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New Dr Who Actor Named

Posted by Hemos on from the who-da-thunk-it dept.

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."

6 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Lets face it though.... by andy666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    nothing beats the good ol' Tom Baker days. Not that I didn't like the other doctors...

  2. Interesting, yet disappointing by Chalybeous · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was holding out to see Richard E. Grant in the role, as he did an excellent job during the recent BBC/Cosgrove Hall co-produced web animation, "Scream of the Shalka".
    That said, I'm more interested than disappointed, because I've seen some of Ecclestone's other work and I think he could bring a new perspective to the role.
    (And I'm also very grateful that the role didn't go to Joanna Lumley. That joke's been done to death since the mid-1980s, and the Comic Relief episode a few years back is as close to that prediction as I want to get!!)

    All we need to know now is, who are his new companions?

    --

    "It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork

  3. A good Docotor does not a good show make... by eweu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Paul McGann was a fabulous Doctor in the 1996 movie, but the writing was terrible. That's why it flopped.

    I only hope the BBC holds back on budget just like the old days so the storytelling has to bear the weight, not the effects.

    1. Re:A good Docotor does not a good show make... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I won't speak for the quality of the writing. However every TV executive will tell you if you just toss a TV show on the air and tell nobody you will get no viewers.

      It was awful as an example of Doctor Who. If they wanted to start over from scratch then they should have started over from scratch, not pretend to be writing a Doctor Who movie. If they wanted to continue a tradition then they needed to stay more in that tradition. The movie they made just didn't work as Doctor Who.

      If they wanted to take the series in a new direction then they had to first show that they could cope with the existing material.

      A one off episode after a long break is not the time to decide that the Doctor is half human, bring in all that weird power source of the tardis that can only be opened by humans (why?) stuff, have the Doctor falling in love with some girl he's just met etc. etc. Work with the material you've got or don't bother, but reinventing like that was never going to work. Revelations like that need to be fitted in to the direction of the story line over time. Maybe a Doctor falling in love or whatever can work, but not out of the blue like that.

      If they'd created it as a standalone without the Doctor Who references maybe it could work. If it'd been the culmination of a series that led up to it, maybe it could have worked. As an attempt at a new Doctor Who, it was terrible.

    2. Re:A good Docotor does not a good show make... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The main problem with the pilot was that it assumed that you knew who Doctor Who was and that you should care, while at the sametime trying to explain this overly complicated backstory. Plus the movie was just plain boring.

      Had they just introduced the Dr Who character to the American audience and left it at that, it might have worked. Nothing more than "He's a timelord, he has a time machine, he solves people's problems" was really needed. They could explain the baloney about the Tardis powersource in later epidsodes if they really needed to.

      I got the feeling that the script was written by fanboys and then glossed over by professional hollywood types that didn't know anything about Dr Who.

  4. Gotta have decent production values. by Moderation+abuser · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I remember hiding behind the sofa like thousands of other kids in the 70s but Dr. Who is no longer for children and the effects which in those days inflamed childhood imaginations will no longer cut the mustard.

    The production values now have to be good enough to compete with Babylon 5, Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, Farscape for the attention of the now thirtysomethings who want Who back. I'm not convinced the Beeb will give the show the budget it's going to need and disappointment is a powerful emotion.

    --
    Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.