Kopic's Doctor Who & Torchwood News |
- News: Bernice Summerfield Book Sampler
- Which was (or will be) the first regeneration you experienced watching Doctor Who?
- Hulk Smash Puny Anniversary! - Comic Book Resources
- Marvel's 70th Anniversary Is Golden… Apple - Comic Book Resources
- It's A Celebration - Comic Book Resources
- Is it Wednesday? - Comic Book Resources
- Celebrating In The Mighty Marvel Way - Comic Book Resources
- Did you want the second issue of Blackest Night? - Comic Book Resources
- Let Them Eat Cake! - Comic Book Resources
- Absolution At Golden Apple - Comic Book Resources
- Access Required - Comic Book Resources
- Marvel's 70th Anniversary Panel - Comic Book Resources
- Captain Jack's Guts
- News: Big Finish - Licence Renewed!
- BBC Audio Renews Big Finish Licence for Doctor Who
- Baby's day out: Billie Piper feeling the strain as she takes baby ... - Daily Mail
- Postcards from America
- Doctor Who’s Greatest Moments – new series
- Ratings show that reality prevails - Variety
- The Keys of Marinus - DVD cover and details
- BBC America press release: Best week, more Who
- Gallifreyan Embassy / Doctor Who: Podshock Apparel Regenerated
- News: Doctor Who on BBC America 2010
- BBC America Announces Acquisition of Doctor Who Season Five - TVOvermind
- TV highlights, August 12 - WA today
- Pictured: The child bollards that are so lifelike they're scaring ... - Mail on Sunday
- On the London Stage A Seductive Twist on a Classic Tale - New York Times
- Pictured: The child bollards that are so lifelike they're scaring ... - Daily Mail
- Tennant: 'I felt like Robbie Williams' - Digital Spy
- Last chance to nominate your homo heroes... - The Lesbian and Gay Foundation
- News: Lazy Love
- Fair City star Jamie will show you to your table - Herald.ie
- BBC America Tops 1 Million Viewer Mark With Pair Of 'Torchwood ... - Multichannel News
- A Seductive Twist on a Classic Tale - New York Times
- TV highlights, August 12 - The Age
- Big Brother 11: The Empire Strikes Out. - Huffington Post
- First let's do a quick recap of our week: - Daemon's TV
- Swimming against the tide - Brisbane Times
- Swimming against the tide - Sydney Morning Herald
- James Corden refused to bare his butt in new movie - Oneindia
- 11-year-old's death in Death Valley ruled accident - Las Vegas Review - Journal
| News: Bernice Summerfield Book Sampler Posted: 11 Aug 2009 05:40 PM PDT Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story is a new book from Big Finish exploring the genesis and development of the former Doctor Who companion. Now the focus of her own series of audio adventures (in which she is played by Lisa Bowerman), Bernice Summerfield was first featured in the Doctor Who New Adventures release Love and War, by Paul Cornell. Written by Simon Guerrier and comprising 320 illustrated pages and more than 300,000 words, Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story is a chronicle of... | ||
| Which was (or will be) the first regeneration you experienced watching Doctor Who? Posted: 11 Aug 2009 03:49 PM PDT William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton 0% (0 votes) Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee 0% (0 votes) Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker 75% (3 votes) Tom Baker to Peter Davison 0% (0 votes) Peter Davison to Colin Baker 25% (1 vote) Colin Baker to Sylvester McCoy 0% (0 votes) Sylvester McCoy to Paul McGann 0% (0 votes) Christopher Eccelston to David Tennant 0% (0 votes) David Tennant to Matt Smith 0% (0 votes) Total votes: 4 | ||
| Hulk Smash Puny Anniversary! - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 10:03 AM PDT
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| Marvel's 70th Anniversary Is Golden… Apple - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 10:03 AM PDT
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| It's A Celebration - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:44 AM PDT
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| Is it Wednesday? - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:44 AM PDT
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| Celebrating In The Mighty Marvel Way - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:44 AM PDT
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| Did you want the second issue of Blackest Night? - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:44 AM PDT
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| Let Them Eat Cake! - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:21 AM PDT
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| Absolution At Golden Apple - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 09:21 AM PDT
