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17 October 2013 at 17:48 #18656
@Shazzbot – the BBC term is ‘requests’ – so I think they include both streamers and downloaders in that.
Agreed that the 50th Anniversary special is event TV – but AG Who has a history of ‘event TV’ becoming a fixture. The Christmas Specials; the first one created especially to introduce David Tennant. Then next year, as RTD loves to tell us, the suits were ‘so, what are you planning for the traditional Christmas Special?’
As he said; traditional? They’d done exactly two Christmas Day episodes in the entire history of the programme, and one of those was back in the 1960’s… The 50th Anniversary would be a perfect time to test the waters for the traditional Doctor Who 3D movie. You know, the one they have every year? 😉
In support of that particular mad theory, I note that David Tennant is frantically trying to build up a US profile, Matt Smith is looking to move into films, and Karen Gillan’s playing Angela in Guardians of the Galaxy. Peter Jackson has expressed an interest in directing Who, the latest director announced is best known as a film director – and Steven Moffat was moving into film scripts when he got the call for Who.
17 October 2013 at 17:07 #18650@scaryb The Eleventh Doctor and the Moffat era actually has better viewing figures than that: iPlayer. iPlayer isn’t yet counted; they haven’t figured out yet how to account for people using it for a repeat viewing. But the Moffat era started at the point iPlayer was really beginning to take off – and they know some episodes have had over 2 million downloads. If you add on the iPlayer stats, you’re generally running at 8 million +
So if you look at Series 7B, it looks like Nightmare in Silver and Crimson Horror did very badly – in fact, about half a million people seem to have shifted platforms. The lower the overnight/DVR figure, the higher the iPlayer downloads. Both NiS and Crimson Horror add on 1 1/2 million viewers, bringing the figures back to that ‘around 8 million’. Episodes that have higher overnight/DVR have lower downloads – about 1 million or a bit higher.
The thing the team are struggling against is that Doctor Who is probably the most timeshifted (pun intended) programme in the BBC’s line up. Only 62% of the audience watch it when it’s broadcast. Everyone saves it for later. No wonder the start time wanders around – the suits know it doesn’t matter when they broadcast it.
So I think the thing with the 50th is they might be curious to see if people aren’t bothered about watching it on the telly; so long as they can watch it. Will they go to cinemas to watch it? Will they download it? Are they playing it on their iPad the next day? Or will everyone be passing round the dalek shaped biccies and watching it at home with the kids?
17 October 2013 at 14:06 #18634@jimthefish – had it not been for the fact that Matt Smith went and got a new haircut – and you’re not allowed to get that drastic a haircut without permission, not when you’re the lead actor in a series – I would indeed have continued my assumption that she meant ‘new haircut and entire new body’. That’s certainly what I thought at the time; she was referring to another regeneration.
But now he’s got the new haircut.
Yes, fine, they could have said ‘hey, one more Special, we can manage a wig.’ But where’s the fun in that? (As River would say).
17 October 2013 at 13:55 #18632@wolfweed – Lost in Space and the giant carrot! Ooh, that takes me back!
I think it was actually called ‘The Great Vegetable Rebellion’. Tybo the giant carrot accuses Dr Smith of murder for picking those flowers. In ensuing events, Dr Smith becomes a big stick of celery, Penny turns into a flowerbed and the adult members of the audience wonder how many tabs the writer had been dropping (it was 1968).
For an especially surreal experience, watch it dubbed into Spanish. 🙂
17 October 2013 at 13:49 #18631@jimthefish and @scaryb – I’m still somewhat suspicious that they gave Matt Smith permission for a new haircut, frankly. Okay, wigs. But there’s that line way back in Forest of the Dead where River talks about: ‘You turned up on my doorstep with a new haircut and a suit.’
And here we are with the new haircut. Which, by using an ‘old haircut’ wig, they seem to be busily trying to imply is not part of the plot. Really not. Definitely no reason in the world for the Doctor to have a very drastic haircut. Haircut? What haircut?
And then, if they follow that line, visit River for the last time before she goes to the Library and dies … in a very similar pattern to the Tennant Doctor wanting to see his old Companions, before he regenerated.
16 October 2013 at 09:19 #18570Six stills have been released for Day of The Doctor. They’re on the official BBC Doctor Who site, so I presume they’ve been approved for release. 😉 Especially since they tell us absolutely nothing that we don’t already know. 😀
14 October 2013 at 20:51 #18524@scaryb – I seem to be doomed with Orphan Black. My DVR keeps forgetting to record it; I think it’s having a fist fight with Agents of Shield, which is on just before. Then I only realise that my DVR didn’t record an episode when it’s gone off iPlayer. Watching this series is just not to be.
