Dr Who News (5)
This topic contains 565 replies, has 28 voices, and was last updated by 
janetteB 20 hours, 23 minutes ago.
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2 July 2026 at 03:45 #78724
@dentarthurdent Sorry, we are not prepared to lend out Mark Carney at this time, he is way too busy here or at least he better be. There’s a lot going on.
Peter Capaldi would make a great Bond and he already has attack eyebrows.
@janetteb The Who movie was an American production that was filmed in Canada so you can’t blame us, especially on our 159th birthday.
Happy Canada Day!
2 July 2026 at 07:25 #78726@winston Yes, we had noticed rather a lot going on. The orange Feuhrer in Washington is a busy boy isn’t he?
1867 is quite recent. Still beats Australia though.
I wish you happy birthday, good luck and elbows up! 🙂
2 July 2026 at 09:54 #78727@winston and all Canadians, I most humbly apologise. The American movie.
@nerys and @dentarthurdent. Not all fans are talented but those that are usually have the feel for the show which non fans might miss. There are of course exceptions. One problem I think with recent Who is the developers were trying to be more “american” to compete with the U.S. market but they were forgetting what makes Who unique and most likely what makes it appealing in the U.S. as elsewhere. Keeping the feel of the show, it’s warmth, humour and a quality that comes from low budget that so many British productions have will make it far more successful than all the glitzy special effects and action. The best episodes in the last few series were not those with the big budget on show. I hope the BBC are now of the same mind. After all it was on good scripts, acting and production that they built their reputation in the first place. (though Old Who might only have ticked two of those and then only some of the time.)
Maybe they need Mackenzie Crook to take over as show-runner, once he has done another series or two of Small Prophets of course.
cheers
Janette
2 July 2026 at 11:30 #78728Doctor Who was created by the BBC in 1963. It soon became a success. However, not everyone at the BBC liked it. By the end of the Second Doctor’s era, there were a lot of Doctor Who haters at the BBC who were plotting to cancel it. Luckily, the Doctor Who lovers at the BBC managed to defeat them by creating a new format for Doctor Who. Unfortunately, this was mainly designed to save money. The money saving plans were to cut the number of episodes produced per year AND to have all the stories based on Earth. Later on, travel to other worlds was restored, but the number of episodes wasn’t increased.
Later still, there was some censorship of Doctor Who, but I’m not sure when it started. This gave Doctor Who hater Michael Grade an excuse to have an 18 month gap between series, which even prevented viewers seeing how Mel first met the Doctor.
Finally, Doctor Who had its number of episodes cut again, as well as more censorship, and being shown in the UK at the saw time as Coronation Street. This gave another Doctor Who hater Peter Creggan an excuse to cancel the 1990 series, then it was never continued.
With NuWho, it got off to a great start, but after just a few series the Doctor Who haters at the BBC managed to cancel the 2009 series, leaving the Tenth Doctor’s era to end with a few specials. They managed to cause more chaos by cancelling the 2016 series as well. Finally, they caused so much chaos that they’ve managed to cancel Doctor Who again, but of course they don’t call it cancelled. All this should tell you that the BBC nowadays is nothing like in the 1960s. The main difference is that the people in charge hate sci fi! During the 1960s and 1970s, the BBC produced some other sci fi series as well as Doctor Who. They were called “Out of The Unknown”, “Doomwatch”, “The Survivors”, and “Blake’s Seven”. There may even have been some others.
As for what might happen to the Doctor Who rights after the BBC is closed down, I think the rights should be given to a trust, not sold to the highest bidder. As for what exactly rights mean, this isn’t clear. Isn’t Doctor Who copied from “The Time Machine” by HG Wells? I recently saw an episode of “Out of The Unknown”, based on a JG Ballard story. It was called “Thirteen to Centaurus”. Fifty years later, a mini series with the same plot called “Ascension” was made which didn’t seem to credit JG Ballard at all. Also, there was a classic Doctor Who story called “The Ark” about a long journey through space in suspended animation. After that, other companies were free to create series such as “The Starcrossed” and “The Ark”.
As for me writing some Doctor Who stories, or collaborating on them, I could do that, but the problem is that I’d know in advance what was going to happen!
2 July 2026 at 13:05 #78729@janetteb I agree with you about the budget and special effects. First of all, the FX should support the script, not replace or outweigh it. I think there’s a certain quality of FX to properly support the story. Less, and you get things like the embarrassing unconvincing ‘guns’ in Blakes 7, or the gods in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy looking like styrofoam statues firing ‘little points of light.’ Too much, and the plot gets overshadowed. The worst is when the producers think, “We’ve got the most awesome FX, just need a script to tie them together”. No, FX cannot substitute for a good script. Nor can a cast of thousands.
This is probably why the most intense episodes of Who were ones like Blink, Listen, Midnight and so on.
This is not to say that a good FX budget doesn’t help when the story needs it, for example I imagine the CGI budget for the beautiful alien ship in Wild Blue Yonder must have been – generous. But even so, it was subservient to the story, so it worked.
For another example, “Alien”, which was famously filmed on a relatively tight budget, was by far the most intense and suspenseful of its series.And, I think a ‘feel for the show’ is a big asset, maybe even essential, for producers/writers/directors.