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| Access Required - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 07:56 AM PDT
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| Marvel's 70th Anniversary Panel - Comic Book Resources Posted: 11 Aug 2009 07:56 AM PDT
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| Posted: 11 Aug 2009 06:25 AM PDT In which Lawrence Miles responds to the letters about Torchwood: Children of Earth in last week's Radio Times, and uses their entrails to divine the past and future of Doctor Who. Let's begin with the RT's letter of the week (which, as we all know, wins a charming BBC-endorsed digital radio with 1950s moulding). _________________________________________________________ Dear Radio Times, I've been a Torchwood fan from the start... _________________________________________________________ Then your opinion can be of no intellectual value. Next! _________________________________________________________ …how can a drama be gripping for a week, then throw it all away? It was heartbreaking to see a good premise and fine acting wasted on an "in one bound they were free" solution. _________________________________________________________ Dear God, man, where have you been for the last four years? Anyone would think you'd never seen a drama by Russell T. Davies before. Were you not paying attention when the last-ever Dalek army was disintegrated by Billie Piper's time-space orgasm (arguably what the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" was really all about, if you interpret the whole of Season One as an unrequited love affair… call it "The Fire in the Girly-Place", if you will)? Or when the other last-ever Dalek army was sucked out of the universe by background radiation from a place where nothing exists, not even radiation? Or when the other other last-ever Dalek army was defeated by Catherine Tate fiddling about with some wires? And that's without even mentioning the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Doctor rewinds time by flying around the planet very very fast, or something. As we should all have gathered by now, Russell T. isn't primarily a science-fiction writer, at least not in the most pedantic sense. SF is hung up on the details of how the machinery works, but he only cares about the people. Therefore, it's reasonable to hit the reset button as long as there's a human cost, whether it's the death of the Best Ever Doctor or an almost Biblical child-murder. Which brings us to the real nub of things… _________________________________________________________ I seriously wonder whether the harrowing ending, in which a child died horribly, should have been broadcast. For the first time ever I was reduced to tears watching a TV programme. _________________________________________________________ Whooooah Nellie. Let's pause to consider what this correspondent is actually saying. He's complaining that a drama programme - and, furthermore, a tragedy - actually provoked an emotional reaction. I'm sure you can see the oddity. Isn't a few minutes' blubbing just a sign that the programme worked…? Let's not be in any doubt, the controversy about the child-exploding finale (if there really was any controversy) had nothing to do with "violence on television": the slaughter of Jack's firstborn grandson was too far from any real-world agony to leave a bad taste in the mouth, and a long way from graphic, unless you seriously believe that nosebleeds shouldn't be shown on TV. But modern drama, or pretend-drama, is about making the audience feel comfortable rather than affected. This has always been true of the commercial channels, yet now even the BBC's mandate is to provide the viewer with "cosy" rather than "challenging". It's a truth of modern television that despite the liberalisation which has allowed men to kiss each other in prime-time and characters from The Wire to mumble "fuck" every twelve seconds for absolutely no reason, the cod-drama programmes made circa 2009 are far more limited / limiting in their content than those of the 1970s. You know the bit in I, Claudius where Caligula does that thing with his sister? Yeah, you know. That thing. Could that be shown - or, rather, suggested - on BBC TV today? Almost certainly not. It isn't comfortable viewing. And for a Corporation that's increasingly made to feel aware of both the ratings and government (dis)approval, an uncomfortable audience makes an uncomfortable drama department. Ergo, programmes are designed to engender a sense of warming numbness, like a plate of chips at the end of a cold day. To the point where viewers actually start complaining when they feel something. I've occasionally noted my approval of Waking the Dead on this blog-page, particularly