Doctor Who TV Series – The Enemy of the World DVD. featuring the 2nd Doctor (Patrick Troughton).

Unseen in the UK for 45 years -marvellously restored and remastered and brought back to life for you to own on DVD. Enemy of the World is the fourth tale of Series 5 which first aired on the BBC in December 1967. It stars the second actor to play the Time Lord, Patrick Troughton, who is both the Doctor and his antagonist Ramon Salamander, alongside Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Deborah Watling (Victoria).

On Earth in the near future, the Doctor and his companions are enmeshed in a deadly web of intrigue thanks to his uncanny resemblance to would-be 21st century dictator Salamander. He is hailed as the ‘Shopkeeper of the World’ for his efforts to relieve global famine, but why do his rivals keep disappearing? How can he predict so many natural disasters?

The Doctor must expose Salamander's sche­mes before he takes over the World. Considered missing but astonishingly found by Phillip Morris in Nigeria, Africa by the tracking records of overseas shipments made by the BBC containing tapes for transmission. On his discovery Phillip Morris says, “The tapes had been left gathering dust in a store room at a television relay station in Nigeria. I remember wiping the dust off the masking tape on the canisters and my heart missed a beat as I saw the words "Doctor Who”. When I read the story code I realised I'd found something pretty special".

Written by David Whitaker.

Doctor Who: The Enemy of the World Review
By doctorwhorevi­ews.co.uk

"The Enemy of the World is perhaps best known for being the one serial of the 1967/68 run not to feature any sort of typical monster or alien menace. David Whitaker’s unusual script instead takes the key tenets of the ‘historical’ format last employed in The Highlanders, and shifts them into a near future that’s reminiscent of early James Bond films – a future that’s overcast by the dictatorial shadow of Salamander, the second Doctor’s unlikely doppelganger and quintessential Bond villain.As five of this serial’s six episodes have been lost in time, a facet of it that’s often overlooked is Barry Letts’ stunning cinematography. This serial’s director and future series producer somehow imbued the whole production with a luxuriant sense of scale; indeed, it seems to exude expense. John Cura’s Episode 1 telesnaps, for instance, evidence a spectacular, filmic chase across an Australian beach that featured hovercrafts and helicopters. The Enemy of the World’s opening instalment was also the first to be shot with a picture resolution of 625 lines instead of just 405, helping to afford it that little bit of extra sheen, even in telesnap form.

In fact, in production terms, The Enemy of the World has but two flaws. Firstly, the need to avoid recording breaks ruled out frequent costume changes for Patrick Troughton, the upshot of which was that the Doctor features rather less in the action than would normally be the case. Of course, Troughton’s tho­roughly deplorable turn as Salamander more than makes up his cosmic hobo’s absence, but we can still lament the dearth of interaction between the story’s hero and its villain, who don’t actually meet face to face until the final episode’s dénou­ement. I understand that they were scripted to meet earlier in the tale, but the film jammed in the camera being used to shoot the split-screen effect.

Whitaker’s na­rrative is as ambitious as Letts’ quixotic direction, taking place all over the world, and, insofar as possible, resisting the temptation to fashion blacker-than-black heels and whiter-than-white babyfaces. Such aspects are typified by the serial’s second episode, which takes place in both the Central European and Australian zones (singular countries, it seems, have long-since fallen by the wayside) and presents the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria with an intriguing dilemma as they must weigh their new friends’ assertions that Salamander is a tyrant against all the evidence to the contrary.

Inevitably though, it is the third episode of The Enemy of the World that people will be most familiar with as it still survives today and was recently released as part of the Lost in Time DVD collection. Its endurance may be why this serial is so often derided, as the slow and studio-bound episode lacks the action and scale of the first two, choosing instead to revel in the mundane misadventures of Deborah Watling’s Victoria. Judging from the surviving Frazer Hines-narrated soundtrack of the fourth episode, things didn’t improve much there – whilst Watling’s wailing Victoria is propitiously absent, so is Hines’ gung-ho Jamie, and the subterranean setting only seems to emphasise how firmly entrenched in exposition the plot has become. There aren’t even any telesnaps available to embellish the surviving soundtrack and help stir the imagination.

The serial’s final two episodes mark a glorious return to form, however, buoyed by the awesome performances of Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines and two actors who would go on to play Gallifreyan Castellans: George Pravda, who plays the disgraced politician Denes; and Milton Johns, who plays the nefarious Benik. Punctuated by unforeseeable twists and turns and culminating in a sensational climax, The Enemy of the World’s final third exemplifies Whitaker’s writing at its best, and segues delectably into the opening of an adventure that many would argue was amongst the second Doctor’s greatest.

Despite its languid middle, The Enemy of the World is a distinctive and daring tale, and one that I dare say holds its own against many of Troughton’s finest. If you can swallow the dubious conceit that, just as the first Doctor had his evil doppelganger in the 16th century, the second Doctor has his in the 21st, and possess the patience to meticulously marry up John Cura’s telesnaps with the BBC Radio Collection’s sou­ndtrack and the Lost in Time DVD, then you’re in for one hell of a trip around the world."