DVD Extras

a variety of extras from Doctor Who: The Complete Fourth Series, including:

BBC Trailers (Disc 1)
Ooh, I love the Voyage of the Damned trailers, especially the long cinema one. I hope there's one to come this year...

David Tennant's Video Diaries (Part 1)
David Tennant and Julie Gardner -- with Phil Collinson and Russell T Davies on the phone! -- get a police escort into Blackpool to turn on the illuminations. Brilliant!

Deleted Scenes: Voyage of the Damned
It's funny watching the deleted scenes -- they're all pre-filmising, so the picture's all video-y, and with studio sound only... which means they really, really look and sound like classic Who. A very odd experience.

Deleted Scenes: Howard Attfield
Howard Attfield originally reprised his role fromThe Runaway Bride as Donna's dad, filling Wilf's part. However, the actor was too ill to continue filming and sadly passed away shortly after completing these scenes for episode one.

Deleted Scenes: Journey's End
Including an alternate ending that, frankly, belongs deleted. Though obviously it also belongs on DVD for everyone to see.

the start of The Journey (So Far)
Woah, it's surprisingly weird seeing Eccleston as the Doctor again. Not watched any of his eps for years. It's funny to remember how uncertain everyone was if Tennant could follow in his shoes, whereas now, for me, he's virtually wiped Eccleston from memory.

+ commentary snippets
The Doctor Who team are an engaging lot y'know -- I listened to the start of every commentary to hear who the participants were and, out of curiosity, to see how chatty they were, then wound up listening to several minutes of them! On Journey's End it was over 20 minutes before I finally turned it off again.

I really ought to go listen to all the commentaries, though I'm now obviously 55 episodes behind! And there's another 40 commentaries if you count the podcast ones.

Actually, there's a point to be made here: the VotD commentary on this set is a new one, the first time they've done that for the DVD (the other two Christmas specials duplicated the online commentaries, while the remaining episodes had different podcast and DVD commentaries). But the DVD has Russell Tovey (who played the relatively minor role of Midshipman Frame), Murray Gold (who does the music), and Peter Bennett (the first assistant director. Yes, really.) I'm sure they're all lovely people with interesting things to say, but that line-up just doesn't compare to the podcast's Dream Team of Russell T Davies, Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner. When the DVD is the one you pay for and the online ones a nice bonus, surely the better commentary should be on the disc?

At least the online ones are all still online, but, as I've thought since series two, surely there would be room on the discs to squeeze in an extra commentary track for each ep? I know we shouldn't complain -- as I said, they're all still available online for free, and most TV shows don't manage a single commentary for every episode never mind two! -- but... well, why not, hm?