Christian Cawley's Blog, page 345

The First Doctor Who RT Photoshoot

Rebecca Crockett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

In another fascinating little look back into the last 50 years of Who, Radio Times spoke with photographer Don Smith, who was responsible for the first publicity shots taken for the show.

Because of the timing of the photoshoot, the sets from the first episode weren’t available, so Smith recalls having to make do with some specially constructed fake sets and whatever else was at hand in a basement studio at BBC’s Television Centre:

“Because our press day was a few weeks ahead of transmission, we naturally had to shoot things like this in rehearsal rooms and studios or anywhere we could. And in this particular case, we had [first Doctor] William Hartnell, and [his companions] William Russell, the girl teacher Jacqueline… I never remember her name [Hill], and Carole Ann Ford. It was a terribly uninspiring session – just a matter of putting them together in a schoolroom…”

Smith also recalled an anecdote of another photographer, Douglas Playle, about something Playle had seen a few weeks later while shooting publicity shots of a future episode:

“[Playle] said, ‘I’ve just been down to Lime Grove [a former BBC studio] photographing an episode of Doctor Who. And they’ve got these fantastic things – they’re like inverted dustbins on wheels. It’s fantastic the way they move about.’ And this is the point: Doug said, ‘I can see them becoming very popular and being the in thing.’ I’ve often thought back on that.”

It’s so wonderful that all of these little memories are being shared about the beginnings of Doctor Who. Looking back at the history of the show when everything was new and uncertain makes one appreciate how long the show has continued to be relevant in popular culture and how it has so completely captured the hearts and minds of each new generation!

(via Radio Times)

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A Thank You from Sylvester

Jonathan Appleton is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Sylvester McCoy has thanked fans for their ‘financial and spiritual’ help in supporting The Minister of Chance.

Have fun checking out what’s on Sylvester’s shelves. No points for spotting the weighty Hitler biography. And is it just me or does he look more like a distinguished old school Time Lord as he gets older?

Producers are seeking to crowd fund the first part of the Minister of Chance movie, and latest the update shows they are almost halfway to their target of £30,000.

The Minister of Chance project spun out of Death Comes to Time, the BBC audiocast Doctor Who adventure of 2001, but is entirely fan-produced. Cast members have included Sylvester himself, Paul McGann and Paul Darrow. Visit the Minister of Chance website to see how you can sponsor the film and download previous audio episodes.

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New Zealand Mint Silver Coin Available in UK

Alex Skerratt is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

A special Doctor Who 50th Anniversary coin, previously only available in New Zealand, has materialised in the UK!

The $2 piece, made of silver, has a mintage of 10,000 and an engraved relief of the TARDIS as it hurtles through the full-colour time vortex. The coin border features the finely engraved words ‘Doctor Who 50th Anniversary 1963 – 2013′ and, as such, is the perfect addition to anybody’s celebratory collection (or handy bus fare if you live on Niue Island!). The reverse side does, of course, depict the Ian Rank-Broadley effigy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

As if that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, this limited edition coin also comes in its very own TARDIS display box, with doors that go “vworp vworp” and everything. For the considerable sum of £99.99, UK fans can order theirs now from the BBC Shop, claiming a 10% discount if they enter the promotional code DOCTOR1.

Rachael Hammond, BBC Worldwide’s Senior Licensing Executive, said:

“We are thrilled to be partnering with New Zealand Mint on this global deal. It is an historic year for the Doctor Who brand, and we are pleased to be able to bring this unique product to Doctor Who fans and coin collectors alike.”

And Simon Harding, the NZ Mint Chief Executive, added:

“I grew up watching Doctor Who as a child in New Zealand which, coincidentally, was the first country outside the UK to screen the show. It’s a great honour to now be asked to produce these coins to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Fans are going to really like what we’ve come up with.”

This is certainly a unique item, and a welcome addition to the range of 50th Anniversary merchandise now available in the UK.

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Watch Classic Who on… Watch!

Alex Skerratt is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Classic Doctor Who has finally made its way to Watch!

As from October, viewers in the UK will be able to enjoy some ‘omnibus’ editions of the Time Lord’s greatest adventures. Kicking off at 2.30pm, the schedule is (so far) confirmed as:

Saturday 12th – The Aztecs (First Doctor)

Sunday 13th – Tomb of the Cybermen (Second Doctor)

Saturday 19th – Spearhead from Space (Third Doctor)

Sunday 20th – Pyramids of Mars (Fourth Doctor)

Saturday 26th – Earthshock (Fifth Doctor)

Sunday 27th – Vengeance on Varos (Sixth Doctor)

There are currently no listings available for Saturday 2nd or Sunday 3rd November, but presumably these will feature a Seventh Doctor adventure, and the TV Movie for Doctor Eight.

Watch, (which can be found on Sky 109 and Virgin 124), is part of the UKTV Network of channels. In fact, BBC Worldwide has a 50% stake in the venture, so it makes sense that they’re interested in running a few repeats (plus it’s rather cool!).

Be sure to tune in from Saturday 12th.

