BBC Home Video re-releases the first four seasons (including seasonal specials) of the revived Doctor Who series on Blu-Ray, starring Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant as the Doctor. The content of this box set (apart from the final few specials starring Tennant, which were shot in high definition) was upscaled to HD, initially to include these seasons in a larger box set encompassing the entire revived series. 
If you were missing any of the Christopher Eccleston season or any of David Tennant’s first run as the star of Doctor Who, you’re in luck – it’s all here. All the extras and Confidential Cutdowns are here. It’s all in one set. That’s the good news.
And the less good news? Fair warning, I’m going to go on one of my tangents here from having worked in television post-production for most of my adult life. You have been warned.
It’s now been 20 years since Doctor Who returned to our screens as an ongoing series, and a lot’s changed, from a constant barrage of political assaults on the BBC’s funding sources and independence, to radical changes in how television itself is made. This box set is a product of the latter set of changes. When production of Christopher Eccleston’s sole season of Doctor Who began in 2004, TV technology was in the midst of the largest sea change since the early 1960s, but Doctor Who was still made largely as it had been when production ended in the late ’80s, shot on videotape both in studio and on location, so the raw footage didn’t really look much different from where we left the Doctor in 1989. One thing that hadn’t changed between the ’60s and the early aughts was the perception, both within the industry and among the viewing public, that video is reserved for “cheap” or “disposable” programming – soaps, game shows, live sports, and of course what any of us were shooting with our camcorders: material with little to no shelf life. But the BBC, out of cost concerns, had spent entire generations producing all but its most prestigious programming on either a mixture of video and film, or just video. Very few BBC productions (and usually only prestige pieces that secured international co-financing before production started) have had the luxury of being shot entirely on film. The solution to this perceived problem arrived in the ’90s with digital editing and video processing: the “filmlook” process was a combination of lighting techniques and post-production tricks (including alteration of frame rates, color grading, and in some cases overlaying artificial “film grain”) to make it look like more money had been spent and film had been used. The process was applied to everything from a single season of Red Dwarf to prime time soaps to the original Ricky Gervais iteration of The Office. (American productions have tried out this process too, including Hot In Cleveland, Reba, and even Survivor.)
Among the post-production steps that the raw Doctor Who footage went through between 2005-2008 was digitally adding “bloom”, making visible light sources (and the reflected light on everything illuminated) glow more dramatically to help sell the film effect. This was probably done at the time to help hide some of the rougher edges of the production, but when footage that has been treated to that process is upscaled, as nearly all of the episodes in this set have been, it leaves the upscaling software with “fuzzy” footage to try to sharpen, making it much harder for that process to convincingly produce high-definition video. It would have been more expensive, but probably would’ve produced better results, had the bulk of the footage – anything without effects composited – been sourced from the original shooting media, upscaled in that raw form, and then given a grading/processing pass sympathetic to how the shows were broadcast. But that’s not what happened here; the original episodes as broadcast were run through some software and they called it a day. The results are sometimes really impressive, and at other times they’re a bit of a mess… which isn’t a surprise, because in upscaling from 1024 x 576 (the resolution of the original tapes) to 1920 x 1080, the software – no matter how good it is – is being tasked with extrapolating nearly half of the visual information on the screen, when that information has been given layers of bloom and soft focus to trick the eye of the audience in 2005-2008. And AI upscaling software just isn’t up to that task yet.
The one saving grace of this set is that it’s not terribly expensive, it includes all of the holiday specials without sequestering them to a separate purchase, and even if the upscaling hasn’t always re-rendered them gracefully, the majority of the original performances still shine despite the imperfect process intended to give them a glow-up. The strengths (and weaknesses) of the original stories still stand. Russell T. Davies still needs to stop leaning on the season finale being a short hop away from the grisly demise of all reality as we know it. Martha was still handled badly in the third season, and yet still shines thanks to Freema Agyeman, whose talent was too big for a character whose writer was never going to stop comparing her to Rose. The bonus features from the previous DVD and Blu-Ray sets are all here, though they were only ever produced at standard-definition, and didn’t even get the upscaling treatment (a pity, since upscaling that would’ve provided a good example of what going back to the original untreated footage might’ve looked like). And I suspect the reason it’s not terribly expensive is because this probably isn’t our last stop in the ninth or tenth Doctors’ TARDIS. Eventually, “The Collection” – the ongoing series of wonderful Blu-Ray re-releases of seasons of the 20th century Doctor Who series – will exhaust its supply of material.
And when The Collection’s classic series well runs dry, maybe it will do what this release really should have been on the eve of the 20th anniversary of new Doctor Who: give these more recent (but now far enough in the past to look at more critically) seasons the same treatment: unflinching new bonus features, a proper audiovisual cleanup of the kind that has salvaged much of the original series, all hopefully amounting up to a proper presentation and preservation of the seasons that not only brought back the Doctor, but made Doctor Who a mainstay of TV on both sides of the Atlantic again. But that’s something that this set is not.
Home video review by Earl Green