Agents of Shield is fun, though… 🙂
14 October 2013 at 19:45 #18515It’s odd for the Doctor to have that extremely empathetic reaction
@Shazzbot – agreed. I think, myself, that it’s a callback to the First Doctor – travelling with his granddaughter.
So what happened to her parents? I think he’s so extremely empathic here because Madge is in a situation he does understand. He’s been there as well; having to let a child be happy while knowing that – very soon – he’s going to have to sit down with her and explain something that will make her sad.
As to the ‘fighting off Amy’ – I’m deeply convinced that the ‘alien, not understanding this’ was simply because Amy had just told him she was getting married in the morning. He was trying to stop her making a very big mistake. I’m sure that when he later told River that story, his version was along the lines of ‘and I should’ve got a medal for my self-restraint!’ 🙂
14 October 2013 at 16:01 #18480It seems Ben Wheatley is down to direct two episodes of Doctor Who.
14 October 2013 at 15:43 #18479Well, I’m going to be quite surprised if I find out that @jimthefish isn’t Peter Capaldi’s forum name… 😈
14 October 2013 at 11:42 #18467@craig – it looks brilliant. The new version of the Home Page is excellent as well – it prioritises what we’re discussing right now.
14 October 2013 at 09:27 #18452@hudsey – yes, welcome. Making your first post a completely bonkers theory is definitely a good move.
What I like about it is that placing the Hurt ‘Doctor’ as the very first regeneration of The Time Lord Currently Known As The Doctor fits in with the ‘Prisoner Zero has escaped’ motif of The Eleventh Hour. The Hurt Doctor isn’t Doctor Zero because he’s been cast out of the succession (a Doctor with no number), he’s literally ‘Doctor Zero’, the Doctor before the First Doctor.
And yes, it would give us the Doctor’s ‘origin story’ for the Fiftieth Anniversary. And explain why the Hartnell Doctor starts off as a rather untrustworthy and slightly murderous kind of guy. 🙂
13 October 2013 at 22:24 #18444@fatmaninabox – like I said, Matt Smith’s regeneration 😈
13 October 2013 at 22:13 #18442@fatmaninabox – WTF is in that trailer? Matt Smith’s regeneration???
13 October 2013 at 22:10 #18441Interesting to see that they had ‘Doctor Lite’ episodes back then, as well. It’s something I’d been told, but because there weren’t really any surviving examples, it hadn’t registered. Until the final credits rolled for that episode, and I realised the Second Doctor had only appeared in the recap from the previous episode.
I’m really liking this so far; a couple of ‘we will now sit down and do the exposition’ scenes, but otherwise it’s very tense and fast moving.
13 October 2013 at 15:19 #18420@craig – I wouldn’t go with a footer, myself. Generally, the first thing people see is the top of the page – if they have to scroll down all the way to the bottom they might not even realise there is a ‘recent posts’ section.
With the Blogs – I think the problem is that you’re thinking logically. 🙂 That is, you’re thinking ‘Recent Blogs’ must come before ‘Recent Blog comments’. It can be the other way round: recent comments, recent blog comments. THEN ‘Recent Blogs’.
Or you can even go all wild and whacky and have ‘Recent blog comments’, ‘Recent forum comments’, ‘Recent Blogs.’
13 October 2013 at 14:02 #18409@Shazzbot – I like the sidebar. It tells me who’s chatting about what, where – the Activity page is ‘too much information’.
I agree that changing all the different topics into BG discussions and the Moffat retrospective was a good move. I suspect we all imagined one or both of these would die a death after a week or two – and didn’t allow for our ability to Just. Keep. Talking. 🙂
12 October 2013 at 23:19 #18379@fatmaninabox – if you’ve heard about the Tenth Planet 4 hoax, you’ll know why the BBC can be simultaneously buzzing with stories of ‘more episodes’ and denying that they’ve found anything.