those episodes written by Declan Croghan, whose ability to bring a kind of nightmarish magic-realism to a standard prime-time format should surely put him on any producer's list of Writers to Try Out on Doctor Who (consider the episode "Wren Boys", which is a bit like CSI in the style of The Wicker Man, and features the fit one from "Blink" as an additional bonus). The reason is that Waking the Dead is one of the few dramas still prepared to take the viewer out of his or her coddling-space. As I've mentioned before, the episode "In the Sight of the Lord" involves a murder case that stretches all the way back to the 1940s, and attacks our sentimentalised version of the Great British War Years by focusing on the atrocities carried out by English soldiers in the field. We're told, for example, about a group of squaddies cutting the genitals off a German soldier and forcing him to put them in his mouth. The repugnant Chibnall-era version of Torchwood often brought this to mind, and not just because of the sensation of gagging on bollocks. Torchwood tried to sell itself as a "grown-up" sci-fi show, and yet despite a superficially similar format to Waking the Dead (just try imagining Trevor Eve as Captain Jack…), it never would've dared risk audience disapproval in this way. The supposed point of science fiction is that it's meant to go further than conventional drama, but Mark One Torchwood never had the - excuse me - balls to even go as far as a mainstream detective programme on BBC1. Hardly surprising: after all, Torchwood was deliberately contrived as a "Cult TV" series, not a drama series. This is why a guest appearance by James Marsters was thought to be more important than consistent characterisation, and why horribly misjudged story-arcs were thought to be more important than the actual stories. The gulf between Cult TV and Proper Drama is a vast one, and it's worth remembering this now that the Radio Times has given us our first official preview of Doctor Who 2010. I've already suggested that Moffat's role in the casting of Matt Smith was a colossal act of cowardice, a way of keeping the audience on his side by giving them Tennant Junior rather than anyone more controversial / unexpected / interesting. Likewise, the decision to dress him up in what the RT rather desperately calls "geography teacher chic" smacks of the same play-it-safe, Doctor-by-numbers strategy that brought us the TV movie, in which the Doctor's "character" was defined purely by stuffing a pretty-faced English actor into an Edwardian jacket. But more worrying is the reappearance of Professor River Song, the most cynically-engineered love-interest since… well, since Moffat's last one, to be honest. It's worrying because she's been foisted on the viewer as a Major Character in exactly the same way that Lwaxana Troi was foisted on Star Trek fans, or that Joxer was foisted on viewers of Xena: Warrior Princess for more than a year after he stopped being funny. See also the entire last season of Buffy. This is a sure sign of Cult TV, and it's something that Russell T. Davies largely avoided, at least until the interdimensional wank-fest of "The Stolen Earth". One of the reasons Doctor Who went off the rails in the mid-'80s was that John Nathan-Turner stopped making a television programme per se, and started making a continuity-package to satisfy the kind of people he met at conventions (this way lies madness and "Attack of the Cybermen"). Why did he do this…? Because he just wanted to be liked. And Moffat, as we've already learned, desires nothing more or less than to be adored by his audience. Alienating them is simply beyond him. Especially if they're redheads. And as if to underline this question of "comfort", the next letter reads… _________________________________________________________ …I was shocked, even betrayed. Russell T. Davies transformed our hero Jack into a monster… I wonder how a writer can do this to a character both adults and children adore. _________________________________________________________ We'll skip over the weapons-grade-obvious point that Jack has always been a dodgy geezer, not only because of his criminal tendencies in "The Empty Child", but because he was introduced to us as someone who can casually treat a mass-death like the eruption of Pompeii as a business opportunity. The bigger point here is that a large section of the audience, the section which Doctor Who is now so concerned about offending, wants to be able to see its central characters as definite hero-figures. Even though we know there's nothing more tedious. At this point, let's side-step into the old faux-moral debate about the conclusion of "Remembrance of the Daleks". It's been argued - for