Christian Cawley's Blog, page 44

Doctor Who to have No Title Sequence for the First Time Ever

Philip Bates 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.

For the first time ever, Doctor Who won’t have a theme tune this week!

Wait! Don’t kick off straight away! The reason is, Sleep No More is the very first example of a found-footage story in the show’s history – with said footage supposedly salvaged from the La Verrier Space Station. Without this theme tune, it keeps the illusion that this is all real!

Mind you, it’s no small mercy: in my eyes, the theme and title sequence that’s accompanied the Twelfth Doctor era is one of the worst we’ve had. Seriously, they should’ve just kept the Series 7B titles, but obviously exchanging Matt Smith’s face with Peter Capaldi’s.

It’s not the first time they’ve done something smart with the theme tune: earlier this year, we had the Doctor playing a guitar throughout; and in Death in Heaven (2014), they inserted Clara’s face into the beginning sequence instead. For The Day of the Doctor (2013), we were given a taste of the early 1960s titles, and during Series 7A, the logo was altered to reflect each episode. Asylum of the Daleks (2012), for instance, had the Doctor Who logo covered in Dalek, erm, baubles, shall we say?

The Radio Times says:

“Still, don’t despair – there’s a pretty cool temporary Doctor Who logo to enjoy instead this week (think kids’ restaurant word search), and the ordinary titles with music are back in place next week.”

So Sleep No More has no titles sequence – or alternatively, you can think of it as the longest pre-titles sequence ever.

The post Doctor Who to have No Title Sequence for the First Time Ever appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Mark Gatiss Interview: “Sleep No More is like a Horror Film”

Philip Bates 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.

Sleep No More airs this weekend, and the BBC caught up with writer, Mark Gatiss to talk about what we could expect from the found-footage episode.

Gatiss will be at the Doctor Who Festival Friday – Sunday, so he might answer some further questions about the serial on the last day of the event.

BBC: What inspired you to write about an Indo Japanese space station?

Mark Gatiss: I had this idea for a long time – an idea of insomnia first of all, it was something that really interested me. Then the idea of a future world where people are under such pressure to work all the time, they invented the Morpheus machine. When you go in it, it concentrates chemically the benefits of sleeping for 5 minutes, you can then work for a month without going to bed. There’s the idea that people get competitive, the wide awakes and the rip van winkles. It’s a space station that revolves around Neptune and it’s gone silent. They send a rescue mission from Neptune’s moon Tridon to find out what’s gone on, because the man who invented them, professor Rassmussen, is on the space station.

Why Indo Japanese?

It’s Indo Japanese because I went to Japan and India last year and I loved the idea of, rather than it being another space station I thought what if something has happened in the far future. I love the idea of fusing the different cultures and that it doesn’t look like an ordinary space station.

How does this episode differ from the last episode you wrote, Robot of Sherwood?

It’s very different. It’s a very dark episode and deliberately so; it’s like a horror film. It’s a found footage story, so stylistically and practically it’s very different. Robot of Sherwood is a romp, so it’s completely different. Robin Hood was pure fun, and Sleep No More is very dark.

Do you prefer writing darker episodes or lighter fun scripts?

I like both, and what I’ve specialised in all my life is a combination of the two. So it’s the two poles of what I do. I think an episode of Doctor Who is always somewhere in the middle, a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, and hopefully some scares!

Do you enjoy being on set and watching your episode come to life?

It’s a funny thing, with Sherlock I’m there every day so it’s a different process to birth it as it were and you’re also there being asked questions all the time. With Doctor Who I’m a visiting writer, I usually come for a day or two tops. It’s always nice to see it coming together and I was really intrigued to see how it would work out because of the found footage idea. I hope people are going to be really surprised by it, because it is really different. I love the variety within the format, there’s nothing like it on television, even a big fantasy show. To shake that up and see it via a different perspective is really exciting.

You’ve worked with Steven [Moffat, showrunner] on several occasions. What makes you such a successful team?

We’ve been friends for over 20 years, and the first thing we bonded over was Doctor Who. We used to try and convince BBC Executives to bring back Doctor Who, which usually involved pushing them in to a corner. Weirdly they never said yes. It was the founding principles of how we became friends. It’s real fun thrashing things out, throwing ideas around with Steven, he’s got an amazing mind, he’s so stimulating, and if I get stuck on something he will definitely always have a brilliant idea for it.

Sleep No More airs on BBCOne on Saturday 14th November at 8:15pm.