As I recall, the ‘denials’ generally consist of the Press Office saying ‘I know nothing’. Which they probably don’t. 🙂
12 October 2013 at 20:47 #18368@phaseshift – yes, I agree this looks great; it makes very good use of its extra minutes. Visually stunning, dramatically impressive even when you know the answers to a lot of the puzzles. Very, very filmic – if the Day of the Doctor is this good, I’ll be a happy bunny. 🙂
That moment where the Smith Doctor is screaming in terror for Oswin to open the door is a call-back to Dalek, isn’t it? Why does he hate them so much? Perhaps it’s at least partly because they terrify him. Matt Smith does some really good acting in the ‘Parliament of the Daleks’ scene; the Doctor’s acting confident and unafraid – but every now and then you can see from a flick of his eye or a slight tightening of his mouth that he’s very, very scared. He’s just determined not to give the Daleks the satisfaction of knowing it. Which makes his later screaming collapse all the more powerful; the image you get is that this – being trapped inside a room with the Daleks coming towards him and only one door that he can’t open – is his personal nightmare.
Yes, the final confrontation with Dalek Oswin is the sucker punch. The clues were there all along; the eggs (and the insane Dalek starting off eggs… eggs… before finally managing egg-stir-min-ate), the ability to hack into all the Dalek controls, Oswin’s ‘hiding place’ being an enlarged interior of a Dalek – complete with controls for the mutant inside. Jenna-Louise Coleman gives a hugely confident performance – Oswin Oswald has grown from the Clara at Trenzalore, and you can see it. Even though, when she filmed this, she was having to work out what that more mature Clara might be like – and then go back to an earlier version of Clara for Bells of St John.
12 October 2013 at 15:48 #18333@Shazzbot – Victoria is supposed to be 15 or 16 in these stories. She’s from 1866, Jamie is from 1746 – Jamie has been travelling with the Doctor for a while now, so is pretty confident with all this weirdness, whereas Victoria is a) on her first trip and b) has just been orphaned by the Daleks.
So she can be forgiven for having a reputation for being one of the more ‘fainting’ of the Doctor’s companions. Since we’ve now got a chance to see two more of her stories (yay!), we can see if that’s true.
Dunno if it’s the same quarry, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I think the budget generally stretched to quarries within 25 miles of BBC TV Centre. Anything outside that, and you had to pay for either travel or overnight hotel fees, you see – it was the maximum allowed distance for daily commuting.
12 October 2013 at 11:14 #18323@arkleseizure and @blenkinsopthebrave
The thing about Day of the Daleks that excites me is that there’s this centuries long time loop in it. Namely, the one in which the rebels cause everything to happen.
The time loop then collapses when the Doctor manages to change a small detail.
Anyway, it would be fun if we discover that the AG Who has been this centuries long time loop…
11 October 2013 at 14:09 #18259@thommck – copyright for a recorded dramatic performance rests with the actors, directors and writers who created the performance/script. If the contract doesn’t specify ‘rights in perpetuity’ (and every union going will tell you NOT to sign such a contract), then you have rights in that performance for as long as you live. Thereafter, your heirs will have rights for a legally specified period (I forget how long that one is).
As long as any of the original actors/directors/writers are alive, Who is still in copyright.
11 October 2013 at 13:54 #18256@jimthefish – we don’t know that they’re not going to go on iPlayer after an initial ‘licence’ period. The BBC frequently shows stuff that’s also available on iTunes.
But I suspect that they need their money back. Quickly. That might be the reason for the slight undercurrent of ‘fans made this more difficult for us’ – that the rumours and excitement made it horribly obvious that these were extremely valuable tapes. And that the rumours also meant that BBC might have found itself competing with someone else who was offering a lot of money.
11 October 2013 at 12:29 #18246@Shazzbot – they won’t stop the repeats. They’re a ‘loss-leader’. Compared with taking up a large chunk of your hard drive, forking out £15 or so for a Blu-ray seems quite attractive; especially with all the extras. And once people have bought that series, they might decide that they want the earlier series. And then they might want to look at all these earlier Doctors. 🙂
If you watched the recordings of the Comic Con Q&A, did you notice that Steven Moffat made a point of asking ‘who here watched S7 by downloading?’ He obviously wanted to show that bit (or Julie Gardner had primed him to show that bit) in his next presentation to the BBC execs; that pretty well every single one of those keen fans didn’t want to wait for their Who. And they all knew how to find the illegal downloads.
The results of that informal poll can be clearly seen in the world wide simulcast of The Day of The Doctor and the delay of the announcement that, yes, tapes had been recovered – until they could be legally downloaded. This is, I think, the BBC trialling the oft-stated idea that if you make downloads immediately available worldwide at an attractive price, people will prefer to buy stuff legally. The ‘illegal’ downloads will then reduce to people trying stuff out because they’re not sure they want to buy it, and penniless students. 🙂
The alternative would be trying to make the region formatted DVD’s available immediately – and we all found out how well that went with The Name of The Doctor going out early.