example, by my Magic Bullet employer Alan Stevens, in those rare moments when he's not 'phoning people up and engaging them in two-hour conversations about Blake's 7 - that the Doctor's cheerful blowing-up of Skaro is a moral aberration which contradicts the ethical grounding of most of the rest of the series. The trouble is that this argument only holds water if you seriously believe the drivel that Gerry Davis puts into the Doctor's mouth during "The Moonbase", which portrays the Doctor as a well-disguised superhero who believes that evil communists 'must be fought'. (All right, he's technically talking about Cybermen at the time. But Davis saw Doctor Who as an internationally-exportable adventure series, little more than a spy show with SF elements, so the monsters on his watch become indistinguishable from commie thugs in The Man from UNCLE or The Champions.) Davis widdled all over the heterodox, xenophiliac version of the Doctor promoted by Lambert, Wiles, Tosh, et al, i.e. the interesting version. In the script of "Remembrance", Ben Aaronovitch goes out of his way to establish that Skaro is the Daleks' 'ancestral seat', so its destruction is meant to be like blowing up the Fuhrerbunker rather than dropping the A-Bomb on Japan. But even if that weren't true, even if the Doctor is crossing a terrible moral line, it still wouldn't bother me much. Why? Because I don't necessarily want the central character's values to be the same as my own. Indeed, one of the most alarming things about the Tennant era is the way the voice of the Doctor has become the voice of the liberal-minded early-twenty-first-century viewer. The ideals he represents are the ideals of those in the audience who believe themselves to be generally "good" human beings, on the grounds that they occasionally recycle and don't use the n-word. This explains his ludicrous, self-contradictory arguments against the American death-nerd in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (which leave us with the impression that it's nice to care about the environment, as long as you don't seriously do anything about it), and why "Planet of the Ood" sees him apologise to Donna for taking 'cheap shots' when he asks her the only sensible question in Season Four (because slavery is wrong, but it's apparently even more wrong to make the viewers feel anxious by pointing out that they're supporting child labour whenever they shop at Primark). If, like me, you feel that the prime mover in Doctor Who isn't good-versus-evil but the ability to see things from an alien point of view - a theme that's been there ever since the beginning, even before "The Sensorites" set the pattern for humans-meet-alien-culture stories - then it's surely quite right that the leading man shouldn't have exactly the same moral stance as ourselves. Actually, he should probably be going out of his way to challenge it. So what went wrong? Once again, what went wrong is the desperate urge to keep the audience squirm-free. Beyond the confines of Doctor Who, this has led to a culture of drama in which all goodies are good as we see it, while all baddies oppose the basic freedom to choose the colour of your iPod. By default, protagonists now have "issues" which might occasionally make them behave in out-of-character ways, but we're never in doubt that they share our world-view. They can never be racist, sexist, or homophobic (that's the baddies' job), yet nor should they ever rock the boat. They should never make us doubt ourselves or our consumer society, because even if it isn't perfect - hey! - at least we're living in a democracy, right? Right…? Inevitably, this turns every drama series into a sequence of contrived confrontations between insipid non-characters, and Cult TV programmes are more prone to this tendency than any genre other than cop shows. Fans of Heroes-generation sci-fi honestly believe it's revelatory when a baddie turns out to have "layers", but in fact, it's what Proper Drama is meant to do all the time. Again, we go back to I, Claudius for the perfect test-case. The Emperor Tiberius, supposedly a sadistic pervert who might best be described as "syphilis with a face", reacts in different ways to different characters: at no point does he only have "villain" traits, and from his very first scene, the monster on the throne has characteristics ranging from an honest and touching love for his brother to periods of what we'd now call paranoid depression. Almost nobody writes characters this way any more. Today's audience has been brought up to believe in its own moral supremacy, and thus prefers things to be rather more absolute. Just look at the atrocity of Rome. A personal sidelight here. If you're one of the 4,000-odd people who