(Thanks to BlogtorWho.)

The post Mark Gatiss Interview: “Sleep No More is like a Horror Film” appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

DWM #493 Previews Series 9 Finale (with Variant Festival Cover!)

Philip Bates 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.

The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine looks ahead to the dramatic final episodes of the latest series – Sleep No More, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, and talks to to the writers of the episodes: Mark Gatiss,  Sarah Dollard and showrunner Steven Moffat.

They also catch up with the director of the series finale, Rachel Talalay (Dark Water/ Death in Heaven) and the Doctor himself, Peter Capaldi…

And if you’re going to the Doctor Who Festival this weekend, a very special exclusive limited edition variant cover will be on sale between Friday 13 and Sunday 15 November!

Speaking of the final episode of Series 9, Hell Bent, Capaldi says:

“The whole episode’s quite big. It’s huge, actually – but also there’s a sadness, a romance, and a tragedy to Episode 12. It’s just so romantic. It’s very effective. And I loved all the stuff on one particular set. I was very excited. It looks so modern – a Kubrick-y kind of vibe. It was very nice. We’re in a very interesting place, because we’re competing with bigger shows, frankly. Most American shows have four times the budget per episode that we have, but that’s what we’re up against. We’re competing with Game of Thrones… This is traditional for Doctor Who, but it goes to show what this amazing production team can achieve.”

ALSO INSIDE DWM #493…

INSIDE NUMBER 9

DWM reunites League of Gentlemen stars Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith – writer and star respectively of Sleep No More – for an exclusive interview! Plus a chat with guest star Bethany Black.
BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL

Showrunner Steven Moffat answers readers’ questions, and reveals just who the Doctor is talking to when he’s looking directly at the camera…
IMMORTAL WORDS

Poll-winning writer Jamie Mathieson discusses his varied career, including his life as a stand-up comedian, and how his latest episode, The Girl Who Died, came to be.
HIGHWAY TO HELL

Writer Catherine Tregenna talks in-depth to DWM about how she came to write her recent Doctor Who episode, The Woman Who Lived.
BACK TO LIFE

Jacqueline Rayner explains why The Girl Who Died reminded her of the Moxx of Balhoon, her childhood and Dodo in Relative Dimensions.
TALES OF DARKNESS

The Doctor and Clara face terror in the cemetery in their latest terrifying comic strip adventure, The Highgate Horror, by Mark Wright, illustrated by David A Roach.
THE DWM REVIEW

DWM reviews The Girl Who Died, The Woman Who Lived, The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion. Plus, the latest DVDs, books and audios are put under the spotlight.
COMING SOON

All the latest and forthcoming Doctor Who CDs are previewed – including UNIT: Extinction and Jago & Litefoot & Strax!
PLUS! All the latest official news, competitions, ratings round-up, Wotcha! and The DWM Crossword.

Doctor Who Magazine 493 is on sale from Thursday 12 November 2015, price £4.99.

The post DWM #493 Previews Series 9 Finale (with Variant Festival Cover!) appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Capaldi and Moffat Tease Series 10 Changes

Simon Mills 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.

Oh. Hello! Welcome to my first foray into writing actual proper news for Kasterborous! I’ve graduated from the occasional opinion(ated) article into a full member of the news team! Yay!

And what a great start I have with bringing you this news regarding the direction that the Doctor’s character arc will be heading in when Series 10 hits our screens. Events towards the end of Series 9 will put him back in the “cynical and closed off and suspicious” frame of mind that we originally saw at the beginning of Series 8. Capaldi said:

“It’s been nice to see him more cheerful, but of course as the whole series develops, more terrible things happen. So in fact, I think by the end, he’s going, ‘Oh man, I was right, I should’ve remained cynical and closed off and suspicious’. If you’ve been following this Doctor, you’ve seen him go through all those different colours and all those different places. So where he goes now – in Series 10 – I don’t know, but he’s been put through the mill.”

On the companion front, Moffat has disappointed legions of Osgood fans by stating for the record that Ingrid Oliver will NOT be signing on as the new companion to replace Jenna Coleman’s Clara. His reasoning being that you really need someone new on board to make a fresh start, and while bringing an established character back worked with Donna, this isn’t the direction they want to go in right now. Whilst he thinks Osgood is a great character, he likes where she is in the Whoniverse at the moment. He went on to say:

“I think every time we get a new companion – even more so than a new Doctor – you are sort of saying, ‘This is the beginning. This is where it starts. You can join in here’.”