11 October 2013 at 11:55 #18244Mark Gatiss also mentioned in the various interviews that his script for Sherlock S3 has been influenced by Web of Fear. So it’s pretty clear the production team probably got to watch the episodes as soon as they were vaguely watchable.
Which might well have been ‘as soon as they were returned’ – Philip Morris was saying what good condition they were in, considering their age and the Nigerian climate.
Wonder if Richard E. Grant got to see them as well?
11 October 2013 at 11:43 #18243@fatmaninabox – and, as someone noted last night, if they’d put them on iPlayers there’d be people complaining about the massive waste of people’s licence fee in remastering these programmes that nobody wants to watch.
They can’t win. That said; programmes were found in Nigeria, therefore they’d been sold overseas, therefore it was probably BBC Worldwide’s remit from the get-go. I doubt Philip Morris goes trawling round Nigerian relay stations for the sheer fun of it, so he’d want to be paid – and quite possibly the Nigerian TV channel wanted paying too. After all, they had legitimately bought those tapes, had stored them so well that they survived – and now they turn out to be valuable. It’s like rolling up to the Antiques Roadshow and being told that your granny’s old painting, that you’ve carefully looked after, is actually a Turner.
Then you’re looking at the cost of remastering. Add it all together, and putting them back on air for licence payers probably wasn’t an option.
Sadly, I’m going to have to wait until I’m paid to get the iPlayer copies. But this is as nothing to the thought that I can now look forward to watching Web of Fear. 😀
11 October 2013 at 01:37 #18216@scaryb – Very happy. Especially happy about Web of Fear – we can live with one episode still missing; the DVD release isn’t until February, which raises hope that they’re planning an animation.
11 October 2013 at 01:20 #18214@scaryb – the BBC already had one episode in archive. So they’ve found nine, you’ve got ten.
11 October 2013 at 00:54 #1820711 October 2013 at 00:09 #18195Doctor Who Magazine are reporting: Enemy of The World has been completely recovered and Web of Fear now joins the stories only missing one episode.
That is fantastic news: Enemy of the World is said to be one of Troughton’s best performances in Who and Web of Fear has the first appearance of Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart.
10 October 2013 at 23:59 #18188Drop the Dead Dalek
The Vicar of Gallifrey
Ever Decreasing Time Vortex
10 October 2013 at 23:53 #18186Only Fools and Daleks.
Till Regeneration Do Us Part.
Last of the Artron Energy.
Time Lords Behaving Badly.
10 October 2013 at 22:06 #18168@wolfweed – what Series 6?
10 October 2013 at 21:44 #18160Anything would be terrific.
Something that completes a story (or is a complete story) would have me bouncing round the room. I never got the chance to see Hartnell or Troughton when the stories were on air; now there are so many stories where you have the depressing feeling that you never will be able to see them.
10 October 2013 at 20:48 #18151There’s always some fecker who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘embargo’
I’m going to get the next round in?
Agreed, though. When someone tweeted that they didn’t sign anything, so … I was like ‘Classic. They’re asking you to wait less than ten hours.’
10 October 2013 at 20:37 #18145@miapatrick – glad the advice came in handy. It’s the product of sitting several OU exams. 😯
Creative Writing? A215 by any chance? I did that two years back, so if you find that you need someone to give you feedback, feel free to PM me.
10 October 2013 at 12:51 #18113@scaryb – I’m guessing it’s either a lot of episodes, a complete story, or episodes which make stories complete. To me, a full scale press conference implies something whose importance can be understood by the average BBC viewer – not just the hard core fans. In that sense, Tenth Planet 4 is up there with the BBC’s studio coverage of the Moon Landings – everyone would understand why it’s important that they’ve found it.
Realistically, they’d love it back, but they haven’t much hope. It’s so very well known that they want it, badly, that the only remaining chance is someone who doesn’t know what’s on that old film stock. Or, alternatively, one of those strange people who want to be the only person anywhere who has this.
