The Incomplete Guide to The War Games in Colour

In which Elliot partied like it was 1969, which ended badly for the Doctor

DOCTOR WHO: The War Games In Colour

I am a huge Doctor Who fan, and although I did nothing much with my teenage years other than watching Doctor Who, even I haven’t watched the entire classic series. I didn’t really have the money to be buying every serial on DVD, and to be honest, there are some that one is better off for having not seen: especially certain serials from the 1980s. The other difficulty is that not all of them exist any more, due to the BBC junking hundreds of tapes when they ran out of physical storage space. I am slowly but surely progressing through the entire classic run as is available on iPlayer since the 60th anniversary celebrations, but I’m enjoying this as a slow burn. I’ve got literal decades to work through.

Over Christmas, we were treated to the best Christmas special in a decade thanks to Steven Moffat’s Joy to the World which was full of wonder, time travel chaos, a side character that we wish was the main companion, and fire and fury at the way the Tories handled the pandemic. The ending in particular, (SPOILERS IN THE NEXT SENTENCE), revealing that Nicola Coughlan’s lonely young woman had to go on this adventure with the Doctor to take her place in the history of the nativity story was particularly touching.

However, the real treat for Doctor Who fans over Christmas was The War Games in Colour. After remastering serial 2, The Daleks as The Daleks in Colour as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations last year, (I would link to it, but it seems to have fallen off iplayer, probably because BBC Studios needs it to prove its worth as a commercial release), to mixed results, these HD remasterings and colourisations of the Black & White era seem to be set up as an annual fixture.

The War Games’ DVD trailer from a decade ago.

The War Games is the Second Doctor’s final serial. It is ten episodes long, with a mammoth runtime of 250 minutes, (only the twelve-part The Daleks Master Plan and fourteen-part The Trial of a Time Lord are longer, fans aren’t convinced that the single-serial, Flux, that encompassed Jodie Whittaker’s third season / series 13 counts in the same way). Patrick Troughton’s pitch perfect take on the role was coming to an end after three years, and the producers were facing all sorts of problems, so had pitched that a future version of the show could be made with more efficiency and relatable action and drama if the Doctor was confined to Earth, as would be the case for Jon Pertwee’s first few years. This meant a story was needed that would result in handing over the role in way that the Doctor would be feasibly confined to Earth afterwards. This was the first episode where the Doctor faced his own people.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Fans were alarmed when they learned that this colourisation and new edit would be presented as a 90 minute TV movie. This would mean jettisoning literally hundreds of minutes of the episode. The Daleks had similarly been reduced from its 175 minutes across seven-parts to 75 minutes last year. This is because old TV does move at a bafflingly slow pace. Everything is shot like a play, which, in a way, most BBC Television was basically written as if it were tele-plays. Right up to the end of the 1980s, Doctor Who was sort of anachronistic and outdated by its style of production being leftover from this early 1960s mindset.

The result is utterly brilliant. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe, the wonderful adventurous and mischievous trio, land in a World War One trench, and are taken prisoner and sentenced to death for betrayal and execution all within the first 8 minutes. It’s a ruthless edit, but it brings the modern Doctor Who action-adventure sensibility into the past seamlessly. In a daring escape, they learn that they aren’t on Earth at all, but a series of battlefields taken out of time, where lots of wars all at once are happening, as an evil race of War Lords are plotting to take human-kind’s worse excesses from various conflicts and use their findings to create a savage intergalactic army. These ideas are so ludicrously ambitious and exciting, especially when written by Terrance Dicks in a pre-Star-Wars, barely post-Star-Trek world. The drama is absolutely huge here.

SPECIAL ADDITIONS

The colourisation is also very carefully done, and never oversaturates the screen, in the way that some others do: I’m looking at you It’s a Wonderful Life (which just does not work). These aren’t just colourisations, however; they are akin to the Star Wars special editions. Additions made include new model shots, occasional CGI Tardises and flying machines, and the modern depiction of Gallifrey inserted in. Apart from Gallifrey, these have all been done to look the way that they would have done if created by model makers of 1969, and its all really classy. An updated score by Mark Ayres helps the whole thing feel like a TV movie, but it’s not quite as overbearing as his work on The Daleks.

Then the biggest and most exciting enhancement: The Master. The Doctor’s ‘best enemy’ (according to the Third Doctor at least, when he bumps into him like a nuisance in The Five Doctors), was never meant to be The War Chief, one of the primary antagonists breying for power in this story. The Master wasn’t invented until 1971, by a whole separate production team. The biggest and most anxiety-inducing enhancement in this edit is the use of The Master’s ‘Harold Saxon Theme’ from 2007’s Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords when The War Chief (Edward Brayshaw) is on screen.

It’s a brilliant change. It adds so much more. Is this the first ever Master story? When the Doctor first sees him and tells his companion, Zoe, to run, despite having dangerously infiltrated the enemy base, it is possibly the most scared that Troughton ever looked on screen. Some fans have retroactively applied the idea that this is The Master since forever, and others have dismissed it as making the universe even smaller. Sure, it makes it even more of a soap opera, but the consequences are even more personal now, especially in the sequences where the Doctor seemingly gives up and must help the War Lords (the exact name of the race of humanoids that are behind all this is never confirmed), in their evil goals.

Not everything is perfect. Fan edits on YouTube of the Doctor’s trial with the time lords have previously posited the idea that the drawings of strange men could now be replaced with future incarnations that the Doctor rejects. This is possibly the clunkiest edit, using weird promotion pictures of the Doctors rather than footage from future episodes. However, to have 200 minutes of constant capture and escape loops edited down to a manageable and faster paced series of montages, allowing the plot more emphasis whilst reducing the running up and down corridors makes up for it. The new regeneration sequence means that the odd and creepy exile sequence has been replaced, but its worth it for the gag about timelines.

I’ve given away too much, but if you weren’t sure about Classic-Series Doctor Who because of its aristocratic tones and confusing pacing, these colourisations are just the way to do it. It looks like the modern bombastic action-adventure series that Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat got us used to. It always has been. And it is better than ever. This is a classic. Thankfully, unlike George Lucas’ special editions, these aren’t replacing the classics, but enhancing them. It’s a great time to be a Doctor Who fan.

The War Games in Colour is on BBC iPlayer now. As is almost all of Doctor Who, including Joy to the World.