never invite their ancestors round to dinner?" This refers to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Production Pre-production Working titles for this story included The Bestiary and Life-Cycle. As revealed in the production notes for the DVD release, the story was renamed Das Haus der tausend Schrecken (The House of a Thousand Frights/Horrors) upon translation into German. The story evolved out of an earlier, rejected script entitled Lungbarrow. It was to be set on Gallifrey in the Doctor's ancestral home and deal with the Doctor's past, but producer John Nathan-Turner felt that it revealed too much of the Doctor's origins. It was reworked to make both evolution and the idea of an ancient house central to the story. Marc Platt used elements of his original idea for his Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow. Production Ghost Light was the final production of the original 26-year run, with the last recorded sequence being the final scene between Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline. It was not, however, the last to be screened – The Curse of Fenric and Survival, both produced beforehand, followed it in transmission order. Cast notes Michael Cochrane and Frank Windsor had both previously appeared in Doctor Who with Peter Davison; Cochrane as Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid in Season 19; Windsor played Ranulf in The King's Demons in Season 20. Carl Forgione appeared in the final serial of the Jon Pertwee era, Planet of the Spiders. Commercial releases Home media Ghost Light was released on VHS in May 1994. A DVD was released in September 2004, with many extended and deleted scenes included as bonus features. However, unlike The Curse of Fenric, these scenes no longer existed in broadcast quality as the master 625 line PAL colour videotapes containing the extra footage had been erased for reuse shortly after the story was broadcast, and were thus sourced from VHS copies, some with timecodes burnt-in, i.e. recorded permanently onto the picture. This made an extended edit, as had been prepared for the Curse of Fenric DVD release the previous year, impossible. This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files in Issue 96 on 5 September 2012. In February 2020 the full serial was released as part of the Doctor Who: The Collection Season 26 box-set with a new Extended Workprint Cut. Extended Workprint In print Marc Platt's novelisation was published by Target Books in