Kroton Soup

Being one of the few complete Patrick Troughton stories in existence, season six story The Krotons has had more than its fair share of exposure over the years; BBC2 aired the story in 1981 as part of their 'Fives Faces of Doctor Who' repeat season, while BBC Video issued a home video in February 1991. More recently, it has been available from on-line digital media store iTunes, released on audio CD with added narration and even made available to stream for free from the BBCWorldwideTV channel on YouTube... never before has a fan had so many opportunities to eye up the amazingly cute Zoe in PVC...

Naturally, UK Gold wanted a slice of the action and gave the story its third outing on British television during the week of 18-24 January 1993. However, the presentation in this video originates from the omnibus edition which aired a week later, on Sunday 31st January 1993 (9.00-10.30am)...

Bridging the gap between an episode of BBC children's comedy Rentaghost and Doctor Who was a promo for the 1965 The Man From U.N.C.L.E film "The Spy With My Face", screened later that morning as part of the channel's Weekend Film Festival.

Unusually for a four-part Doctor Who story, only three commercial breaks were scheduled -presumably due to the 90-minute time slot - necessitating the editing of the story's original cliffhanger sequences; unfortunately, the join between episodes 1 and 2 made rather obvious due to the difference in both sound and picture quality (sadly, BBC Enterprises' library masters were often poor quality).

During its initial year, UK Gold's break-bumpers were simply made up of the channel logo and 'End of Part...' text displayed over the live action shortly before fading out to the commercial break (this was subsequently changed to static 'holding slides' in late 1993).

Finally, the awkwardly edited end credits you can see ensure that the cast and crew who only worked on the first three episodes still received an on-screen credit on this compilation version (e.g Bronson Shaw who played 'Student' in the opener) and, perhaps more importantly, they were clearly legible. When the story was repeated by UK Gold in 1998, the original closing credits were shown.

Right, that's yer lot for this week - just like the Krotons, we're totally exhausted. Come back next Monday for another dip into the past...