The sheer number of Doctor Who DVDs scheduled in 2007 made this “the heaviest year ever” for the restoration experts entrusted with the series’ archive.

By EDDIE ROBSON

In 2007 the range of ‘classic’ Doctor Who DVDs saw a major increase in activity.

From the outside, one might reasonably assume this was the knock-on effect of the series’ recent television revival.

But it had far more to do with the 50th anniversary. Which was due to take place in (checks notes)… 2013.

Dan Hall, who was then overseeing the range for distributor 2|entertain, explains. “My best friend Moray Laing was the editor of [children’s magazine] Doctor Who Adventures, and he was always very good at helping me pull together strategies,” he says. “It was through a conversation with him that we realised the 50th anniversary was coming up – and when I say ‘coming up’, it was about six years down the line.” But they agreed the last two releases should be Terror of the Zygons and The Tenth Planet – with Dan noting that the missing final episode of the latter “is the one you’ve got to animate, it’s the really iconic one, so I said that’s the one we’ve got to end on… So it was sort of working backwards from there, going ‘OK, we’ve got so many release slots per year, how do we make this work…’ And I was concerned that there was going to be such a big hoo-ha for the 50th that interest in the show might wane a little bit for a couple of years afterwards, just because there would’ve been so much.”

Dan Hall oversaw the Doctor Who DVD range for distributor 2|entertain.

Lee Binding’s cover art for the Destiny of the Daleks DVD.

Clayton Hickman’s cover art for Logopolis and the New Beginnings box set.

Castrovalva was packaged alongside The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis in New Beginnings. Cover art by Clayton Hickman.