The Tour is going to stake itself out to a very controversial statement.
Ready for it?
Doctor Who always looks better on film.
There. We said it. None of the 405 or 625-line videotape or OB-broadcast (junk) stuff for us, no sir. We like the flimsy film-y stuff. The poster child for this in the classic era of course is Spearhead From Space, which just looks marvelous. Now for the record the decision to go all-film for Spearhead was forced upon the production team when a strike took out their studio space for the duration and they nimbly re-purposed the whole shebang onto film. But that story is the outlier for whole of the classic series as compared to the ‘traditional’ ad-mixture of (mostly) tape and film–particularly for location shooting, although even that finally gave way for the McCoy era.
There are all sorts of variations on this formula too. A cursory examination of The Tomb of the Cybermen could lead you to believe that this story was also filmed, but it’s a bit of a deception. One of those lost episodes which was recovered (in Africa as we recall in 1992) the story was transferred to film for international sale and was found in this state. And you know what, it looks better for it, although we suspect that this plays into our prejudice in the matter.
Perhaps for rarest birds in this respect though, and to be honest the point of this post, are those stories made wholly in studio, but which had generous amounts of filming, probably down to the technical preference of the production team at a given time. The stories which succeeded most in this respect are Planet of Evil and The Face of Evil (evil loves itself some film apparently). The ‘jungle’ sets for each story, the depth, coloring, and overall menace, were all enhanced by the move to film for those sequences, and thus in a wholly un-fair way, makes the rest of the story shot on tape, seem just that tiny bit shoddier by direct comparison. And the Tour holds both of these stories in quite high esteem.
Spinning this out, when an asbestos-driven crisis befell studio shooting for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, wouldn’t that have looked downright amazing on film? How many others can you name quickly which would also fall into the same camp?
The ‘new’ HD Re-classic-ated caps for The Face of Evil have been online for awhile now, but if you haven’t looked at them before, they’ll be new to you.