After a very long night last night I'm not able to sleep tonight, so have finished watching Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass on Netflix. I'm not sure whether it was the towering work of art its admirers have hailed, but I don't think it was the damp squib its detractors have pointed to either. I could sense that it was full of references to other ( Read more... )

Russell T Davies's talk to Worcester College, Oxford and (by invitation of the provost) the Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society was enjoyable. I wasn't in the target audience, of course - there was a lot of talk about how to get into television and how Russell failed to get into the BBC training course three times, ending up by going in as a ' ( Read more... )

Digital Fix report that Peter Harness will be adapting H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds for Mammoth Screen and ITV, with shooting not beginning until 2017. Promising; and further food for the speculators surrounding the Doctor Who succession.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2015/12/16/peter-harness-and-the-war-of-the-worlds. ( Read more... )

As alluded to earlier... Richard Marson's biography of Verity Lambert, first producer of Doctor Who and guiding force behind much, much else, reviewed by me at The St James's Evening Post.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2015/04/13/drama-and-delight.html.

Here I am, an agnostic and I suppose a functional atheist, humming 'Jesus Christ is risen today'... but here is a Doctor Who Easter Bunny, co-creator Cecil Edwin 'Bunny' Webber, profiled on BBC Two's (Happy Fiftieth Birthday, BBC Two!) website for An Adventure in Space and Time last year. (
( 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... )

I've shared this picture, which should be visible on the other side of this link elsewhere. It shows an article from DWIFC Magazine issue 2, published by the Doctor Who International Fan Club, back in May 1976, in which one Peter Capaldi praised the creativity and integrity of Bernard Lodge, title sequence designer for the first seventeen years of ( Read more... )

He's off, then, after all, just when I had expected that he would be doing the 2014 series. If, as some sources suggest, this is part of a general relaunch which will try to restore momentum for the series after three years of reduced episode counts and allegedly troubled production, then good luck to it; though increasingly globalised television ( Read more... )

I'd noticed how recent publicity for the new series of Doctor Who has emphasised its historical settings, with leaks from the set over the last few months revealing that the nineteenth century seems to be visited several times. Just as Doctor Who in 2005 had borrowed imagery and themes from the contemporary aspirational working-class drama genre, ( Read more... )

Catching up with the first two episodes of the second series of The Hour from BBC2 and Kudos, and I am less sure what to make of it than I was last year. Hector's outsider status seems to have been forgotten - was he really being addressed as a 'journalist' in the trailer at the end of part two? He definitely wasn't one in the first series - and ( Read more... )