Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

Okay, so, last year, when we had the ‘Doctor Who’ 60th anniversary celebrations, we were treated to a colourised version of ‘The Daleks’ in November 2023. Essentially, it was a colourised version of the black-and-white story compressed into 1 hour and 15 minutes.

If you’ve read my quick review on the colour version of ‘The Daleks’, you may have picked up I wasn’t really impressed with it. Mainly because I didn’t like some of the things that were omitted in the colour version from the black-and-white version and it was very noisy.

There was too many sound effects and music to contend with compared to what I’d seen in the original black-and-white seven-part story. I felt they should have just colourised the entire story without needing to add too many additions. It was an unsatisfying experience.

So, when it came to ‘The War Games’, the last ‘Doctor Who’ story starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, announced for colourisation in December 2024, I was sceptical on how good it would be. I felt it was going to be like ‘The Daleks in Colour’ again.

Also, I wasn’t keen on the original 10-part story being compressed into 90 minutes. But I was curious, and I wanted to see what it would be like. My Dad was keen to see ‘The War Games in Colour’, as it’s one of his and my favourite ‘Doctor Who’ stories from Patrick’s era.

And after watching ‘The War Games in Colour’ on BBC Four recently, I enjoyed this more than ‘The Daleks in Colour’. I was able to get into the story, especially within a 90-minute duration. The colourisation is very good, and I enjoyed some of the additions to the story.

Now hear me out. It’s not great. There’s no way the colourisation can surpass the original black-and-white 10-part story. There are some scenes and moments edited out in the colourisation edit and the ‘Episodes Five and Six’ segments of the story are rather rushed.

The cliffhangers for ‘Episodes Four and Five’ are clearly absent in the colourised version. But for a while in the first third and definitely in the final act, I found myself enjoying the colourised version of ‘The War Games’ and I really like some of the additions included.

It was good to see the exterior shots of the British World War I base and the War Aliens’ headquarters. And I appreciate the exterior shots of Gallifrey, including ones from ‘Heaven Sent’, to establish that it was the Doctor’s home planet the TARDIS was taken to.

There also additions in the colourisation that surprised me. For one thing, the War Chief’s character is given a new dimension via the music. Again, there’s too much music in the colourisation version of ‘The War Games’, but there were some interesting cues being used.

In particular, the fact that the Master’s music is used to underscore some of the War Chief’s scenes. This isn’t just the ‘vainglorious’ theme for the Master from Series 3 of the new TV series. There’s music utilised for the Master from the Jon Pertwee era of the series.

Indicating the War Chief and the Master are the same person? That the War Chief is an early incarnation of the Master? It’s a theory that has been addressed over the years, even via my ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog in some comments sections, but I’d rather dismissed it.

Mainly because, there wasn’t official evidence to confirm the theory being valid as far as I was concerned. ‘The War Games in Colour’ seems to confirm that the War Chief is an early incarnation of the Master through the music, though we don’t get to see a regeneration.

There are the sounds of a regeneration about to occur off-screen in the colourisation after the War Chief was shot down, which I’m glad is included, since I found it disappointing that the War Chief got shot down and it was never shown that he regenerated.

But we never see Edward Brayshaw changing into Roger Delgado in ‘The War Games’ colourisation. Maybe it wasn’t possible or there wasn’t time to include the change. Or maybe it was decided to keep it off-screen so it keep fans speculating more in regards to this matter.

For the sake of argument, I’ve added ‘The War Games’ to the Master’s timeline, making Edward Brayshaw’s War Chief one of the Master’s incarnations. Please feel free to correct me on this if I’ve made a hasty decision, but I’m going with it based on the colourisation.

I liked some of Dudley Simpson’s music recreated by Mark Ayres with an orchestral flair. Again, I think less music is required in a story like ‘The War Games’, but again, this is a condensed version of the story. It’s not going to entirely match to what’s in the original version.

I enjoyed the updated version of the Doctor’s presentation that he gives to the Time Lords of the monsters he’s fought, including the Quarks, the Yeti, the Ice Warriors, the Cybermen and the Daleks. There are colourisations of scenes from other stories in the presentation.

You can see colourised scenes of ‘The Dominators’, ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, ‘The Web of Fear’, ‘The Ice Warriors’, ‘The Seeds of Death’, ‘The Invasion’, ‘The Power of the Daleks’ and ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ included. It makes the presentation far more dynamic.

It was also fun and amusing to see the updated selection of faces the Doctor could choose from by the Time Lords in ‘The War Games in Colour’. This includes images of new series Doctors that we’d had lately. 😀 I can’t deny I had a smile on my face when I saw them.

This included Peter Capaldi as the ‘too old’ face, David Tennant as the ‘too thin’ face, Jodie Whittaker as the ‘too young’ face and Matt Smith as the ‘that won’t do at all’ face. 😀 I wonder who would have been the ‘too fat’ face. We haven’t had a fat Doctor yet, have we?

Of course, the selling point of ‘The War Games in Colour’ is the fact we get to see Patrick Troughton regenerating into Jon Pertwee, leading into ‘Spearhead From Space’. I wasn’t really anxious nor desperate about seeing the regeneration. I prefer that to be a mystery.

We’ve had Season 6B stories and ‘Devious’ to allow us to speculate on what happened in the transition between the Second and Third Doctors and I wasn’t sure that a regeneration between the two was required to be seen. But it was intriguing to see it done.

Most of the regeneration between Patrick Troughton into Jon Pertwee is taken from the Confession Dial’s video ‘The Second Doctor Regenerates’, even down to the confusion of whether the TARDIS has landed in 1970 or 1980. There’s no getting past me regarding that. 😀

‘The War Games in Colour’ has been an enjoyable version of the 1969 story in colour in 90 minutes. It’s not great, but it’s better than ‘The Daleks in Colour’. I also enjoyed it within 90 minutes. It makes me wish the first ‘Daleks’ story in colour was under 90 minutes instead of 75.

It’s also nice to see Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, Frazer Hines as Jamie and Wendy Padbury as Zoe in colour. ‘The War Games in Colour’ is something that I found worth my time and I’m pleased there was a labour of love involved with the making of this.

Thanks for reading!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