Thursday’s historical novel news

Doctor Who

Film

  • Steve Carell to play Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard?
  • Pics from Star Trek XI
  • Trailer for Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson’s Bride Wars

Art

  • Welsh national art gallery delayed by four years

Canadian TV

  • New channel for women, Viva, to show Lost in Austen
  • CTV picks up Merlin

British TV

US TV

Wednesday’s golden fleece news

Doctor Who

Film

Theatre

  • Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman to star in Duet For One

British TV

US TV

Review: Doctor Who – Time Reef

Time Reef

There’s always something more to look forward to with a fifth Doctor Big Finish play. Okay, so Colin Baker’s still the best audio Doctor and he’s usually partnered with India Fisher (best audio companion/actress), Nicola Bryant (ah, Peri…) or Bonnie Langford (nearly best audio companion/actress. Honest). But his stories tend to be considerably poorer than the ones Peter Davison ends up with.

Whether it’s the TV era itself that encourages the writers to come up with cleverer storylines or the editor of the fifth Doctor range (whoever that might be) simply commissioning better pieces, you can usually assume that a fifth Doctor piece is going to be good, with just the occasional minor fluff-up (such as The Boy That Time Forgot.

Here, though, we have Marc Platt, author of the Sylvester McCoy TV story Ghostlight, who can normally be guaranteed to over-write his audio plays something chronic. So we have a battle on our hands: the pretension of the seventh Doctor’s era versus the cold sci-fi of the fifth Doctor’s. Who will win? And should you spend money on the spoils of the war?

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