|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Apr 5, 2014 12:07:04 GMT
From the Doctor Who News Page: Glyn Jones has passed away. Born on April 27 1931, Jones was one of few people to have appear and written for Doctor Who. As a writer he wrote the William Hartnell story The Space Museum and as an actor he appeared in the Tom Baker story The Sontaran Experiment playing Krans. His acting work outside of Doctor Who included the Strange Report episode Report 0846: Lonely Hearts - Who Killed Dan Cupid? Which featured Doctor Who alum Anneke Wills as a series regular.
Jones died on April 2 2014, just 25 days before his 83rd birthday.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Apr 19, 2014 6:26:46 GMT
Robophobia: Robophobia is an audio story featuring the Seventh Doctor and is a sequel to the Fourth Doctor TV story The Robots of Death. Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs and released by Big Finish Productions in July 2011. In the accompanying interviews Briggs suggested that Robophobia takes place a couple of months after Robots of Death. However TARDIS Wiki has noted that if this comment was to be taken into account this might mean a continuity clash with the Kaldor City audio series from Magic Bullet Productions which is set ten years after Robots of Death. Incidentally Briggs himself had a small acting role in Kaldor City. The guest cast in this story includes Nicola Walker and Toby Hadoke. Nicola Walker plays a sort of companion in Liv Chenka while Hadoke is a comedian who is known to be a Doctor Who fan. In contrast to him being a comedian, Hadoke plays quite a serious role in Robophobia. In Robots of Death, the formal name of robophobia was Grimwade’s Syndrome which was in-joke to it being named after Peter Grimwade, who would later become writer and director on Doctor Who and had been production assistant on Robots of Death. Due to the name of Robophobia as the name of this audio story, it was unavoidable that Grimwade’s Syndrome gets a reference here and I can only imagine how the late Peter Grimwade would react to being name checked on Big Finish. Robophobia is quite a solid sequel to Robots of Death and definitely good performances from Nicola Walker as Liv Chenka. So glad to learn that she recently returned as Liv as the companion of the Eighth Doctor in Dark Eyes 2. Quite fascinating the accompanying interviews including mentioning the fact of Nicola Walker being well known for her role as Ruth in Spooks. I am not sure I should be surprised or not that Sylvester McCoy did not know that this was a sequel to Robots of Death but that sure came out of nowhere hearing him say it. Also very good but quite haunting isolated track of the incidental music.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Apr 29, 2014 1:14:17 GMT
Liberty Hall: Liberty Hall is a special feature included in the Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead DVD which is a fictional interview with the Brigadier reprised by Nick Courtney and released with the Black Guardian trilogy DVD set in 2009. Quite an enjoyable interview with the Brig as he talked about his career in UNIT, being a maths teacher in Brendon and eventually marrying Doris. Harry Sullivan, Benton and Yates gets mentioned (as well as footage of them shown). The showing of Yates here perhaps rectify the fact that he was the only long-term UNIT character who was not mentioned by the Doctor. Quite perplexing when the Brig said that Turlough suddenly disappear because surely the Doctor must have popped out of the TARDIS briefly to tell the 1983 Brigadier that Turlough was coming to travel in the TARDIS. The highlight of this interview was when the Brig mentioned his daughter Kate and Gordon who originally appeared in the video drama Downtime and events of the Big Finish stories The Spectre of Lanyon Moor with the Sixth Doctor and Minuet In Hell with the Eighth Doctor. It is interesting that Liberty Hall has acknowledge these non-TV narratives but the canoncity of Liberty Hall is something that would be debated as it an original DVD special feature and not something that is either part of the Doctor Who TV series or an official on-screen supplement of it. However Kate would be canonised when she appeared in the TV series starting with Power of Three & Minuet In Hell would also be canonised as it featured Charley who got mentioned in the mini-episode The Night of the Doctor.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on May 21, 2014 9:33:54 GMT
In Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter, in an email from Russell T Davies to Benjamin Cook in 2008 the former informed the latter that Noel Clarke would not be available to reprise his role as Mickey in Torchwood: Children of Earth as he had been cast in a Michael Winterbottom film but did not revealed the name of the film possibly because Davies didn’t know its name. Out of curiously I went to IMDb to find out the name of the movie that made Clarke to miss out on Children of Earth but the filmographies of Clarke and Winterbottom did not correlate any such film. I then found out the name of the movie from this site: uk.linkedin.com/pub/jermaine-curtis-liburd/17/610/898The name of the movie was called A Beautiful Game but it was never made due to lack of film funding. This means that Clarke had missed out on Children of Earth for a movie that never got made. It means in retrospect Clarke could have been in Children of Earth if he had known that A Beautiful Game was not going to be made!
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on May 29, 2014 18:55:16 GMT
From the Doctor Who News Page: Grammy award-winning singer songwriter Louisa Rose Allen better known as Foxes will appear in the new series of Doctor Who.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on May 30, 2014 5:29:53 GMT
From the Doctor Who News Page: Barbara Murray has passed away. Born on September 27 1929, Barbara Murray appeared in Doctor Who in the Fifth Doctor story Black Orchid playing Lady Cranleigh.
