-and-white episodes were recovered from TV Ontario in Canada as 2" videotape colour versions. Unfortunately these were in the NTSC format (525-lines at 30 frames per second rather than 625-lines at 25 frames per second). The video had been standards-converted to be shown on the Canadian tv system.

Standards conversion, especially in the 1970s, was a messy analogue process that introduced its own particular artefacts (such as juddering) into the image. To convert the episodes back to the PAL format and make them suitable for use in this country would have involved a second standards conversion and even more noise added to the picture.

In 1992, a group of technicians working within the BBC who were Doctor Who fans had unofficially formed the Doctor Who Restoration Team. Their work in restoring colour to a story only held in black-and-white meant that their expertise has been utilised on many BBC Video and DVD releases (as well as broadcast restorations) - not just Doctor Who stories.

In 1993, Ralph Montagu and Steve Roberts of the Restoration Team attended a meeting at the BBC`s Research and Development department at Kingswood Warren. The topic was the de-conversion of material that had been standards converted for overseas sale. BBC Engineer Jim Easterbrook had worked out a method to unpick the converted video signal. Sadly the research could go little further because at the time, neither the computing power or the budget to invest in hardware was available.

Montagu kept the idea in the back of his mind until a few years later when he met another engineer and fan of Doctor Who called James Insell. Insell realised that in the intervening period, computer technology had moved on so far that it might be possible to implement the Reverse Standards Conversion process as a non-real-time software process rather than as an expensive piece of dedicated hardware. Although BBC Engineering managers were less than enthusiastic, Insell researched the project in his own time and thanks to Montagu winning some funding for the project from BBC Worldwide, he was able to work with Jim Easterbrook in developing a working piece of software.

Unveiled as a working Windows application in 2004, RSC would run on a standard PC with a serial DV input/output card. It takes five hours to process a 25-minute episode, but the results are a distinct improvement on the double-converted alternative

**Thanks to www.restoration-team.co.uk for the background material used in the above.

Audio

The sound, restored by the Restoration Team`s Mark Ayres, had its own problems, which can also be read about on the Team`s website. The mono sound is reproduced on this release in Dolby Digital 2.0.

Features

As with most of these glorious releases, there is an audio commentary. This one features Katy Manning (assistant Jo Grant), Richard Franklin (Captain Mike Yates) and producer Barry Letts. There is a featurette on the director of the story Michael Ferguson and a behind the scenes compilation of raw studio footage. There is a photo gallery and informational text. "Who Was Doctor Axon?" is a tongue-in-cheek featurette on the RSC process of interest to restoration freaks like myself. There is a "Now And Then" featurette on the Dungeness locations and an Easter Egg.

Conclusion

While some naysayers curl a lip at this period in the Doctor`s career, I think the Pertwee era was the show at its best. Not a sci-fi show, but an adventure show. I`m always glad to see these episodes released on DVD, I`m just waiting for my all-time-favourite The Daemons to come out.