Doctor Who

• Sixth series and Christmas special confirmed
• There almost certainly will be a Tom Baker Big Finish play
• From the new series press launch, a video interview with Matt Smith…
• …and a video interview with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, including a clip from the first episode

• Final Destination 5 a go
• Jamie Foxx joins Bruce Willis on Kane and Lynch
• Trailer for Predators
• New trailer for Kick-Ass
• Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher join Ivan Reitman's Friends with Benefits
• Film rights to Andy McNab's Nick Stone series acquired
• Tim Burton doing 3D stop-motion Addams Family movie

British TV

• Lucy Gaskell joins Casualty
• Adam Crozier to earn at least £1m a year at ITV [subscription required]
• Justified acquired by Five USA
• Wii and iPhone now responsible for 4% of iPlayer views each
• John Pilger to make Afghanistan documentary for ITV1 [subscription required]

Canadian TV

• Lots of money spent on US shows

US TV

• Beau Bridges to co-star in The Rockford Files
• Skeet Urich gets a pilot
• Ashley Tisdale to star in Hellcats
• Human Target's ratings hold up
• BSG's Michael Trucco to recur on Castle
• A returning True Blood character [spoilers]

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Doctor Who

• Steven Moffat offers Steven Spielberg the chance to direct an episode
• Karen Gillan reveals more about her character, as well as her inability to do anagrams [spoilers]

Films

• Peter Mullan to star in The Lion Inside
• Glee/Heroes' Jayma Mays to star in The Smurfs…
  
• …with Hank Azaria playing Gargamel
• Spooks' David Oyelowo to play Martin Luther King
• Amanda Seyfried to star in McG's The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League
• Trailer for Jason Statham's The Mechanic
• Trailer for The Romantics
• Reese Witherspoon signs up for blog-based The Pioneer Woman
• A Tron: Legacy set visit or two (with pics) [spoilers]

British TV

• Five to go HD on Sky
• Five won't help FlashForward if it's cancelled

• CTV acquires The Borgias

US TV

• Larry Charles creating Steve Jobs satire
• Pilot casting
• Brotherhood's Jason Clarke to star in Shawn Ryan's Ride-Along
• 24's Howard Gordon to adapt Israeli format Prisoners of War
• Justified FX's second biggest debut ever
• Daylight savings time continues to cause ratings drop
• Robert Wisdom to appear in Burn Notice [spoilers]
• James Marsters joins the Hawaii Five-O pilot
• Jane Espenson to write for Game of Thrones

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Doctor Who

• Behind the scenes of the new series [spoilers]
• An interview with Karen Gillan

Film

• Orlando Bloom and Jonathan Rhys Meyers join Albert Nobbs
• Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell join The Tourist

• Trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

British TV

• BBC to launch second Freeview HD service because Five can't?
• BBC shouldn't have bid on Harper's Island [subscribers only]
• Sci Fi HD coming to Virgin
• ITV1 HD also coming to Sky

US TV

• SyFy working on Three Inches, Alphas and another BSG spin-off
• Mia Maestro to star in Cutthroat + more pilot casting
• Actor leaving True Blood for The Good Wife?

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When people (by which I mean Doctor Who fans) think of 'lost stories' and Colin Baker, they generally think of those stories from the original season 23, such as The Nightmare Fair and Mission Magnus, that got replaced with Trial of a Timelord thanks to Michael Grade and his 'hiatus'.

However, those stories weren't the only Colin Baker stories that fell by the wayside. Here we have Leviathan, a story written by the late veteran TV writer Brian Finch for season 22. Despite getting as far as a rehearsal script, the story never got made, probably because it would have been too damn expensive to make.

In the story, the Doctor and Peri land in a medieval forest near a castle. They come across some villagers who are being pursued by Herne the Hunter.

Cue the Celtic charms of Clannad and the theme to Robin of Sherwood? No, because this Herne is mean and he's out for blood…

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - The Lost Stories - 03 - Leviathan"

Read other posts about: Big Finish

Doctor Who

• Wii game a go

Film

• Hugo Weaving to play the Red Skull in Captain America?
• Trailer for Shrek Forever After
• Sam Worthington to play Dan Dare?
• Leonardo Da Vinci – action hero?
• Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman to star in Change Up

Radio

• What the Beeb plans to do after closing 6Music and the Asian Network

British TV

• Sky looking for 13-part dramas [subscription required]

US TV

• Firefly/Dollhouse's Alan Tudyk to co-star on Rockford Files
• Pilot casting, including Malcolm McDowell in Franklin & Bash
• John Voight signs up for Fox's Midland
• Katherine Heigl to be released from Grey's Anatomy
• Michael Madsen to guest on 24
• Grace Park and Moon Bloodgood to guest on Human Target
• Nurse Jackie season two trailer

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Doctor Who

• An interview with Matt Smith
• Bus with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan to tour the UK

Film

• Liam Hemsworth joins Arabian Nights
• Proper trailer for Tron: Legacy
• The Book of Genesis: 3D
• Trailer for American: The Bill Hicks Story

