Jackie Lane has died aged seventy-nine. She played Dodo Chaplet, travelling companion to William Hartnell's Doctor in Doctor Who, between Bell of Doom, the fourth and final part of the story the scripts and Doctor Who Magazine call The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve but which BBC Studios call The Massacre (26 February 1966) and The War Machines ( Read more... )

The first part of a series of musings on Doctor Who and British identity, at John Connors's Timelines blog, originally commissioned by John for the fanzine Plaything of Sutekh which he co-edited with Richard Farrell. A short introduction can be found at The Event Library, too.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/849575.html.

Veteran performer Brian Blessed has told the Radio Times this week that he was offered the lead role in Doctor Who after he finished his run in Z Cars at the end of 1965. If this is not a drastic misremembering of the negotiations in the early 1990s revealed in issue 3 of Richard Bignell's Nothing at the End of the Lane, which would have seen ( Read more... )

For reasons clear to anyone who studies his Twitter feed and interactions, veteran Doctor Who fan Ian Levine is keen to make it known that this short series of articles published in DWB in 1992 is available to read online. It's been supplemented and superseded by other work, such as Richard Molesworth's DWM articles and the two editions of his book ( Read more... )

Brief reaction as I have to get up and cross London to the ExCel tomorrow for the 'Celebration'... but it was corny, with some overdone sentiment and dramatised the mythology and communal memory of Doctor Who as much as it did (very selectively) the facts and personalities - but it was still a tremendous achievement within eighty-five minutes, with ( Read more... )

"...the total of missing episodes now stands at 106. The fact that so much of Doctor Who exists is a testament not only to fans’ determination but to the incompetence of the BBC; not only could they not manage to keep a proper archive, they couldn’t even manage to throw things away."

Jonathan Morris's Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition ( Read more... )

Rewatching these for the first time in some years, for research purposes, I'm struck by how good they are. The Doctor oscillates between coward, inspired speaker, petulant elderly child and thinker; he's deliberately difficult to know, though I think that by the time Barbara expresses her surprise that the Doctor is trying to help her escape, and ( Read more... )

My review of Big Finish's The Library of Alexandria, over at The Doctor Who News Page's reviews wing.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/606115.html.

I was led to this story about the discovery of a cache of scripts belonging to the late Anthony Coburn by the estimable
( Read more... )

There's something about this 1964 Radio Times cutting which reminds me that Susan and Doctor Who were indeed born in "another time, another world".

( Cut for image )