Stones of Blood

Due to them wearing out and my VHS player being increasingly hard to service (it's a beautiful piece of engineering inside), I invested a great deal of £s in updating my Doctor Who VHS collection to DVD.  That's it I thought.  A good investment.  After all VHS had only half the picture quality of DVD which can faithfully reproduce all 625 lines on an old cathode ray tube but slightly flatter. But blow-me-down-with-an-industrial-wind-macine if the BBC didn't find a way to milk their old content further by releasing it on Blu-ray.  Well, I can't afford that at £50 a go, no matter how many extras they put on.  No disrespect to Toby Hadoke & Co but I don't want to pay their pension.  Particularly since at the same time the BBC made almost all old Dr Who free on iPlayer.  

So imagine my schadenfreude when I discovered there were problems with the Blu-rays & the BBC in an attempt to drain more money from fans had applied dodgy AI upscaling filters that give Sarah Jane a cleft palette, straighten Tom Baker's crooked teeth like they're selling unnecessary dental work, make old people look like they've had the world's worst facelifts or are filtered TikTok influencers who've had plastic surgery to make them look like their own filters ...and dyslexicly (is that a word?) rewrite the words on the TARDIS door in dodgy fonts...  

All because some people bought massive 92 inch TVs on which you can see the CRT lines.  Not that anyone's really crying out for AI "upscaling", it's just people inventing themselves work.  I do have the Spearhead from Space Bluray as this was entirely made on film so there is extra quality to be mined but that's it ... How much more blood can they get out of these stones...?

So three cheers for my not-so-old DVDs where everyone doesn't look like they've been replaced by an Auton.  The past is another country ... and eventually they're going to reach a point where there's no one to bring back to do DVD extras anymore because everyone will have passed on.  Which is a shame because the thing that makes "classic" Doctor Who DVDs so much fun is everyone on the commentaries etc is now retired and can be brutally honest about what they actually thought of their colleagues at the time without the fear of losing work.  

I look forward to the fully immersive holographic 2040 Whateveritisthen editions of "New Who" which faithfully recreate an old Cathode Ray Tube TV with glass and broadcast signal distortions being released with Christopher Eccleston telling us what he really thinks of RTD and Captain Jack's naked body eventually...

Not that anyone's really bitchy on the commentaries but you can tell the diplomacy filter is switched off in most of the contributors.  It being new content they're selling no one's going to let the side down say "Well, that was a bit pants" on a New Who commentary.  The occasionally brutal honesty is the fun really...

In other Doctor Who news the BBC are still trying to prise old film prints off miserly film collectors but are stuck in probate processes.  I upset someone on X by refering to these collectors as misers.  I do apologise.  Its very generous of them not to just be buried with their film collections like a modern day Tutankhamun.  Let's not get into the ethics of whether these prints should have been returned to BBC Enterprises to be destroyed.  We know for a fact that when Peter Cook contemporaneously offered to store the old copies of "Not Only... but Also" to save them from landfill, the BBC refused on policy grounds and destroyed them anyway.  They're all out there somewhere, dumpster divers!  According to the unreliable narrator that is Ian Levine when he walked into BBC Enterprises on behalf of JNT all 7 positives and all 7 negatives of "The Daleks" were sitting on a table marked "to be junked" because they didn't understand that the main archive had been purged as ruthlessly as one of Stalin's Politburos...

But anyway... the BBC have generously promised to broadcast a new episode in December 2026 after the Disney deal finally fell apart ... and before Christmas they'll be releasing the War Between Land And Sea spin-off that nobody asked for but ... Let's keep an open mind...  Apparently post production takes almost a year these days... With the result that everyone thought "The Interstellar Song Contest" was a comment on the War in Gaza despite the script being written before it started.  Maybe there's something to be said for leaving a few bloopers in and doing it stupidly quickly on a shoestring...