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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Authors: Russell T Davies, Benjamin Cook
Price: £16.99 (Amazon price: £11.04)
ISBN: 978-1-846-07861-3
Pages: 704
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: January 14th (that's tomorrow, baby)

Writing's not easy. It's very hard. Ask a writer. Go on. Any writer. They'll tell you about it at length. Really quite absurd length.

Journalist Benjamin Cook asked Russell T Davies how hard writing is, some time just before the launch of the third series of Doctor Who in February 2007, and the resulting email and text correspondence lasted, well, years. But in a radical move, Cook and Davies decided to turn all that correspondence into a book, and thus Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale was born.

Since then, Russell T Davies has continued to tell Benjamin Cook just how hard writing is, and the additional 300 pages or so of correspondence have been collected together and added to the original book to produce Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale – The Final Chapter. This not only continues Davies' insights into writing for Doctor Who, as well as Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures and indeed television in general, but also looks at the politics of television, the nature of television production, how PR and the press work, and more.

And if you keep reading this exciting review, you'll be able to win a copy of it. How's that for fun?

Continue reading "Competition and Review: Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale - The Final Chapter"

Read other posts about: The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood

According to DWM (apparently. You think I'd buy it?), the writers on the fifth series of Doctor Who are:

• Steven Moffat (six episodes); past work – Coupling, Press Gang, Jekyll et al; The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
• Mark Gatiss (one episode); past work – The League of Gentlemen et al; The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot's Lantern, The Lazarus Experiment
• Gareth Roberts (one episode); past work – The Sarah Jane Adventures; The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp
• Richard Curtis (one episode); past work – Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley, Four Weddings and a Funeral et al
• Toby Whithouse (one episode); past work – Being Human et al; School Reunion
• Chris Chibnall (two episodes); past work – Torchwood, Law and Order; 42
• Simon Nye (one episode); past work – Men Behaving Badly et al

What are we all thinking? Interesting choice of Chris Chibnall, certainly, but the rest look potentially good, IMO, especially since Nye, Gatiss and Curtis are primarily comedy writers.

Read other posts about: Being Human, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• David Tennant SJA gets 1.14m viewers

Film

• Gerard Butler to star in Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus
• Patrick Dempsey signs up for heist comedy
• Fox developing CIA remote viewing thriller
• Alan Cumming joins Burlesque

Theatre

• Ambassador Group buys Live Nation's theatres
• Prick Up Your Ears to close early
• The Shawshank Redemption to close early

British TV

• Liza Marshall quits as C4 head of drama
• C4, BBCW merger abandoned

US TV

• No more Flight of the Conchords?
• Chuck exec producer to become show runner for V
• Five more episodes of Accidentally on Purpose
• Heroes ratings up again past season opener
• Colin Hanks to star with Bradley Whitford in Jack and Dan
• CMT greenlights two adventure series
• James Franco to guest on 30 Rock
• Blair Underwood to return to Old Christine
• Dexter hits a series high again

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Read other posts about: 30 Rock, Dexter, Heroes, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• Trailer for The Sarah Jane Adventures (including David Tennant)
• David Tennant to co-star in Burke & Hare
• Carey Mulligan talks about Sally Sparrow

Film

• Rachel Nichols joins The Loop
• Fox to dramatise story of Moses
• Michael Bay to kill Megan Fox in Transformers 3?

British TV

• Beeb to revive Upstairs Downstairs
• Simon Amstell to guest in sitcom he's co-written
• John Cresswell to become interim CEO at ITV – then leave
• Life on Mars – United Arab Emirates edition?
• Tim Kring talks season four of Heroes – series to air in the UK in the New Year

US TV

• FlashForward gets a full season
• Dollhouse does well from DVR ratings…
• …and Fox will air all 13 episodes
• Rachael Harris and Alan Ruck to recur on Cougar Town
• Emmy-winning Mad Men writer fired
• Reno 911! creator writing a comedy for NBC
• Radha Mitchell to star in A&E pilot The Quickening
• Matthew Perry to star in and co-write comedy

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Read other posts about: Heroes, Life on Mars, Mad Men, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• Lis Sladen previews The Sarah Jane Adventures

Film

• Five-minute behind the scenes Iron Man 2 video
• Friends: the movie to happen at last?
• Neve Campbell signs up for Scream 4
• Teaser trailer for Nightmare on Elm Street

• Rory Kinnear, Anna Maxwell Martin and Ben Miles to star in Measure for Measure
• Sister Act extends its run
• Gemma Arterton, Tamsin Greig and Rupert Friend to star in The Little Dog Laughed

