This, the last of the Doctor Who series before production began again in 2005 (ignoring that telemovie!) was not the last screened, but was the last filmed.

Ghost Light dates from 1989, and finds the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) plunged into a strange high-Victorian household full of weird moods and happenings. And to her horror, the Doctor's companion, Ace, suddenly realises that this was the very house which has haunted her all her short life, where something nasty happened to her when she was just 13, some 100 years in the future.

This was one of the most confusing of Doctor Who stories to hit the screen, mainly because what was initially planned to be a four-part series suddenly had to be crammed into three episodes to meet the BBC's tough budgetary demands.

Whole scenes and lines of dialogue were jettisoned, both during rehearsals and during editing. What's left isn't really as difficult to follow as some have claimed. But it's a story now told at break-neck pace, with no time for leisurely explanation or recapitulation. It's as if we're being told half the story. There are huge gaps, which we must fill for ourselves, as best we can, while the story unfolds.

But that doesn't matter, because the tale is told splendidly, with great Victorian-era sets and costumes adding to the Gothic mood, in the very best BBC costume-drama tradition. And a particularly fine group of character actors, including Ian Hogg, Sylvia Sims, Michael Cochrane and John Nettleton, seem to absolutely relish playing their highly-dramatic parts. They're having the greatest fun, and so are we.

The tale is very simple, really. A three-member intergalactic survey team has visited Earth as part of a job of cataloguing life-forms in the Universe. The survey's leader, a sort of Angel-looking creature called Light, has sent one team-member to the Earth's surface.Once down there, this team-member has obeyed Darwin's imperatives, and has begun to evlve into the highest form of life on the planet -- it eventually evolves into a high-Victorian gentleman named Josiah.

Meantime, back at base, the third team member, aptly named, for scientific purposes, Control, sits and waits. And quietly goes loopy. But while Control just goes loopy, Light goes totally insane. For this is a cataloguing task it realises can never be completed. As soon as it thinks the job's finished, these Earth creatures start evolving and the whole blooming job has to start again.

Well, that's the background to the tale. You'll have to see for yourself just where the Doctor and Ace fit in -- and work out for yourself why the house's butler, Nimrod, looks so positively Neanderthal.

Despite its drawbacks, it's a splendid tale, one to relish often. And one of its strongest points is its absolutely wonderful atmospheric music, from composer Mark Ayres. His music helps make up for the fact that this series features the silly ephemeral fizzy fireworks-style Doctor Who theme to open and close each episode, instead of the original music which used to suck you in at an episode's close, as if into a black-hole vortex.

This is a fine transfer, very dark indeed but suiting the Gothic-horror theme and high-Victorian era. And the soundtrack is in nicely-produced 5.1 Surround, augmented just enough to sound realistic, and doing great justice to the music and effects.

The program itself is short (only 73 minutes, a far cry from the ABC's claim of 146 minutes on the slick).

But there are some very solid extra features. The main feature is a 39-minute Making Of documentary, 'Light in Dark Places - Illuminating Ghost Light', which gives all the gen on just why the program baffles so many viewers. It's a trifle long and repetitive, but has useful information.

Next up is a 20-minute short film, 'Shooting Ghosts', which is one of the best 'fly-on-the-wall' features of this type I've seen, as we watch the cast at work rehearsing and filming the episodes. This is where you can see the cast totally relishing being part of the production, and the rapport that seems to have sprung-up between McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace.

There's a 12-minute filmed interview with writer Mark Platt, filmed at Panopticon, October 1990 -- very dry; this one's strictly for the very zealous fan.

There are 15 Deleted or Extended Scenes, most of which just repeat, minus a few words, what we've already seen, and which don't really contribute to anything. At least they're there for the dedicated ones.

More useful are the switchable Text Notes which can be selected via the subtitle button to give interesting facts along the way, and a very sound, informative and amusing Audio Commentary by Sophie Aldred (Ace), script editor Andrew Cartmel, writer Mark Platt and composer Mark Ayres.

There's a Music Only option to focus on Ayres's music, and a better-than-average Photo Gallery where the photographs are shown full-screen instead of in the usual totally useless miniscule scrap-book fashion.

That's a solid swag of extra features, presenting just about everything you'd want or need to know about this episode, and more. Well done indeed.