2 July 2026 at 13:43 #78730@translatorcircuit Unfortunately, what you think ‘should’ happen to the rights carries little weight with those who actually have custody of them. In particular, if the BBC were wound up, it would probably be the duty of the receivers (or whatever their title was) to maximise the financial return.
As for ‘The Time Machine’ somehow invalidating Doctor Who’s copyright, that’s not how copyright works. ‘Prior Art’ can invalidate a patent, but copyright is a little bit different. There is no copyright in ideas, only in the expression of those ideas. The idea of a time machine, even if it was original with Wells, is not copyrightable. The BBC, or you, or Disney, can make all the stories they like about time machines and not violate anything. It’s the expression of those ideas which is copyright. If Disney or you make your time machine look like a blue police box, that would almost certainly be a breach of copyright. Again, courts take into account how much of the original work was copied. There’s a doctrine known as ‘fair use.’ If your sci-fi included a line-up of model time machines, and one of them happened to be a blue police box, you’d probably be on safe ground, so long as the hero didn’t select it to do his adventuring in.
Also, of course, almost every idea in science fiction (or any other fiction) has been used countless times.
The authors of ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ famously sued Dan Brown for using their ideas in ‘The da Vinci Code’ and failed utterly. Firstly, their book claimed to be factual and historical, and there is no copyright in facts. (Kind of an own goal, that, if they’d released their book as fiction they might have stood a better chance). Second, they claimed da Vinci Code copied their ‘theme’, but couldn’t state which unique parts of their ‘theme’ had been copied, other than a few key points which were ‘factual’. There was no word-for-word wholesale copying. So they failed.
Similarly, Doctor Who copied a theme fron A Christmas Carol, but they were on safe ground. The Who story was sufficiently different from the original to be safe from copyright.And even if the Beeb had been guilty of breach of copyright in elements of The Time Machine, that wouldn’t invalidate the original copyright or mean that anybody else could breach copyright independently. And, the Beeb would still have copyright over all elements of the story that weren’t copied from The Time Machine.
(Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, if any of what I’ve said is wrong, please somebody weigh in.)
2 July 2026 at 20:55 #78731@janetteb I definitely agree with you about the Paul McGann movie. I had no idea he was so good because … well, that movie didn’t offer a clue. But when I saw The Night of the Doctor, I was so impressed with him. As you say, what a difference a good script and good direction make!
@winston Yup, Mark Carney’s dance card is full … more than full, actually. I don’t know how he does it, but I’m glad we’ve got him.
2 July 2026 at 22:09 #78733Paul McGann as The War Doctor would have been fascinating. We got John Hurt instead.
Otherwise…
I AM annoyed with The BBC:
Putting Grade and the first cancellation aside…
In my opinion they undermined Moffat.
They set an agenda for Chibnall. Who was pretty poor anyway.
They give every impression that they want to sell the show… you can call it ‘putting it to tender’ if you want. They get broadcasting rights; someone else carries the can.
But what happened with the BBC abandoned special? It was clearly never just a figment of RTD’s imagination. They must be divided over the show because…
… they’re in a right wing press/streaming competition bind. And we are, all of us, as far as the press and the streamers are concerned, toxic fans. Yep! That’s us. Because we like the show. But most of us rather actually like Steven Moffat, and they can’t cope with him again.
Probably, ‘kiddult,’ as a genre… frothy, not too serious, but some real threat and jump moments, isn’t actually possible anymore. Not sure The Streamers will touch it. It would need a reinvention, to be ‘like’ something probably irrelevant to WHO. And I would never want someone to do to Who what Apple did to Foundation.
The issue are ratings: we ARE niche, toxic, unrealistic, sentimental and NOT amenable to soapification, the holy grail for the proper hack.
And yet somehow we still exist, somewhere, down the river. Sold.
8 July 2026 at 01:34 #78734Moffat’s views on writing, always worth listening to:
Earlier in the interview, Moffat also shared his view on what makes good writing, arguing that the first job of any television show, film or play is to entertain.
“They never mention the word entertainment, which is the minimum condition of anything you write,” Moffat said. “Not theme, which some poor sods ask me about, and not subtext. Oh, do me a favour. It’s entertainment. That’s all you’re doing.”
8 July 2026 at 09:46 #78735@whohar Care to give us a link to that interview? Thanks.
8 July 2026 at 12:07 #787368 July 2026 at 15:47 #78739thank you for the link @whohar I was just thinking earlier about how universally loved Dr Who is. I was in a shop yesterday when the s.o rang to find where I was and the assistant immediately smiled at the ring tone and we started talking about Dr Who. Prior to the reboot that would not have happened, not in Australia anyway.
cheers
Janette
9 July 2026 at 10:50 #787419 July 2026 at 12:35 #78743@whohar Thanks for that. That article is actually excerpts from a video interview with Stephen Moffet, it very helpfully gives a link to the interview, which is on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T-wYCvusZ4
I know what I’ll be watching for the next hour and a half. Moffat is always interesting to listen to.
16 July 2026 at 02:58 #78760Smallish update on the tender process:
https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor-who-next-production-partner-107265.htm
16 July 2026 at 03:39 #78761 -
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