kept buying the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels after their sell-by date, then you may recall that I once invented a semi-antagonist called Sabbath, for a book called The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The editor of the range was keen on using him as a recurring character, and asked me to write up a detailed description, which I did. Now, the idea here was to present Sabbath as the Doctor's (morally dubious) replacement in a hostile new universe, or at least in a hostile new form of history. Gallifrey had been destroyed; the laws of time were in flux; and the Doctor's powers were distinctly limited, not least by a period of amnesia. As a result, Sabbath was a figure who knew more about the universe than the Doctor did. This was his environment, while the Doctor was rooted in a version of history that no longer existed. Which, as I saw it, meant that the overwhelming smugness of some of the weakest Doctor Who stories would be removed from the formula. The central character would no longer have all the answers. He wouldn't be able to pull solutions out of a magic pocket. He'd have to learn from experience, and figure out each new situation from scratch, just as Sydney Newman had intended. In short, he'd be able to make mistakes. What actually happened was the other writers turned out a series of novels in which stupid, arrogant, evil Mr Sabbath would perform some reckless experiment which imperilled the entire universe, so that the good, noble, and all-wise Doctor would have an opportunity to set things right again. This reached its nadir when Lloyd Rose stated that she couldn't see any difference between Sabbath and the Master, as if I'd written a three-page document describing an out-and-out villain who wanted to take over the galaxy and finished every sentence with "nyah-hah-hah". (In her novel Camera Obscura, AKA The Twelve-Year Old Anne Rice Fan's Guide to Victorian Clichés, she underlines this by having the Doctor put a whoopee cushion on Sabbath's Throne of Evil. It's meant to demonstrate how silly and pathetic anyone who dares to argue with the Doctor must be, because apparently, villains don't have a sense of humour. Here I'd just like to point out that the first thing Sabbath ever says to the Doctor in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a joke, and an anachronistic one to boot.) Why, then, did this happen? How did a character whose whole function was to give the Doctor some real competition end up being used as a Hooded Claw substitute? The answer seems to be that we've come to fetishise the very notion of the Doctor, to the point where we believe he's simply incapable of doing anything wrong. The nature of Cult TV makes him "our hero" in ways that extend far beyond the narrative. We feel uneasy if he goes astray, either morally or intellectually, and now we're beginning to feel the same way about Doctor-surrogates like Captain Jack. Of course, the fact that we feel uneasy probably indicates that it's good storytelling, yet we've been too swaddled in FilmLook slickness to accept this. On top of which… oh, dare I really say it? I think I have to. Unquestionably, this fetishisation is doubled if the Doctor's cute. No fangirl would be bothered by the thought of William Hartnell, or even troll-faced Chris Eccleston, committing space-age genocide. This sort of behaviour is harder to accept from Paul McGann or David Tennant, whose boyish good looks™ have been thoroughly mined for romance, firstly by the Yanks who factory-assembled the TV movie and more lately by a sneery-faced Scots cynic. Mentioning no names. It comes as no surprise to find that the "you bastards, you've made Jack evil!" letter in the Radio Times was written by a woman, just as it comes as no surprise to find that the "I'm furious because the machinery they used to kill the 456 doesn't make sense!" letter came from a man. Yet the most curious thing is that as Doctor Who heads further and further into the stagnancy of Cult TV, Torchwood has suddenly veered in the opposite direction. "Children of Earth" is, against all expectations, a work of Proper Drama. Nobody here scores points for being 100% Goodie, and the only 100% Baddie seems to be the Prime Minister. Even the 456, who exist solely to make us poo ourselves, have enough depth to point out the humans' hypocrisy. Bucking the trend of all the other programmes that look, sound, and market themselves like it, characters with whom we sympathise do things we don't necessarily like, not in order to make a big song-and-dance about major issues (yeah, you're right, I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica again) but just because that's who they are. The most obvious example