New Dr Who Actor Named

gdav writes "Well, after all that talk about Bill Nighy, it's actually going to be Christopher Ecclestone. He was prominent in Cracker, Our Friends in the North, and more recently 28 Days Later."

Comments

Re:Lets face it though....

[Masem]

The reason that many people like Tom Baker is that during that time, the complete DW production staff was one of the best assembled, from writing to direction, and thus has some of the more memoriable stories, and just so happened that Tom Baker was the Doctor at that time. But I know more DW fans that appreciate Patrick Trougton, Jon Pewtree, and Peter Davidson as the Doctor, given some of the intensity of acting which they supplied to the roles, while Tom Baker's was more a jovial approach - there's also the change in approach from more cerebrial stories to more action-oriented ones as the sfx budget increased.

The question here, is, is this going to be the 9th Doctor (as the BBC canon (which includes the made-for-tv movie) has McGann as the 8th, or are they planning on retcon?

Re:One question....

[kamawell]

Eccleston. In the UK he's a well repected TV actor but he was in '28 Days Later' and 'Elizabeth' too. He's an interesting choice and over here at least he's certainly going to lend a bit of adult credibilty to the new version of the show.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001172/

Re:Am I the only one?

[Fred Or Alive]

Are any of these posters from America?
Quite a few I would guess. Not me though.

When is the last time any of these shows aired?
Last new episode was broadcast 06/12/89 (DD/MM/YY dates), a TV Movie coproduced by the BBC and Universal was broadcast 27/05/96 in the UK (earlier in the US). Repeats continue on UKTV Gold in the UK (early weekend mornings, set a video / PVR unless you want to get up a 7:30am on a Saturday), and some US PBS stations (but not many). Various other channels show it, like BBC Kids in Canada, UK TV and ABC[1] in Australia.)

Or, if they are any good, is there a Dr. who bittorrent site, since the BBC open-sourced their content.
Note "announced plans" and "in the future" etc. in that news article. It doesn't mean you can just share BBC material freely, it's still copyright and so on. Plus Drama series are probably going to be the last stuff the BBC will make available online, I think the early stuff they're going to have available is stuff like documentaries. You can get DVDs, audio CDs and VHSs of stories.

Now I'll just do a quick "WTF is Doctor Who" bit...

Doctor Who was a Sci-Fi series predominately aimed at children (although it's exact target audience varied over the course of the series, it gradually shifted to older audiences as time went on) that ran between 1963 and 1989 on BBC TV. It concerned the adventures of a mysterious time traveller called The Doctor (not Doctor Who), with the ability to regenerate and change his body to cheat death, and who travel through time and space in a Police Box[1]. The Police Box is actually called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space), and a broken chameleon circuit (which should make the ship blend in with any environment, not just 1950/60's British city streets[2]) was not it's only problem, as the ship appeared to be very unpredictable, often catapulting the Doctor and his travelling companions[3] into dangerous situations, often against evil aliens like the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, or The Doctor's nemesis The Master. The series was at it's most popular during the mid-late 1970's, when Tom Baker took the lead role.

[1] Basically a big blue phone box so police officers could contact their station before the advent of portable radios, they also had a phone on the outside for the use of the public in emergencies (behind the panel with text on it.)

[2] Naturally the TARDIS was first seen in a junkyard, not exactly a common location for Police Boxes at the time. A junkyard did become common in the 1970's, as police forces began scrapping the boxes in there numbers, only a handful of real boxes still exist.

[3] Quite often young women.