British TV

• Landmark crime drama commissioned from Marion and Geoff writer
• Sir Crispin Davies to replace Michael Grade as ITV chairman?
• Living HD to launch next month
• Johnny Vegas to hunt dead puppets for CBBC

US TV

• Smallville and Dollhouse ratings down over 40%
• V to be broken in two
• A&E cancels The Cleaner
• Seth Rogen to write and voice a Simpsons episode
• FlashForward gets good ratings, CSI's drop 44%
• CW cancels The Beautiful Life

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Read other posts about: Smallville, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• The Sarah Jane Adventures to air twice-weekly from October 15th
• Girl Number 9 to star Tracy-Ann Oberman and Gareth David-Lloyd

Film

• Christopher Plummer, Brad Dourif, and Madchen Amick join Priest
• Paul Giamatti and James Purefoy to star in medieval Magnificent Seven, Ironclad
• Matt Damon and Clint Eastwood team up for Hereafter
• X-Men: First Class to start filming next year?
• Trailer for Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
• Scott Glenn joins Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch
• Noel Clarke starts shooting 4.3.2.1
• Trailer for Jonathan Rhys Meyers'/John Travolta's From Paris With Love

British TV

• STV planning its own 6pm news
• Beeb cuts My Family budget, orders two new series
• C4 looking for more NI programming
• Season three of Gossip Girl to start on ITV2 next month

US TV

• The Tudors to be succeeded by The Borgias?
• John McNamara to take over as showrunner on In Plain Sight
• Penn and Teller to star as 'Penn and Teller': magician-detectives for ABC
• Vinnie Jones to guest star on Chuck, star in comic book series (not convinced Vinnie came up with the quote in the article…)
• Heroes websides and TV show to crossover

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Read other posts about: Gossip Girl, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood

Apologies if any of this is old news!

Doctor Who

• A breakdown of the Sarah Jane Adventures third season [spoilers]
• Big Finish licence renewed until 2012
• The Doctor to get animated in Dreamland

Film

• Bryan Singer to remake Excalibur
• Trailer for James Cameron's Avatar
• Stephen Moyer joins Priest
• Samantha Morton, Dominic West and Polly Walker join cast of John Carter of Mars
• Trailer for Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story

British TV

• The Mentalist finishes with 2m viewers
• Krod Mandoon axed
• Alan Davies chef comedy Whites commissioned for series
• STV axes almost all ITV drama
• Sky3 to show paid-for content for free one weekend in September
• Sky1 picks up Stargate Universe

US TV

• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to star in A Game of Thrones
• FX picks up two comedies
• Heather Locklear to return to Melrose Place?
• Prison Break writers to create Break Out Kings
• NBC orders pilot for Rex is Not Your Lawyer
• Hiroyuki Sanada joins Lost cast as recurring character
  
• Keith Carradine to appear in both Dexter and Dollhouse
• Tyne Daly to reunite with Sharon Gless on Burn Notice
• Jayma Mays returning to Heroes [spoiler]

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Read other posts about: Burn Notice, Dexter, Heroes, Lost, Prison Break, Stargate, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• Nigel Havers to guest on The Sarah Jane Adventures

British TV

• Law and Order gets a second series
• FX picks up Eastbound & Down
• Hallmark UK to become Universal Channel?
• ITV turned down low-cost Primeval
• Freeview HD to launch in December
• BET HD added to Freesat
• BBC Worldwide co-producing Emma and Cranford sequel

• Jeri Ryan to recur on Leverage
• Joanna Garcia to recur on Gossip Girl

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Read other posts about: Gossip Girl, Primeval, The Sarah Jane Adventures

Doctor Who

• David Tennant to appear in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures?
• John Barrowman taught kung fu kata for Tonight's The Night

Film

• James McAvoy, Elizabeth Banks and Anna Friel to star in The Details
• Robert De Niro and Edward Norton to star in Stone
• Alex Holmes to direct The Interpretation of Murder adaptation
• Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer to star in The Irishman
• Steve Coogan to play Hades, Rosario Dawson to play Persephone in Percy Jackson
• Barbarella remake cancelled

British TV

• Melvyn Bragg leaving ITV, ending The South Bank Show
• Channel 4 may cut programming budget 10% and cut down on US imports
• Dominic West to star in BBC4's Breaking the Mould
• Charlie Brooker working on Gameswipe?
• Rock Profiles returns on Funny or Die
• Heroes ratings drop 64.5%

US TV

• Peter Dinklage to star in Game of Thrones
• Old characters return for Prison Break finale [+spoilers]

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Read other posts about: Charlie Brooker, Heroes, Prison Break, The Sarah Jane Adventures