With a spooky alien menace in a modern day English setting, ‘The Awakening’ is a two-part adventure featuring a feisty female companion, a slightly cowardly, wryly amusing male counterpart and an energetic, good-humoured Time Lord who conveys an incredible sense of age and wisdom in spite of his youthful appearance. If it weren’t for the slow pace and the forced cliffhanger halfway through, this could almost be an episode of Doctor Who from 2011, rather than 1984.
The Doctor (Peter Davison) takes companions Turlough (Mark Strickson) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) to visit the latter’s grandfather in the village of Little Hodcombe. However, the twentieth century has become the seventeenth as a full-sized and devastatingly accurate reconstruction of the English Civil War is taking place – and something even more terrible lurks inside the wall of the local church…
The story itself, alternately charming and chilling twenty-seven years ago, has aged fairly well (in spite of a few inevitably clunky special effects shots and a resolution at the end that is best described as ‘vague’) and at less than an hour in length is perfectly suited for showing to the kind of easily distracted modern audience that Purves and company were bemoaning on the EarthStory set’s first disc. Adult fans wondering which story to show their children as an introduction to the classic series could do a lot worse than ‘The Awakening’.
Extras: With only two episodes of actual story on the disc, there’s plenty of additional material to fill up the remaining space. ‘Making The Malus’ revisits the original alien prop which ‘lurks, ready to greet visitors when they come in,’ on the wall of a fan who bought it at auction; ‘From The Cutting Room Floor’ showcases footage edited from the transmitted story (including a tedious and awkward sequence featuring Tegan and forgotten robot companion Kamelion, who is slumped against the wall like a drunk in a pub toilet and talks in the voices of the Doctor and Turlough); and ‘The Golden Egg Awards’ sees Peter Davison collecting a prize from Noel Edmonds for the overplayed and not-all-that-funny outtake clip of a horse trashing a purpose-built church lynch-gate on location.
Best of all is ‘Return To Little Hodcombe’, a laidback and amiable documentary in which director Michael Owen Morris, script editor Eric Saward and actors Janet Fielding and Keith Jayne return to the original shooting location to reminisce about making the story, while some elderly residents hog the camera and refer to Doctor Who fans as ‘geeks’.
Released on DVD on Monday 20th June 2011 by 2entertain.
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