Doctor Who [2]

Some early new companion press pics.

Now there be a cutie-pie.

Good solid pretty Northern lass, no doubt bred on Chicken tikka Masala and Vimto.

No hotpots?

thats a bit old school, its more kebab and Bacardi breezer these days I am afraid.

I find that deeply disappointing. What happened to a hotpot and a local ale? Thas what I remember from my time there. Especially all the local brews, remember them fondly (well most of them) every pub seemed to have its own speciality. Happy days!

I think its generational, I am sure there are plenty of traditional pubs with real ale for the beer enthusiasts, and I am sure there is still good old fashioned pubgrub too, but I was talking more about teenagers youngsters, like the new Who girl, they probably wont discover the delights of traditional pubs until they are past 30, before that age its all alco pops and Macdonalds, probably, but I havent lived there for more than 10 years so maybe I am wrong. maybe they are all young fogeys with pipes and cloth caps.

Mrs Figg wrote: maybe they are all young fogeys with pipes

Pipes are not for old men with hats exclusively, dear Mrs. Figg! They are excellent company by the campfire

Very true indeed Ringdrotten. And a ladies stocking is a handy companion too on a Scottish campsite (pulled over a hat and attached at collar they are the perfect midgie net-makes smoking the pipe trickier though!)

Scotshobbit genius and plenty of buckie combing once more-

Dundee University researchers claim to have invented their own version of Doctor Who's famous sonic screwdriver.
They have created a machine which uses ultrasound to lift and rotate a rubber disc floating in a cylinder of water.
It is said to be the first time ultrasound waves have been used to turn objects rather than simply push them.
The study could help make surgery using ultrasound techniques more precise, the physicists said.
"This experiment not only confirms a fundamental physics theory but also demonstrates a new level of control over ultrasound beams which can also be applied to non-invasive ultrasound surgery, targeted drug delivery and ultrasonic manipulation of cells.
"The sonic screwdriver device is also part of the EU-funded nanoporation project where we are already starting to push the boundaries of what ultrasound can do in terms of targeted drug delivery and targeted cellular surgery.
"It is an area that has great potential for developing new surgical techniques, among other applications, something which Dundee is very much at the forefront of.
"Like Doctor Who's own device, our sonic screwdriver is capable of much more than just spinning things around."

Thats a sonic screwdriver and a medicine replicator we've invented, and thats just this week!

From the Conventionin Cardiff. Moffat, Matt, Karen and Arthur.

Bit of fun from Babelcolour.

A Beginners Guide to the Doctor. (The bit about him being half-human is a hugely contentious one- most people reckon Rule 1 applies to it- The Doctor Lies).

For Mrs Figg- the series 6 Niel Gaiman penned episode Doctor Who.

"I don't know what it's like to be God — obviously …until that very first moment when you get to sit down and type the words in your script: INTERIOR. TARDIS. … Suddenly I got a very good idea of what it must feel like. I went: "I'm writing it now this scene in the Tardis. I'm writing it!" And that was amazing, it was wonderful."- Neil Gaiman

http://www.peteava.ro/id-683716-doctor-who-2005-6x04

Thanks Petty I will watch tomorrow.

Sure you will enjoy it Mrs Figg.

The Guardian's Dan Martin said: "With so many wild ideas at play, this would have been so easy to get wrong...yet in every sense it was pitched perfectly".
The Telegraph praised the acting of Smith, Jones, and Sheen, and called the episode "hugely enjoyable".
The Independent praised Gaiman for mixing "romance, tragedy and horror, managing to strike a balance while telling a simple story".
SFX magazine reviewer Russell Lewin gave "The Doctor's Wife" four and a half out of five stars, labelling it as "non-stop intrigue and carefully-controlled suspense all the way". He particularly praised Smith's energetic performance, saying "he pings and fizzes around the screen like a Technicolor firework, lighting up every scene he adorns".
Digital Spy's Morgan Jeffery rated it four out of five stars, saying, "you'd be hard-pressed to fault its ambition".
IGN's Matt Risley rated the episode 9 out of 10 and concluded, "Sweet, touching, intelligent, different, utterly imaginative and accessible by both hardcore fans and newbies alike — this is not only Doctor Who, but sci-fi telly at its finest".

I quote those not for you Mrs Figg but every so often I like to try to entice those who have yet to dip into the Who universe by hiinting at what they are missing.

ps I dont agree with the critic who says its good for newbies too- its not- the more you undertand the character of the Doctor and his world the more pleasure will be derived from this epiosde. Its stroy can easily be followed by a newbie, but all the nuances are for the Whovian.