As a morsel of comfort for the Clara fans, Moffat also stated that “You can never say that someone can never come back. They always can, because it’s a show about time travel. So it’s entirely possible.”

So, there we have it! We can look forward to a return to the darker, moodier Doctor with a brand new companion on board in Series 10.

I, for one, can’t wait to see how this shapes up! How about you…?

The post Capaldi and Moffat Tease Series 10 Changes appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Sneak Peek: Sleep No More Clip

Philip Bates 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.

Professor Rassmussen has created something that can change the fabric of human existence: the Morpheus Machine.

On the Le Verrier Space Station, revolving around Neptune, something very wrong has happened. The space laboratory has gone silent.

The BBC has released this short but tantalising teaser from this weekend’s Sleep No More – the last message from the Le Verrier Space Station, starring Reece Shearsmith (Inside No. 9) as Rassmussen. Fans will know Shearsmith for appearing as Patrick Troughton breifly in the 2013 docudrama, An Adventure in Space and Time, but many will also recognise him for his work alongside writer, Mark Gatiss and Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead‘s Steve Pemberton.

Sleep No More is a first for Doctor Who: a found-footage episode, similar to the style employed for The Blair Witch Project and countless further horror stories.

It airs on 14th November on BBCOne at 8:15pm…

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Out Now: Jago & Litefoot & Strax – The Haunting [TRAILER]

Philip Bates 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.

UNIT: Extinction has only been out a couple of days, but already Big Finish has released another New Series title: Jago & Litefoot & Strax: The Haunting!

The audio adventure teams the Infernal Investigators from The Talons of Weng-Chiang with Strax, the Sontaran who first appeared in A Good Man Goes to War and who has since found a home in Victorian London.

Written by Justin Richards, this is what to expect:

Strax, the Sontaran butler to Victorian investigator Vastra and her wife Jenny, suffers a disorienting attack and mistakes Jago & Litefoot for Jenny and Vastra and moves into Litefoot’s home. Together, they are on the trail of a creature that is stealing brains, which may or may not be linked to a haunted house in London…

The double-disc set stars Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter reprising their roles as Henry Gordon Jago and George Litefoot respectively, while Dan Starkey returns as Strax. They’re joined by Lisa Bowerman, Conrad Asquith, Stephen Critchlow, and Caroline Seymour.

Of course, if you enjoy the Jago and Litefoot adventures, they’ve got ten series’ worth of stories behind them. Who knows where Strax will next pop up, but Starkey’s a regular at Big Finish anyway, so we look forward to finding out!

Jago & Litefoot & Strax is out now from Big Finish, £14.99 for a physical copy and £12.99 on download. Look out for our review soon!

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Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch Awarded CBE

Philip Bates 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.

Benedict Cumberbatch collected his CBE at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace yesterday.

The star, best-known for playing the lead role in Sherlock, was recognised by the Queen for his services to drama and charity, and posed with his wife, Sophie Hunter outside the Palace following the ceremony.

He told the BBC:

“It’s a unique occasion and I feel very privileged to be here and flattered to be recognised in this way… [Her Majesty] asked me what I was doing at the moment, and I told her I had finished a three month run at the Barbican, which she knew of. And I told her I had just got back last night from filming in Nepal, Doctor Strange for Marvel, then I’ll be going straight into the fourth series of Sherlock. She said: ‘Oh, it never stops does it?'”

Indeed, the actor caused a media storm after a recent performance of Hamlet when trying to raise awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis. Though he was battered in rags like The Daily Mail, he retorted:

“I’m interested in the number of people that are drowning off the island of Lesbos, people who need funding and help, I’m not interested in the flak that I’m taking… If because I’m in the public eye because of my work and I get scrutinised in my private life because of that, I’m going to damn make sure that I use that potency to help other people.”

Huge congratulations to Benedict from everyone at K Towers!

The post Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch Awarded CBE appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Reaktion Round-Up: What You Thought of The Girl Who Died

David Power 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.

Finally! This episode’s been hyped up for so long that I was starting to wonder if it’d ever get here. Anyway, it’s time to find out what you all thought of Maisie on the Orient Express. Oh, wait, my mistake. I meant Monty Python and the historically incorrect Vikings.

Oh, whatever, you know what I mean!