isn't Captain Jack's kiddie-killing, it's the fact that Clem - a man who's pure victim to the core, pitiable-yet-quite-frightening in exactly the way that mentally-damaged people really are - treats Ianto with disgust while calling him 'queer'. In any other show, that alone would be enough to mark him out as a baddie, like the bigot-thugs who occupy most corners of the CSI world. Here, it's simply treated as the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's been messed up since the 1960s. The Doctor Who universe has always had leftist intentions (Gerry Davis notwithstanding), but there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, civil tolerance - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal. Most of the New Adventures are very, very liberal indeed, hilariously so in some cases. Whereas "Children of Earth", in facing up to our hypocrisies and refusing to make things simple, actually seems… leftist. Who saw that coming? [A footnote, before you ask: it's true, much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite, who genuinely believes that everything in the world will be all right as long as you don't vote Conservative - in which he derided me for being 'like one of those '60s idealists'. Hmmm. Does he mean, like one of those '60s idealists whose determination to change Western values created the kind of lifestyle that Paul and his friends now enjoy…? No, he probably didn't intend it to be a compliment. Oh, and I chose "poof" as a Word You Mustn't Say after a conversation with Moffat in which I jokingly exclaimed 'are you calling me a poof?' when he challenged my masculinity, 'are you calling me a poof?' being the catchphrase of the boorish he-men whom anyone of my age will remember from the '70s. Moffat responded by looking nervously around the pub and informing me under his breath that I shouldn't say that out loud. I'm amused by several things here: (a) the thought that Moffat believed I needed his wisdom and experience in social situations, (b) the thought that any gay fanboy at the Tavern might seriously be offended by the retro use of the p-word, (c) the thought that I was being criticised for using it by the world's most heterosexual man when I've at least enjoyed the occasional gay flirtation, and (d) the thought that Moffat was terrified of offending Doctor Who fans even then. I really, really digress.] Of course, the aliens are still basically evil, because no series can be xenophiliac all the time. Especially not when there's the potential for great big monsters. The notion of a morally-questioning, see-the-other-man's-POV universe may run all the way from "An Unearthly Child" to the superfly guys in "Planet of the Dead", yet a programme in which the outsiders are always potentially-friendly would be dull. Morally uplifting, but dull. Fortunately, most Doctor Who writers through the ages have managed to use horrible alien menaces without suggesting that anything foreign wants to hurt us by default, the pro-Vietnam hectoring of "The Dominators" being a nauseating exception. The problem comes not when the aliens start invading, but when the scripts are written by people who think it's a good idea to present us with a universe which is intrinsically hostile and in which EVERYTHING UNFAMILIAR WANTS TO EAT US. As I've had to explain over and over again, my tragic rant about "The Unquiet Dead" wasn't driven by a disgust of actual racism (although I still hold that it was chronically misjudged in the run-up to the Asylum Seeker Election of 2005), but because the episode betrayed the entire ethos of Doctor Who. The Doctor comes up with the most brilliantly in-your-face, air-punchingly great salvation plan in the programme's history. "Yeah, let the aliens hav | ||
| News: Big Finish - Licence Renewed! Posted: 11 Aug 2009 06:23 AM PDT Independent producers of Doctor Who audios Big Finish have announced that their licence has been extended by BBC Audiobooks through to December 31st 2011! Of course, this is superb news as anyone who has been following the work of Big Finish will know - and they're understandably happy! "We're thrilled that the license has been renewed," says executive producer Jason Haigh-Ellery, "and we've got some fantastic stories lined up for the rest of 2009, and through 2010 and... | ||
| BBC Audio Renews Big Finish Licence for Doctor Who Posted: 11 Aug 2009 05:54 AM PDT Big Finish is delighted to announce that its licence to make The Audio Adventures of Doctor Who has been extended by BBC Audiobooks, for a period up to December 31 2011. "We're thrilled that the license has been renewed," says executive producer Jason Haigh-Ellery. "and we've got some fantastic stories lined up for the rest of 2009, and through 2010 and beyond. Not only from the Doctor Who main range, but also the New Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Companion Chronicles, plus additional ranges like The Lost Stories. "All of us at Big Finish love making Doctor Who on audio, and we feel privileged that the BBC has entrusted us to continue." | ||
