Wet Wet Wet: Greatest Hits DVD Review

The DVD begins with a shot of Wet Wet Wet's 1998 CD release End Of Part One - Their Greatest Hits which has a completely different track line-up, but music DVDs have to start somehow and we are left in no doubt as to what is to come - lots of Wet Wet Wet hits!

When the first track begins it is immediately apparent that the 4:3 picture is quite noisy and soft. The video for Wishing I Was Lucky was filmed in 1987 and is mostly set indoors so the noisy picture doesn't really come as a surprise, but it doesn't overly detract from watching a very youthful-looking bunch of young pop stars.

Next up is Sweet Little Mystery and things improve nicely. Here the video quality is perfectly reasonable - it won't win any awards, but gone is the noise, and colours are rendered quite well. It's nice to see the lads having fun on a sun-soaked beach!

From the third track, Angel Eyes, onwards picture quality improves markedly. Blacks are solid and images are much sharper. The clarity does nothing for Marti Pellow's hairstyle, but I could count most of the individual strands in his little bouffant! During the video for Goodnight Girl I did notice some edge enhancement that may be an issue for some, but overall this wasn't really an issue.

In each subsequent video the image simply improves. After the first couple of rather average music videos, overall I was pleasantly surprised by the picture quality of this release.

There are two tracks here - Dolby Digital 5.1 448 Kbps and 2.0. I preferred listening to the stereo track, as I invariably do with music DVDs. It's not that there's anything major wrong with the 5.1 tracks, but it just doesn't quite gel well enough to make me want to switch. Having said that there is very little rear speaker utilization in the earlier titles on offer here, which had me reaching for my sound level meter to check my amp settings (they were spot on), but things do improve.

Audio quality pretty much follows the same trend as the picture side of things. Wishing I Was Lucky, Sweet Little Mystery and Angel Eyes are a little too sharp in the treble stakes for my liking with very little bass attached to Marti Pellow's voice. This is a shame as not only as not only is Sweet Little Mystery a favourite of mine, but it quickly becomes apparent that listening to these first tracks at anywhere near reference levels are a very tiring experience. Ah well, things do improve rather nicely from Temptation on. In fact Graeme Clark's bass playing in Sweet Surrender gave my sub quite a little workout!

I was again pleasantly surprised with what's on offer here.

Extras? What extras?
As the band that was Wet Wet Wet is no longer together it's a bit of shame that there are no extras at all on this disc. But I am probably asking too much - this is a compilation music DVD and as such it does exactly what it says on the “tin”, on the whole combining reasonable quality audio and video and transporting us back in time to when Wet Wet Wet were on top of the pop tree.