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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."
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Doctor who? Say again please.
nothing beats the good ol' Tom Baker days. Not that I didn't like the other doctors...
"Get the F*ck off my TARDIS ya punk ass bitch!!"
It should have been Paul McGann. He did such a great job in the 1996 movie.
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M
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
Christopher who?
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.
You complain about Slashdot rejecting your story (Maybe it was poorly written?) then you winge about being modded down. Do you have nothing better to do than complain about Slashdot in relation your own life?
What about Peter Cushing in "Day of the Daleks"?
I suspect the can(n)on has to boom in a different direction for the movies, though I did like the touch of including Sylvester McCoy in the McGann movie, even if the movie itself wasn't generally well received. For all of the running through the Tardis in "Invasion of Time", we never saw such an essential and powerful piece of the Tardis as the Eye until 1996?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Arch villans. The Dr must be pitted against a worthy advisory, the Master. He really was very evil, in fact the Master invented evil. The chaps in the shiny suits and trash cans on wheels never really scared me at all, the Master on the other hand was equipped with a TARDIS that actually worked and all the knowledge of a time lord. The Master was Moriarty to The Doctors Sherlock Holmes, and or course he wanted to rule the known universe.
12. Gallifreyans get 12 regens by default. The master used up all his, did all sorts of mojo to stay alive on Gallifrey, stole Councillor Wossisname's body on Traken, and in the 5 docs was offered a full set of regens in exchange for help locating the Doctor.
The Valeyard from Trial of a Time Lord was supposedly the doc's 12th regen. The eeeeeevil one.
Oh my god. I'm a huge nerd.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Yep, 12. Before that he was able to siphon off some of the energy(?) from the Eye of Harmony in the Panoptican on Gallifrey in order to stay alive a bit longer, even in his vegetative form.
That's Councillor Tremas you are thinking of.
Then there's that pneumesmiton(sp?) gas stuff in that cave during Peter Davison's character. Can't recall any more than that.
OMG! I'm a huge nerd, too. There's a pair of us!
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Unless you buy the "Brain Of Morbius" version of Time Lord lifecycles, in which case there were eight other Doctors prior to William Hartnell (this was flatly contradicted in other scripts later in the series, but was very much the intention of the production team at the time) whose faces appear on the screen of the mind-wrestling machine.
SO looking forward to this new series. We have another tall, intense, slightly alien-looking insanely charismatic actor in the role, the best Drama writer in the UK, a budget reported in today's press as around a million pounds per episode, scripts by not only Russell T Davis but also Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Steve Moffat and Rob Shearman, each of whom has a fine professional track record, and the show still has the charisma to get immediate coverage across the UK national media.
I wonder if the Beeb will just pretend the movie never happened? They certainly can't afford to reproduce Hollywood's version of the Tardis.
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.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
No way! Head is a wooden ham who gets by in
the U.S. because of his accent.
Before joining Buffy he was best known in the
UK for his role in a long running coffee
commercial love story ("The Gold Blend couple").
Simply NOT Time Lord material, but he might
serve as an Ice Warrior with a bit of make-up.
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.
Not surprising, then, as Russell T. Davies, the producer spearheading the new series, has gone on record saying he wanted to focus on the horror aspect of the series.
To many people (and especially Americans) Doctor Who is thought of as a lighthearted series. But, really, throughout most of its run, it was not. The show was frequently chided by British "family advocates" for being too scary for the children's audience it was supposedly targetted at, and dabbled in all sorts of macabre ideas. It was only during the reign of producer Graham Williams in the late 1970s (the period in which Douglas Adams served as script editor) that the show gained its reputation for pure camp: Philip Hinchcliffe, the producer preceding Williams, was especially noted for his penchant for gothic horror, and John Nathan-Turner, who followed from Williams' tenure until the cancellation of the show in 1989, tended towards, at various different points, either action/suspense or psychological horror himself. Heck, even Williams/Adams, beneath the somewhat camp exterior, delved into some dark concepts.
The Doctor, as a character, usually has an eccentric edge, but he's not always (or even predominately) a humorous character: even Tom Baker's performance, particularly towards the beginning and end of his seven year run with the role, had its sharper, and darker, edges.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."