10 October 2013 at 11:27 #18111@miapatrick – best of luck! And remember that your eye will, invariably, first light on the one question you can’t answer. It seems to be some kind of weird exam rule that they never mention…
Just keep reading the questions until you find the ones you can answer. 🙂
10 October 2013 at 10:27 #18103@pedant – it makes sense that they’d want to get both the Friday morning papers – a lot of the daily commuter freesheets don’t print on Saturdays – and the weekend papers. And the delay is almost certainly because Marketing is trying to get everything into that golden eight week period before The Day of The Doctor.
It’s just that ‘oh, yeah, we’ve found Episode 3 of the Macra Terror and Episode 5 of The Enemy of the World’ doesn’t sound like something that would rate a full press conference. A press release, yes. But even in the 50th Anniversary year, it’s still only of interest to TV & Film historians and BG Doctor Who fans.
The announcement that episodes had been found didn’t make the top Entertainment story on the BBC’s news site, for example.
Still, we’ll know tomorrow. 😉
10 October 2013 at 09:50 #18098@Shazzbot – it is reaching ‘I can feel my ARSE growing’ levels, isn’t it?
@pedant – can you remember if they held a full scale press conference when they recovered the final missing episode from Tomb? Because whatever they’ve found, it does feel like at least one of the episodes completes a story. Or even that they’ve found a complete story.
9 October 2013 at 23:59 #18090@pedant – I know we’ve been redecorating, but our mission statement is still there…
9 October 2013 at 21:58 #18081anything significant in this week?
@scaryb – they can’t possibly have found the legendary Episode 4 of The Tenth Planet, could they? They’d have Anneke Wills doing the press conference if it were that, surely?
But this week in October is when the First Doctor became the Second Doctor – not broadcast; it’s the week they filmed the first regeneration. The other Troughton serial which is both missing and broadcast in October is The Abominable Snowmen (which would be incredible serendipity, considering we’ve just seen the GI).
9 October 2013 at 15:28 #18075@janetteb and @Shazzbot – the Alex Kingston Melody mentions that she might decide to age in reverse to freak people out, so it seems she already knows that she can adjust her aging speed/direction. She might have been a cute toddler for years.
Makes sense, because the Doctor’s various incarnations obviously don’t age the same way humans do. They look ten years older in three years, or three years older after two hundred years, or twenty-five years older when they’re meeting a later incarnation. 😈
9 October 2013 at 12:43 #18053@miapatrick – yes, they seem to have shifted to ‘virtual’ keyboards. But the e-ink Kindle with the grey background is still the cheapest; which suggests to me that it’s still selling.
They also seem to be marketing it as ‘easy on the eyes’; sensible, as people are much more likely to realise that screen glare is a problem than they are to have been tested for dylexia or dispraxia.
I think the modern definition for dyslexia is whether your reading level is below the level expected of your general intelligence.
9 October 2013 at 10:57 #18045@craignixon – good points. I’d always vaguely presumed that either a)Mme Kovarian et al had found her again and taken her to England and the right time zone. Because to assassinate the Doctor you have to meet the Doctor, and knowing her parents would be the easy way to meet the Doctor.
Or b) Mels-the-toddler kept her age that of a small child, took the slow path to meet her parents as children, and at some point got over to England; then made sure she was fostered near the Ponds.
In days of yore, travelling as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ internationally by air was fairly easy. For entirely legitimate reasons, my brother and myself spent quite a lot of time in aircraft between countries (and sometimes continents) having been delivered at the airport by one set of adults to be met by an entirely different set on landing.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if a human-Time Lord could figure out how to get herself across; the only complication would have been arranging for some fake relative to meet you at the receiving airport. As I recall, one of the stewardesses would be responsible for making sure you were handed to the receiving relative, not just left to play dodgems with the luggage trolleys.
9 October 2013 at 00:08 #18028The US TV Guide is having a vote on the favourite fantasy/SF show of all time. And in the semi-finals, we have Buffy versus Doctor Who.
You need a Facebook page to vote.
8 October 2013 at 23:57 #18027@craig – grey is the new white. 😉
8 October 2013 at 23:54 #18026Well, if you check out The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, you’ll see exactly who to blame for the more realistic discussion of whether or not the Doctor might actually have a sex life.
MOFFAT! ::shakes fist::
😉
8 October 2013 at 23:44 #18024@craig 😀
Yes, definitely much, much better.
8 October 2013 at 22:40 #18016@craig – grey works extremely well – I originally bought my Kindle for the text-to-speech facility. Then I discovered that the grey background meant I very rarely needed it.
It was quite astonishing what difference the grey background, and being able to adjust the text size and spacing, made to my reading ability.
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