“How would you like your Silver Nemesis, sir? Let me help… there’s the original broadcast version, the same version with updated effects, then there’s the grainy 1993 VHS extended version, the shiny new Special Edition version, and the Special Edition Omnibus version…”

Yes. Thanks to Doctor Who: The Collection Season 25 Blu-Ray, there are now five versions of the Doctor Who story, Silver Nemesis. Yes, FIVE. That’s the same number of variants as included on the Blade Runner Ultimate Collectors Edition, one more version than The Wicker Man, and two more than Apocalypse Now. Does the world (or you and I) need five versions of Silver Nemesis? I’d suggest that it is, at the very least, four too many.

If you were mad enough to decide to forgo the delights of this tiresome 1988 romp and decide to watch Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death, or Time-Flight instead, you’d only be able to enjoy one measly version of each. Even the 20th anniversary multi-Doctor story, The Five Doctors, has only three variants.

I must say, back in 1988, aged 14, I was excited to celebrate Who’s longevity with this anniversary story. So much so that, on the day, I dressed up as not just one, but three Doctors. I couldn’t make it to five — that’s a step too far.

Later that day, when Silver Nemesis was broadcast and failed to light up our screens, I was a little puzzled as to what I had witnessed. Why had they decided to celebrate a quarter of a century of Doctor Who with a story that was nothing whatsoever like the programme either before or since? I know the latter is hindsight, but it shows that neither did Silver Nemesis herald a startling new direction for the show. Mercifully.

I understand that a multi-Doctor story was probably too soon after The Five Doctor and The Two Doctors and the production team also had the issue of which Who would be willing or able to come back. Richard Hurndall and Patrick Troughton had sadly died, Tom Baker proved he wouldn’t rock up to shoot a few press photos let alone come to a TV studio, and I don’t think anyone from the BBC was going to call Colin Baker in 1988.

So, a suitable alternative was found: commission a story from a writer who appears to have never watched the programme, base it around the notion that silver means Cybermen (?), but have them act totally out of character the whole time, and replicate the basis of the plot of a story broadcast just a few weeks before that was set in 1963, features the Daleks, and returned to the original setting of the very first Who episode, which was actually brilliant! Oh, mighty Logar! There should have been another way…

However, Silver Nemesis is now a fixed point in history. We can’t go back and delete it or risk the unravelling of the fabric of time, which is possibly a threat to the entire universe. Worth a go, though? No? Okay. So what can we do to fix it..?

First try was to make it longer. Yes. Have you ever read a really crap book or seen a terrible film and thought, ‘All it needed was to be longer…’? No. You will never get the time you invested back again. So why waste more time?

The theory was that the production of Silver Nemesis was a bit rushed (they only had 25 years to prepare for this, remember) and no one brought a stopwatch, so they just filmed and filmed pages and pages of script and had to fix it in the edit.

The TV schedules only had room for a 25-minute slot on BBC1. And woe betide they cut three-to-five minutes of Terry Wogan jovially chatting to the likes of a p*ssed-up George Best, former sports presenter David Icke announcing his divinity (strike down the heretic, Logar!), or a monosyllabic David Bowie, to make way for more footage of comedy Nazi double-act Karl and De Flores…

So it was with great anticipation that literally several people sat down to watch Silver Nemesis: The Extended Version on its release day, 1 April 1993 (I fool you not). The first thing purchasers of the Video Home System tape might have noticed was the singularly unappealing photo-montage cover, the startlingly juvenile fonts, and the fact that the shiny cover is mostly not silver. It’s green. Snotty Nemesis? [Note to self: Insert Space Babies joke here later, if you can be bothered.]

But what of the extended version? Did it restore the story to be the masterpiece that was always shrouded under the leaf of a limited running time? No. It was a little more coherent in the way that you might describe Wogan’s interview with George Best as ‘a little more’ coherent than Michael Aspel’s with Oliver Reed. The Extended Version felt hastily cobbled together with clumsy edits, repeated music cues, and extra material that was best excised in the first place. It was such a hodgepodge that when the DVD came out 17 years later, the compilers wisely left the Extended Version in a specially extended skip. We won’t get fooled again.

But of course we will. These Doctor Who: The Collection sets are brilliant. They are also exhaustive and exhausting. Everything must be included. Even a VHS rip of Silver Nemesis: The Extended Version, complete with contemporary idents, adverts, and soft, grainy visuals. Drool…

But not content with just including that and the cleaned-up broadcast story, you can also ‘enjoy’ Silver Nemesis with updated special effects (version three). So things like the cyber landing ship that looked pretty good back in 1988 are replaced by a CGI alternative that looks marginally better. But the practical Comet Nemesis that looked like a giant poo when it takes off out of the hangar, is still there in all its stooley glory. Even advanced digital effects couldn’t polish that turd.

The team behind The Collection clearly couldn’t let the story lie. There must be a way to improve it, surely? So they set to work, reordering, restoring some missing bits, ignoring others, and adding Cybermats and Lois Armstrong references. The Special Edition version is certainly an improvement on the broadcast version (with or without updated effects) and the VHS Extended Version. But if you want more, you can also see all the Deleted & Extended Scenes as a 25-minute compilation and all the bits they chose not to include in the Special Edition version as a 3-minute compilation. Confused? You will be.

But, undoubtedly, the crowning glory of the Blu-ray Silver Nemesis discs is the Omnibus Version (and that completes the five!). Yes, what all the other versions that span 36 years have resulted in is the definitive Silver Nemesis. It didn’t need more and more scenes or better special effects (although they are included). What Silver Nemesis really needed was to take up as little of our time as possible — 53.43 minutes to be exact. Comfortably under an hour, now with 20% less dross (embarrassing skinheads, the superfluous American tourist lady, and the like). That will save a lot of time and torment.

But for me, of course, it won’t. Because the wisdom I share with you has come at a mighty cost to me personally. In the extensive research I carried out to bring you this conclusion, I’ve endured over six hours of Silver Nemesis (nearly seven, as I watched the extended scenes separately as well). I am undone. This is the human condition of madness.

This year, the ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno is the subject of a ground-breaking documentary, Eno. It uses generative software that sequences scenes and creates transitions out of hours of footage so that each screening is unique. Please, for the love of Logar, don’t let them get their hands on the Silver Nemesis footage. I already feel like I’ve endured infinite variations of that story. I have a Reality Bomb set to 23 November 1988 and I’m now insane enough to detonate it…