Did you get a chance to watch the episode Mrs Figg? Intrested to see what you made of it.

The Doctor Who News page are doing a countdown to the anniversasry by looking at how the show came about.
The BBC, before th concept was even a twinkling in someones eye wanted to make a scifi series. So, beinghte BBC they commissioned a team of people to invistage scifi for them and see what was suitable for makinginto tv.
Here is that report. Its quite long but its absolutely fascinating, not only as how scifi was viewed by the survey team in the early 1960's, but also for its breakdown of sci fi as a genre.

Survey Group Report on Science Fiction:


1. We have been asked to survey the field of published science fiction, in its relevance to BBC Television Drama.

2. In the time allotted, we have not been able to make more than a sample dip, but we have been greatly helped by studies of the field made by Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, and Edmund Crispin, which give a very good idea of the range, quality and preoccupations of current SF writing. We have read some useful anthologies, representative of the best SF practitioners and these, with some extensive previous reading, have sufficed to give us a fair view of the subject. Alice Frick has met and spoken with Brian Aldiss, who promises to make some suggestions for further reading. It remains to be seen whether this further research will qualify our present tentative conclusions.

3. Several facts stand out a mile. The first is that SF is overwhelmingly American in bulk. This presumably means that, if we are looking for writers only, our field is exceptionally narrow, boiling down to a handful of British writers.

4. SF is largely a short story medium. Inherently, SF ideas are short-winded. The interest invariably lies in the activating idea and not in character drama. Amis has coined the phrase "idea as hero" which sums it up. The ideas are often fascinating, but so bizarre as to sustain conviction only with difficulty over any extended treatment.

5. These remarks apply largely to the novels too. Characterisation is equally spare. People are representative, not individual. The ideas are usually nearer to Earth - in every sense - and nearer to the contemporary human situation. They are thus capable of fuller treatment in depth. By and large the differences between the short stories and the novels are also the differences between the American and British schools of SF. This again helps to limit our field of useful study.

6. SF writing falls into fairly well-defined genres. At one end is the simple adventure/thriller, with all the terms appropriately translated. Any adult interest here lies in the originality of invention and vitality of writing. On a more adult level this merges into a genre that takes delight in imaginative invention, in pursuing notions to the farthest reaches of speculation. The subtlest exponents here are a group of American writers headed by Ray Bradbury, Kathleen Maclean, Isaac Asimov. In a perhaps crude but often exciting way the apparatus is used to comment on the Big Things - the relation of consciousness to cosmos, the nature of religious belief, and like matters. The American writer Edward Blish, in "A Case of Conscience", is surpassing here. More pretentiously, far less ably, the novels of C.S. Lewis likewise use the apparatus of SF in the service of metaphysical ideas. Then comes the large field of what might be called the Threat to Mankind, and Cosmic Disaster.

Most of the novels, and most of the British work find their themes here. This is the broad mid-section of SF writing, that best known to the public and more or lees identified with SF as such. The best practitioner is John Wyndham. Exploiting instinctive psychic fears, the literature of Threat and Disaster has the most compulsive pull and probably indicates the most likely vein for TV exploitation. All "Quatermass" and "Andromeda" fall squarely into this genre. Finally, there is a small lively genre of satire, comic or horrific, extrapolating current social trends and techniques. Again, the practitioners are largely American.

7. We thought it valuable to try and discover wherein might lie the essential appeal of SF to TV audiences. So far we have little to go on except "Quatermass", "Andromeda" and a couple of shows Giles Cooper did for commercial TV. These all belong to the Threat and Disaster school, the type of plot in which the whole of mankind is threatened, usually from an "alien" source. There the threat originates on earth (mad scientists and all that jazz) it is still cosmic in its reach. This cosmic quality seems inherent in SF; without it, it would be trivial. Apart from the instinctive pull of such themes, the obvious appeal of these TV SF essays lies in the ironmongery - the apparatus, the magic - and in the excitement of the unexpected. "Andromeda", which otherwise seemed to set itself out to repel, drew its total appeal from exploiting this facet, we consider. It is interesting to note that with "Andromeda", and even with "Quatermass" more people watched it than liked it. People aren't all that mad about SF, but it is compulsive, when properly presented. Audiences - we think - are as yet not interested in the mere exploitation of ideas - the "idea as hero" aspect of SF. They must have something to latch on to. The apparatus must be attached to the current human situation, and identification must be offered with recognisable human beings.

8. As a rider to the above, it is significant that SF is not itself a wildly popular branch of fiction - nothing like, for example, detective and thriller fiction. It doesn't appeal much to women and largely finds its public in the technically minded younger groups. SF is a most fruitful and exciting area of exploration - but so far has not shown itself capable of supporting a large population.