| Baby's day out: Billie Piper feeling the strain as she takes baby ... - Daily Mail Posted: 11 Aug 2009 05:35 AM PDT
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| Posted: 11 Aug 2009 04:38 AM PDT  As previously reported, David Tennant, Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Euros Lyn have sent two "audio postcards" from America to BBC Radio Wales. An extended version of the first postcard can be heard here, and the second postcard can be heard here. In the second postcard, David Tennant discusses driving in Los Angeles and his first Hollywood audition, Euros Lyn and Russell T Davies chat about Muscle Beach, and Julie Gardner explains the dangers of doggie bag culture. Image source:Left to right: Davies, Tennant, Lyn, Gardner. http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com  | ||
| Doctor Who’s Greatest Moments – new series Posted: 11 Aug 2009 04:33 AM PDT Doctor Who's Greatest Moments is a new three-part documentary series from the Doctor Who Confidential team. Patrick Mulkern, in the new issue of the Radio Times has this to say: With 58 Doctor Who Confidentials already under their belt, Gillane Seaborne and her team deliver a trio of themed docs – a fast, fun celebration of all that has made Doctor Who a storming success since its rebirth in 2005. [Parts 2 and 3] Companions and Enemies will follow, but this week it's the Doctor's turn in the limelight. What makes the Bachelor of Time tick? Why does he need reigning in occasionally? And who are his own heroes? As well as clips from the series, there'll be interviews from the "nearly departed" David Tenant, Freema Agyeman, Georgia Moffett, "next Doctor" David Morrissey and Captain Jack himself, John Barrowman.Each episode is an hour in length, and the first, The Doctor, will be shown in the UK on BBC3 on Thursday, 20 August 2009 at 8–9 pm. http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com  | ||
| Ratings show that reality prevails - Variety Posted: 11 Aug 2009 03:50 AM PDT
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| The Keys of Marinus - DVD cover and details Posted: 11 Aug 2009 03:46 AM PDT The Keys of Marinus - DVD cover & details 2|entertain have sent DWO the cover & details for The Keys of Marinus DVD release. The Keys of Marinus Materializing on an island of glass in a sea of acid, the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara find themselves chosen to embark on a perilous quest set by Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of the planet Marinus. The Conscience machine has the power to control the minds of everyone on Marinus, and it is in danger of falling into the hands of the sinister Yartek, leader of the alien Voord. To prevent disaster, the TARDIS crew must recover the machine's operating keys, hidden in various locations around the planet. Others have attempted this task before - but none have ever returned. The four companions travel from Morphoton to Millennius, battling ice soldiers and deadly plants on their way and overcoming hypnotic conditioning and hostile environments, that challenge the travellers like never before. Special Features: · Commentary - with actors William Russell and Carole Ann Ford, director John Gorrie and designer Raymond Cusick. Moderated by Clayton Hickman. The Keys of Marinus is released on 21st September 2009, priced £19.99. PREORDER this DVD at the WhoStore: PREORDER this DVD on Amazon: Discuss this news in the DWO Forums: [Cover available on the DWO News page] [Source: 2|entertain] | ||
| BBC America press release: Best week, more Who Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:43 PM PDT  BBC America has announced in a press release that Torchwood: Children of Earth and Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead helped the cable channel to its best ratings week: Torchwood: Children of Earth is BBC AMERICA's most successful series ever, reaching 3.3m in Live+SD across the week. It delivered an average audience of 705,000 viewers per episode, with Friday's finale attracting 847,000, the largest average audience in the channel's history. Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead also performed strongly with 657,000 viewers in Live+SD. In the Monday-Friday, 9-10P hour among A25-54, BBC AMERICA ranked #13 in coverage rating (.51) and #22 in delivery (380k) among the 75 Nielsen-rated ad supported cable networks. For the week, July 20, in the 9-10P hour, the channel - available in 64 million homes - outperformed, in Live+SD A25-54 delivery several nets with significantly higher distribution, such as MSNBC, Animal Planet, Bravo, BET, Travel, Oxygen, Hallmark, TV Land, Soap, MTV, E!, WE, and Headline News. The press release also confirms that BBC America has acquired the next season of Doctor Who, starring Matt Smith as the Doctor. The series will air on BBC America in "Q2, 2010 following soon after its UK premiere"; "Q2" refers to the second quarter of the year, or April, May and March. http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com  | ||