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Cowbridge Signings: Reynolds & Frankham-Allen

Nick Kitchen is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

If you live in and around Cowbridge (or are close enough to make the trip), you’ll want to add September 25th to your calendar! As part of their ongoing events scheduled for this year, the Cowbridge Book Festival is welcoming authors, Alastair Reynolds and Andy Frankham-Allen for a Doctor Who themed event.

Reynolds’ novel, Harvest of Time, is set during the Third Doctor’s incarnation and finds him taking on the Master and the Sild. It also features the return of Jo Grant, the Brigadier, and U.N.I.T. (an always welcome addition to a Who story, in my estimation).

Frankham-Allen will also be on hand to discuss and sign his unofficial work on the companions of Doctor Who, Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants, going back all the way to the very beginnings in 1963.

Along with the chance to get your copies of the new releases signed by the authors, they will also be discussing writing and their thoughts on Doctor Who with Comic Guru‘s Kristian Barry. The event will begin at 7:30 pm and will be hosted at the Cowbridge United Free Church. Entry is only £6, and that will also include a glass of wine. Those in attendance will also be able to participate in a charity raffle for items spanning each incarnation of the Doctor.

This is the third year for the book festival and it has seen the format move from a single weekend event in May to events staggered throughout the year to help accommodate the authors and vendors. More information about the event and tickets can be found on the festival’s website. Will you be attending the event? Feel free to share your thoughts on the books too, if you’ve had the chance to read them.

(Via Type40.)

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Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary Volume One: 1963 – 1969

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Here’s an interesting way of reviewing Doctor Who: watch every episode in existence, in order, daily!

Doctor Who Online’s Will Brooks has done this, and his 50 Year Diary Volume One: 1963 – 1969 is now available to purchase for Kindle with a print version following on November 4th 3013, which you can pre-order now from www.pageturnerpublishing.co.uk for £14.99.

In celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, Will Brooks sits down to watch every episode of the programme made between 1963 – 2013 at the strict pace of one per day.

 

Having watched each episode, Will records his thoughts in a daily blog for Doctor Who Online, and scores the episode out of ten, on a scale ranging from ‘Perfect, the absolute pinnacle’ to ‘Why am I doing this again?’

 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: 1963 – 1969 collects together more than 260 entries of the popular blog, covering the complete eras of the First and Second Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), and also includes exclusive entries for the two 1960s Dalek feature films starring Peter Cushing, and a foreword by Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts.

Says Doctor Who scriptwriter Gareth Roberts in the Foreword:

[Will’s] observations are fresh and often startling – his is a unique perspective on Doctor Who. I thought I knew all this stuff back-to-front but Will’s jumping-bean prose snaps me out of my jadedness and I see it with new eyes.

Brooks updates The 50 Year Diary daily for Doctor Who Online, and estimates that – at his current pace – he’ll continue to do it until early 2015 (by which point, it will either be time to cycle round and start again, or bin all his DVDs…). Watch out for further instalments in future – but in the meantime, you can buy Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: 1963 – 1969 now for Kindle for £7.71!

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The Lost Stories: Lords of the Red Planet

Meredith Burdett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

It’s fitting that, with the recent release of The Ice Warriors on DVD, the last release of the year from Big Finish in their Doctor Who Lost Stories range pits the Second Doctor against his ice cold foes once again.

Forming a sort of prequel to Troughton’s first encounter with the creatures, Lords of the Red Planet takes the TARDIS crew to Mars itself, long before the water could give them any trouble…

The TARDIS crew land on Mars, home of the Ice Warriors, far back in its history. The Doctor is convinced it’s much too early for them to meet their frozen foes.. but the Doctor is wrong.

Far below the surface of the planet an evil scheme is in motion. A scientist works night and day at the command of an insane despot. A despot intent on creating a terrifyingly familiar army.

What exactly does Zaadur plan? What dark secret lies at the heart of the Gandoran mines? How far will the Doctor go to save his friends? In the deepest caves, the true Lords of the Red Planet are ready to emerge… Can anyone possibly survive their birth?

Originally conceived by Brian Hayles and adapted for audio by John Dorney, Lords of the Red Planet stars Fraser Hines as Jamie McCrimmon, Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot, Michael Troughton as Quendril, Abigail Thaw as Zaadur, Charlie Hayes as Veltreena and Nicholas Briggs as Aslor, Risor and The Ice Warriors .

Released in November 2013, Lords of the Red Planet can be purchased from Big Finish on CD for £16.00 or via download for £14.99.

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The Day of the Doctor Poster Available to Order!

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Available from 29 September 2013 is this superb new poster for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, featuring the Tenth, Eleventh and mysterious Xth incarnation of our favourite Time Lord.

Based on the images released earlier this month, the paper poster can be purchased for a wholly reasonable £3.99 right now from Forbidden Planet!

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How Would You Feel About a New Doctor Who Title Sequence?

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

An awesomely talented YouTuber called billydakiduk has created this amazing new Doctor Who title sequence for the Peter Capaldi era.

Now, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that this approach is quite a departure from the time tunnels and star fields of old. Personally, I like it, although I suspect it may appeal more to New Adventures fans than anyone else.

