The Colour of the Daleks?

So, apart from the actual new episodes with David Tennant, the BBC’s special event for the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who is… a colourised version of the original Dalek serial. Which I already thought was a bit “oh”, but they’ve also revealed it’s been edited down to 75 minutes—which is rather less than half the original length of the story, which was a seven-episode serial—and, well, now samples of the colour work have been released…

…And I’m now even less certain of what to think about it. I suppose at least the colour is kind of “60s”-ish, in that I’ve seen quite a lot of 60s films where the colour has that sort of visual character (I have absolutely no idea what else to call it), though I do wonder how accurate it is to whatever the actual colouring of the set would’ve been… cos even in monochrome film & TV things have to be a certain colour for it to register as a particular shade of grey on the screen. Cf. the castle in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc which was apparently some nasty pink colour in reality, or indeed the TARDIS console, which was actually a kind of green…

…which it noticeably isn’t in this picture, they apparently went for the colour it was supposed to be instead… and I find myself oddly alarmed by the TARDIS control room floor… Also, isn’t this just a rehearsal picture or some such? This shot never appears in the episode, so why did they colourise it? Indeed, they’ve done rather more than that:

See a couple of details missing from the colour photo?

…Although at least the blue floor is kind of historically “correct”, as this rather rare actual colour photo (taken during rehearsals for episode eight of “The Daleks’ Masterplan” a couple of years later) shows. Still not sure about the shade, nor indeed Barbara’s cardigan…

But the thing I’m most unsure of is that it also has a new score by Mark Ayres, and that’s something that really bothers me somehow. I’ve no doubt it’ll be perfectly fine, Ayres won’t do a poor job or anything like that… I don’t know, it just feels like it’s going rather beyond the original remit of the restoration team which was to not add anything to the episodes (unless as optional extras on the DVD releases), and I’m curious as to where this will leave the original Tristram Cary score, which I think is kind of important to the serial. (EDIT: later on Thursday I found David Graham—who I had no idea was still alive—is also redoing his Dalek voices. Somehow this doesn’t bother me at all.)

So yeah, I have reservations, and I will be buying it as soon as the blu-ray comes out. OBVIOUSLY.