| Gallifreyan Embassy / Doctor Who: Podshock Apparel Regenerated Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:32 PM PDT
They are all available at the new Gallifreyan Embassy Cafe Shop. | ||
| News: Doctor Who on BBC America 2010 Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:28 PM PDT Season 31 of Doctor Who will air in the USA on BBC America, reports Digital Spy, with the episodes airing shortly after their UK debuts! After the flirtation with the Sci Fi Channel (let's ignore it's simple and irrelevant rebranding) Doctor Who has found a much more natural home on BBC America, and recently The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead have both aired on the network, with the Easter special pulling in 657,000 viewers. The Digital Spy report also indicates that Doctor Who will air... | ||
| BBC America Announces Acquisition of Doctor Who Season Five - TVOvermind Posted: 10 Aug 2009 10:40 PM PDT
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| TV highlights, August 12 - WA today Posted: 10 Aug 2009 09:56 PM PDT
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| Pictured: The child bollards that are so lifelike they're scaring ... - Mail on Sunday Posted: 10 Aug 2009 09:13 PM PDT
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| On the London Stage A Seductive Twist on a Classic Tale - New York Times Posted: 10 Aug 2009 08:41 PM PDT
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| Pictured: The child bollards that are so lifelike they're scaring ... - Daily Mail Posted: 10 Aug 2009 08:04 PM PDT
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| Tennant: 'I felt like Robbie Williams' - Digital Spy Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:54 PM PDT
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| Last chance to nominate your homo heroes... - The Lesbian and Gay Foundation Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:29 PM PDT
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| Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:25 PM PDT Writer of the final story from Doctor Who's original 1963-1989 run, Rona Munro knows a bit about the show and the character - and given Ms Munro is a playwright it's fair to say that she knows what she's talking about. As far as the writer of Survival is concerned, love should be off the agenda for the Time Lord, and she has said as much in a recent Guardian interview. "This," she says with mock portentousness, as she munches a sandwich at the Traverse theatre's rehearsal room in... | ||
| Fair City star Jamie will show you to your table - Herald.ie Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:01 PM PDT
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| BBC America Tops 1 Million Viewer Mark With Pair Of 'Torchwood ... - Multichannel News Posted: 10 Aug 2009 06:44 PM PDT
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| A Seductive Twist on a Classic Tale - New York Times Posted: 10 Aug 2009 06:36 PM PDT
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| TV highlights, August 12 - The Age Posted: 10 Aug 2009 06:10 PM PDT
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| Big Brother 11: The Empire Strikes Out. - Huffington Post Posted: 10 Aug 2009 12:03 PM PDT
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| First let's do a quick recap of our week: - Daemon's TV Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:52 AM PDT
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| Swimming against the tide - Brisbane Times Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:06 AM PDT
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| Swimming against the tide - Sydney Morning Herald Posted: 10 Aug 2009 11:05 AM PDT
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| James Corden refused to bare his butt in new movie - Oneindia Posted: 10 Aug 2009 10:08 AM PDT
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| 11-year-old's death in Death Valley ruled accident - Las Vegas Review - Journal Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:41 AM PDT
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