Heavenly 21.04%  (77 votes)

Mathieson lives up to his reputation! (That’s good.) 45.63%  (167 votes)

I… don’t know. 17.49%  (64 votes)

I expected more. Lots more. 10.66%  (39 votes)

What. The. Hell. 5.18%  (19 votes)

You guys seem pretty mixed about this one. And I kind of agree. I was looking forward to this episode, not because of the set up really, purely because Jamie Matheison’s two episodes last year were some of the best of that season (in fact some say the very best!). I was so looking forward to seeing what his new story would be like, plus Maisie Williams was in it, and as a Game of Thrones fan that was pretty cool. I just assumed it would be great and patiently waited.

At the beginning of the episode a Viking (whose helmet doesn’t actually bother me) breaks the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses. Good start. Then the Doctor and Clara are isolated from the TARDIS by at least two days, leaving them to survive on nothing but their wits. Suddenly the Doctor’s training a village full of farmers to fight off a mighty warrior race led by a being claiming to be “Odin”. Wow, that’s a really cool set up. So why am I not into the episode?

It’s strange, but the episode feels… off to me. The pacing’s weird and scattered, it tries to fit a two-part episode into a one part which leaves no room for us or the episode to breathe. “Odin” and The Mire looked cheap, and Odin is acted very poorly (I also wish I never knew that Odin was meant to be played by Brian Blessed. God I wish I lived in the reality that got that episode). As to be expected, an episode co-written by Jamie Matheison and Steven Moffat is full to the brim with jokes. And while the jokes themselves are quite funny, the editor doesn’t seem to understand comedy pacing so for me a lot of the genuinely funny jokes just didn’t hit well.

There was a great script here, just buried under a bad production.

The ratings received quite a boost from the previous week, probably due to this episode being advertised more than any other episode this season. Overnights increased from 4.38m for Before the Flood to 4.85m. Overall figures also improved from 6.05 million to 6.56 million. It got an Appreciation Index score of 82, one less than Before the Flood.

So, what did you more vocal K readers think?

Next week we’ll have something interesting indeed. The second half of two-parter being written by a different person. And not just any person. Catherine Tregenna! How exciting. Let us know what you thought of The Woman who Lived!

The post Reaktion Round-Up: What You Thought of The Girl Who Died appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Titan Comics Announce Fourth Doctor Series!

Philip Bates 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 brand new comic series featuring Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor and the late Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith will launch early next year!

This miniseries expands Titan Comics’ hugely popular and critically acclaimed Doctor Who comics line, which already includes adventures from the Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors.

Entitled Gaze Of The Medusa, the five-part series will hit stores in March 2016 and will be written by Gordon Rennie (Judge Dredd) and Emma Beeby (Witch Hunter) with art by Brian Williamson (The Twelfth Doctor, Spider-Man, X-Men).

The all-new adventure is set in Victorian England, where a mysterious woman commands a hidden army in a house of the blind. Scryclops stalk the streets… and something alien and terrible screams from prehistory – with a hunger that cannot be satisfied!

Issue #1 will come with six covers to collect: a painted cover by fan-favorite artist Alice X. Zhang; a photo variant; art covers by artists Brian Williamson, Jay Gunn and Matt Baxter; and a blank sketch variant. They’re pretty brilliant, don’t you think?

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor #1 debuts in comic stores and on digital devices from March 2016.

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Sleep No More Gallery And Cast Unveiled

Philip Bates 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.

Sleep No More promises to be something pretty unique in the world of Doctor Who: a found-footage episode similar in style to The Blair Witch Project!

But these last four episodes of Series 9 are certainly being kept under wraps.

With that in mind, we present a gallery featuring very few spoiler-y images. Seriously, the BBC aren’t giving much away.

In previous weeks, we’ve had a huge batch of images to give you, but this time…? Not so much.

Still, it looks great, right?

You probably know Reece Shearsmith (Inside No. 9) but if you’re wondering who else is in this weekend’s installment, here’s the full cast list:

The Doctor – Peter Capaldi

Clara Oswald – Jenna Coleman

Rassmusssen – Reece Shearsmith

Nagata – Elaine Tan

Chopra – Neet Mohan

474 – Bethany Black

Deep-Ando – Paul Courtenay Hyu

Monster Actors – Paul Davis, Tom Wilton, Matthew Doman

Morpheus Presenter – Zina Badran

Hologram Singers – Natasha Patel, Elizabeth Chong, Nikkita Chadha, Gracie Lai

Sleep No More, written by Mark Gatiss, airs on 14th November on BBCOne.

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