9. This points to the need to use great care and judgement in shaping SF for a mass audience. It isn't an automatic winner.

No doubt future audiences will get the taste and hang of SF as exciting in itself, and an entertaining way of probing speculative ideas, and the brilliant imaginings of a writer like Isaac Asimov will find a receptive place. But for the present we conclude that SF TV must be rooted in the contemporary scene, and like any other kind of drama deal with human beings in a situation that evokes identification end sympathy. Once again, our field is therefore sharply narrowed.

Conclusions

10. We must admit to having started this study with a profound prejudice - that television science fiction drama must be written not by SF writers, but by TV dramatists. We think it is not necessary to elaborate our reasons for this - it's a different job and calls for different skills. Further, the public/ audience is different, so it wants a different kind of story (until perhaps it can be trained to accept something quite new). There is a wide gulf between SF as it exists, and the present tastes and needs of the TV audience, and this can only be bridged by writers deeply immersed in the TV discipline.

11. Only a very cursory examination has sufficed to show that the vast bulk of SF writing is by nature unsuitable for translation to TV. In its major manifestation, the imaginative short story with philosophic overtones, it is too remote, projected too far away from common humanity in the here-and-now, to evoke interest in the common audience. Satiric fantasies are presumably out. As far as the writers themselves are concerned, nearly all of them are American, and so not available to us even if we wanted them.

We are left with a small group of works, and writers, mainly novels written by British novelists. With the exception of Arthur Clarke and C.S. Lewis, they represent the Threat and Disaster school, which as we have said, is the genre of SF most acceptable to a broad audience. John Wyndham is the chief exponent. Wyndham's books were studied in the Department on an earlier occasion, and we decided that with one exception they offered us nothing directly usable on TV. The exception was "The Midwich Cuckoos", which of course was snapped up for a film. This is indeed the likely fate of any SF novel that could also serve us for TV.

12. Two exceptions to "Threat and Disaster" are Arthur Clarke and C.S. Lewis. The latter we think is clumsy and old-fashioned in his use of the SF apparatus, there is a sense of condescension in his tone, and his special religious preoccupations are boring and platitudinous. Clarke is a modest writer, with a decent feeling for his characters, able to concoct a good story, and a master of the ironmongery department. Charles Eric Maine, who again can tell an interesting story without having to wipe out the human race in the process, is too much a fantasist: he is obsessed with the Time theme, time-travel, fourth dimensions and so on - and we consider this indigestible stuff for the audience. There is scarcely need to mention Fred Hoyle; we consider his ideas exciting, well related to the present day, and only need proper adaptation to TV to achieve great success. We consider "Andromeda" both a warning and an example.

13. It is of course not possible to say what sort of hand Clarke, say, or Wyndham, or any other practitioner would make of writing directly for TV. Perhaps their best role at present would be as collaborators, in the way we are using Hoyle. They are obviously full of specialised know-how, but only a trained TV writer could make proper use of it.

14. Our conclusion therefore is that we cannot recommend any existing SF stories for TV adaptation, and that Arthur Clarke and John Wyndham might be valuable as collaborators. As a rider, we are morally certain that TV writers themselves will answer the challenge and fill the need.

Addenda to Joint Report

I met Brian Aldiss, editor of Penguin Science Fiction (editing another volume now) in Oxford. He is very knowledgeable and has a large reference library of SF. I believe he is the Honorary Secretary of the British Science Fiction Association, and he told me of the conference mentioned by Duncan Ross. He has been engaged by Monica Sims for the "Let's Imagine Worlds in Space" programme. He will call me sometime soon and come to London, at which time he could meet someone regarding SF for television. He would be a valuable consultant - not a crank - with definite ideas about what could be achieved visually.

fascinating stuff. I guess I should look up whether Who preceded Star Trek, which was sold as a sort of western wagon train to the stars. It should also be noted that what Roddenberry sold and what he intended were two different things.

Okay, looked it up. Who won by 3 years.

Who also had the transmat beam before transporters, cybermen long before Borg and all sorts of other stuff too for that matter,

I tried to watch it today Petty but my computer is glacially slow and wont do its thing, is it a Romanian site? the language seems latin based.

I honestly have no idea Mrs Figg. Same site as had the Rose episode though.

Latest rumours for the anniversary is that as well as the upcoming season there will be a further five, one hour specials starting in November 2013. The upcoming series starts this Autumn and will finish about Febuary. Leaving the spring and summer gap before the specials. Apparently they are not a replacement for series 8, it will be seperate. (Whether Matt will still be Doctor by then is another matter of course).