Outside of Doctor Who, her work included Danger Man, The Saint, Department S, Strange Report, Jason King, The Adventurer. She died on May 20 2014 at the age of 84.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jun 1, 2014 0:19:46 GMT
Read in DWM’s 50 Years of Doctor Who – The Doctors in a feature on First Doctor William Hartnell, the feature article writer Jonathan Rigby stated that according to Hartnell’s widow Heather, when Bill was a young actor there had been plans to transport him to Hollywood but those plans fell through when World War II intervened. So if it weren’t for World War II, Hartnell would have had a career in Hollywood but unlikely he would have been in the UK when Doctor Who was conceived. If Doctor Who had a Hartnell-less beginning there is a reasonable probability that it would not have lasted as long as it did and perhaps it would have been a show that no one today knows and remembers.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jul 7, 2014 6:41:57 GMT
The Haunting of Thomas Brewster: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster is an audio story featuring the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and introducing John Pickard as new companion Thomas Brewster. Also appearing as a companion but for this one story is Robert McIntosh played by Christian Coulson. Written by Jonathan Morris, it was released by Big Finish Productions in April 2008. Among the other members of the cast is Trevor Cooper as Shanks. Cooper had been in TV Doctor Who in the Sixth Doctor TV story Revelation of the Daleks playing Takis and will return there again but as a different character in an upcoming Peter Capaldi episode. Quite a thrilling beginning to the story as we meet Brewster, as he prefer to be called by his surname as he gotten used to it being called that. We meet Brewster as a young boy at his mother’s funeral. Also in attendance were the Doctor and Nyssa but they have come too early in his timeline. In fact almost the entire first episode was about getting to know Brewster with the Doctor and Nyssa only playing a substantial part in the story from the second episode. The Doctor and Nyssa began their substantial part of the story by separating from each other due to troubles in the TARDIS. The Doctor and Nyssa then reunited with the latter arriving a year at their current destination. During the preceding year, the Doctor had been an academic and an assistant in Robert. Jonathan Morris presents a story that plays well with its Oliver Twist-style environment with Brewster being an Artful Dodger-type character pretty like how fellow Fifth Doctor companion Adric had been envisaged. Other good parts of the story includes Leslie Ash’s ghostly appearance as Brewster’s late mother. What I particularly liked about this story is Brewster pulling the same trick on the Doctor and Nyssa not once but twice in the respective cliffhangers for the penultimate and final episodes of the story.
The accompanying interviews were very enjoyable including the development of the Brewster character and how he, as an Artful Dodger-type character, was Adric done right and Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) why she likes the stories she was in.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jul 17, 2014 6:28:04 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jul 18, 2014 23:36:22 GMT
It looks like Eleven will end its Torchwood run with Children of Earth, the final episode Day 5 being scheduled on July 21 8:30pm as it does not look like it has the rights to Miracle Day. Torchwood will instead be replaced in its slot from July 28 by new supernatural series Witches of East End.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jul 20, 2014 3:45:48 GMT
Planet of the Daleks: On the DVD info text on Episode 2, it says that part of Terry Nation’s writing techniques has him getting characters to make good use of whatever they have in their possession in order to escape from a predicament they are in. The info text writer then says that Nation would later employed this technique when he helped to develop MacGyver and I didn’t know before that he was that influential to MacGyver as MacGyver’s method of solving a problem he is in is what he is most remembered for. Planet of the Daleks DVD info text on Episode 2 also stated that geranium has been used as the word to describe invisible colour. The info text writer then says that the Geranium Invisibility System presented a contradiction since it turned an invisible Dalek into a visible one. That is not the only problem with the name Geranium Invisibility System with the info text writer neglecting to point out that since geranium has been used as the word to describe invisible colour that rather makes the name Geranium Invisibility System a tautology.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Jul 20, 2014 10:18:48 GMT
Doctor Who: Celebrating 50 Years of Fandom: Doctor Who: Celebrating 50 Years of Fandom is a documentary about Doctor Who fans. Just as Doctor Who celebrating its 50th anniversary, this documentary looks at the impact of Doctor Who on its fans. As well as a select number of fans who got interviewed for this documentary, it also interviewed companion actor Louise Jameson (Leela) and Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman. It was quite interesting to hear from Shearman about a conversation he had with David Tennant sometime during Chris Eccleston’s brief run as the Doctor before being succeeded by Tennant. The irony of Shearman bringing up this conversation and when it took place is that Shearman is the only writer for Eccleston’s only season who did not subsequently write for Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. It was quite surprising that among the fans interviewed here that John Paul Green had been in Doctor Who itself as an extra in Rise of the Cybermen and I did not know who he was there until I saw the clip of him from the said episode here. Another fan Michelle Osorio was quite interesting to see including her telling how she got into Doctor Who and influence her making Doctor Who fan films.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Aug 20, 2014 7:40:38 GMT
Recently I got to re-watch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and watching it from this standpoint the way the title characters dealt with one problem felt very timey-wimey.
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Aug 20, 2014 7:42:11 GMT
Michael Craze had played Doctor Who companion Ben Jackson from the last few stories featuring First Doctor William Hartnell to several early stories featuring Second Doctor Patrick Troughton. Craze passed away in 1998 but recently Big Finish has recast Ben with him now played by Elliot Chapman and this is contrary to Big Finish’s original edict against companion recast.
redrocketrising.com/2014/08/elliot-chapman-cast-as-ben-jackson/
|
|
|
Post by Katy Manning's Chinese Husband on Sept 22, 2014 22:12:01 GMT
|
|