Theatre

• Laurence Fishburne's Riff Raff coming to the Arcola Theatre

British TV

• Bravo acquires Spartacus: Blood and Sand
• Film4 HD and E4 HD to launch only on Virgin [subscription required]
• Men outnumber women two to one on TV
• True Blood gets 206k
• Benidorm back for fourth series – one ep possibly live

Canadian TV

• Canadian viewers prefer really bad sitcoms to drama

US TV

• Brittany Snow and 24's Sarah Wynter join pilots
• Lennie James joins Hung + more
• Nick Nolte to join Lucky?
• Heroes' Sendhil Ramamurthy joins Covert Affairs
• Jean Smart joins Hawaii Five-O, Tom Cavanagh joins Edgar Floats
• Numb3rs' Rob Morrow joins The Whole Truth
• Coby Bell joins Burn Notice as a regular [spoilers]
• Brothers and Sisters gets a fifth season [spoilers for Lost]
• American Idol's Katherine McPhee turns down Trauma in favour of Community

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Read other posts about: 24, Burn Notice, Community, Heroes, Lost, Numb3rs

Doctor Who

• David Tennant to do Karate Kids narration
• Billie Piper and David Tennant to star in Love On The Murder Mile

Awards

• The results of the Oscars
• The results of the Razzies – surprising overlap with Oscars

Film

• Midnight Run 2 will happen
• New Iron Man 2 trailer  

• Sleepless in Seattle: the musical

US TV

• Scott Foley joins True Blue, plus other pilot casting
• Kathy Bates to star in Kindreds?
• Breckin Meyer and Mark-Paul Gosselaar to star in Franklin & Bash
• Worst Week's Kyle Bornheimer joins CBS pilot
• Fringe gets a third season
• The Office, Community and 30 Rock all get another season each
• NBC to pick up 24 if Fox doesn't?
• House re-runs to include extra footage

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Read other posts about: 30 Rock, Community, House

Doctor Who

• The Sarah Jane Adventures gets two more series
• Series five to be fairy-tale like

Film

• Police Academy to be revived
• Pet Sematary to be remade
• Rome movie moving forward
• Trailer for The Runaways with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett

British TV

• MTV acquires The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Sweet Valley High [subscription required]
• Being Human creatives want to launch production company, have new idea for a show [subscription required]
• BBC4 to go back to its high-brow roots [subscription required]

US TV

• Casting, including Jeri Ryan on Body of Evidence, Robert Patrick on Edgar Floats and Nate Corddry on Our Show
• Scott Caan to play Danno on Hawaii Five-O
• Smallville gets a 10th season
• NBC's Angela Bromstad discusses the chances of Chuck and Heroes returning
• 24 on the bubble still

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Read other posts about: 24, Heroes, Smallville, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• An interview with Matt Smith

Film

• Sean Bean joins Luke Goss in Death Race 2
• Trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
• Nicole Kidman to star in The Wedding Doctor?

British TV

• Being Human finale gets 1m viewers

US TV

• Pilot casting, including Julie Benz on No Ordinary Family and Alexandra Breckenridge on Traffic Light
• Dustin Hoffman to star in Luck – his first TV show in 40 years
• TV Land orders 10 episodes of Hot in Cleveland
• American Idol's Katharine McPhee to star in The Pink House
• Matt Frewer to guest on Supernatural [spoilers]

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You know, when Steven Moffat sat down to work out how the next series of Doctor Who was going to work, I'm sure he had many, many things to consider. Not least of these was the kind of companion who was going to accompany the Doctor.

Now Big Finish can be a little off the wall sometimes, but usually they're quite conventional. However, this time – for three plays only – they've done something that I bet Steven Moffat never, ever considered: they've given him a racist, fascist, time-travelling Nazi scientist as an assistant. Yeah, beat that Stevie, you no-talent hack.

For those of you who haven't been listening to the Big Finish plays for the last decade or so, Colditz has probably slipped under your radar, especially since it's a Seventh Doctor/Ace play, so likely to be languishing at the bottom of any collection/bargain bin. Just to jog your memory, it's the one with David Tennant doing the bad German accent.

You probably won't recall the actual plot, however, so let me remind you: the Doctor and Ace land in/near Colditz; they do lots of dumb things; the Nazis capture them and the TARDIS; a Nazi scientist called Klein takes the TARDIS into the future where the Third Reich have won the Second World War; through timey-wimey machinations the alternative future gets undone, Herr David Tennant gets killed off, and Klein is left lurking around somewhere in the world, possessing knowledge of science and the alternative future that she shouldn't have.

A Thousand Tiny Wings picks up where Colditz left off by plopping the companionless Seventh Doctor down into 1950s Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprising. Here he comes across a bunch of posh English people stuck in a house and slowly being killed off by a mysterious poison. And Dr Elizabeth Klein.

Sounding good yet? No? Thought not.

Yet, despite sounding extremely bad on paper, it's actually a pretty decent play in practice.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - 130 - A Thousand Tiny Wings"

Read other posts about: Big Finish