What do you think? Could the show do with a new approach, and do you think the BBC will go with something like this?

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041 The Web of Fear

Jake Simpson is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

I’ll be honest.  80% of this review is going to come from my recollections of the Web of Fear book I read and re-read as a kid. I loved this story. It was set on the Underground, where my dad worked (my dad was a London Transport Schedule maker – he worked out the routes and the schedules that buses and trains took around London, so they all matched up. Or, as we used to call them, “Fairy Tales”, given the accuracy of timing of your average London bus driver.)

It was dark, it was spooky and it was, as all the most classic and best Doctor Who stories were, it used familiar environments and then sacred the crap out of you by using them in creepy ways.

Given the recent resurgence of the Great Intelligence and the very pointed references to the London Underground in the Christmas Special, The Snowmen, it seems appropriate to be reviewing this now.

Now, as I mentioned, most of what is available for The Web of Fear is recon. Episode 1 exists of the six part serial, and some clips, but most of the meat is simply gone forever. Where is a time machine when you really need one, I wonder?

So, the story. It opens right on the tail end of Enemy of the World, where the Doctor’s doppelgänger has been ejected into space from within the TARDIS (which is interesting since the current series opens the doors in deep space all the time. A recent fix to the TARDIS ? The lasting effects of the Tribophysical Waveform Macro-Kinetic Extrapolator from Boom Town?)

Eventually we are (re-)introduced to a Yeti from The Abominable Snowman – interestingly enough they understand that it’s a robot. There’s actually some pretty good acting, dialog and direction in these scenes, better than you would expect from that time. It’s all very believable, even if the music is a little over the top and straight out of a Hammer House of Horror movie.

The Yeti comes alive, predictably kills someone – this is Doctor Who after all – and off we go. There is some messing around in space, with the TARDIS covered in web, for no really discernible reason, and then lots and lots of mucking around in tunnels.

There is a story that goes around that the BBC actually asked to film in the real Underground in London, but were turned down. So they built a station and tunnel of their own and filmed in that, and when this was broadcast, the BBC received an irate letter from London Transport demanding to know how they had got into the tunnels to shoot, when they’d been specifically told no! Hard not to imagine the set designer not putting that letter up on his wall!

We get to see the Yeti using webbing – which is new, since the only time we’d seen webbing before with the Yeti was briefly in the Abominable Snowman, as part of where the Great Intelligence was breaking through.

From what can be seen from the first episode, the actual scripting, dialog, direction, sets and everything is surprisingly good for the time period. Quite frankly, this would not be out of place in the new Doctor Who – it’s the kind of stuff that makes you realize why Doctor Who is the British Treasure it is today. Pat Troughton is a delight, just loving the roll of the Doctor and chewing up the scenery every time he’s on screen. Victoria and Jamie are Victoria and Jamie, only more so. It’s also nice to see Professor Travers back from the original Abominable Snowman, only this time complete with daughter in tow.

Sure, in later episodes there’s some filler – this could easily have been a four-parter instead of running to six episodes, but in terms of actual filler, it could be an awful lot worse.

One of the things that does contrast with a story like The Web of Fear and today’s stories is that today’s are almost in real time. At most, they last a day or so. With these old six parters, stories could take place over a week or more! You don’t often see that in modern Doctor Who, other than, perhaps, The Power of Three.

Of course, no conversation regarding The Web of Fear could be complete without discussion of the scene where the Doctor meets Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (at this point, still only a Colonel) for the first time, starting a friendship that would span time and bodies. It’s so good to hear Nick Courtney again, back at the start with no real idea of where it was going to lead and how important it was going to be in the pantheon of Doctor Who.

What’s even more interesting is that John Levene – who went on to play Sargent Benton in Unit – was actually inside one of the Yeti!

As a story, this one is an interesting one. The Doctor, at the conclusion of the adventure, was all set to drain the Great Intelligence into his brain. We can only speculate at what the results would have been had he been successful – having the Great Intelligence knocking around in his head would probably not have been the most terrific thing ever, but he was game to do it and didn’t seem too concerned about it if it had been successful!

The story itself carries several Doctor Who memes – monsters from out of space, contemporary environments made scary by mysterious means, a hidden agent, soldiers shooting things unsuccessfully and lots and lots of sneaking around, being split up, running around and meeting up again, plans made and foiled and so on. In fact, after watching/listening to it all, it’s almost as though it contains the blueprint for pretty much every Doctor Who story made since!

The Yeti, as monsters, aren’t really that scary in terms of just looking at them. For some reason – I think it’s the huge wide spaced eyes – they remind me of the Mandrels of The Nightmare of Eden. The noises they make don’t make you apprehensive – I think that honestly, they aren’t that effective. They are just too cuddly. The concept of a robot programmed and controlled by the spheres is a compelling one though.

All in all though, a very enjoyable romp. It’s a criminal shame that more of this story isn’t available, since it’s showing both the Doctor Who team and the BBC of the time in the best possible way. It’s well written, compelling characters and a great story, both in premise and execution.

It’s just a shame we had to wait 45 years for the Great Intelligence to return!

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