Doctor Who

An archive of blog entries about British science-fiction programme Doctor Who.

News

Thursday’s first news of 2008

3 January 2008 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Season two of Torchwood cast

Welcome to 2008, news readers, the year everything changes. Don’t forget to vote for the daily news in the reader survey if you want it to continue!

Doctor Who

Film

  • Stills from The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • Tyler Perry to appear in Star Trek XI?
  • Trailer for Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Books

Theatre

British TV

US TV

Review: Doctor Who – The Girl Who Never Was

2 January 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The Girl Who Never Was (Doctor Who)

Ah Charley. How we’ll miss you. Well, assuming we’ve not been listening to any of your stories since the Divergent Universe disaster.

When Big Finish was starting up and figured it could invent a few new companions of its own, Charley was the only one of the new companions who could be described as good or popular (sorry Evelyn and Erimem fans). Enthusiastic, actually wanting to travel with the Doctor for a change and with a good chemistry with the eighth Doctor, she made even the cruddier stories tolerable. We also were treated to a precursor to the Rose/Doctor romance that was tastefully done and with a near-adult depth that the onscreen equivalent would be sorely lacking.

Then C’rizz turned up, the writers forgot how to write for Charley, the romance wasn’t so much nipped in the bud as snapped off at the root without any real explanation and the best companion of the Big Finish range quickly became a next generation Tegan or Adric.

As people have been surmising since Sheridan Smith landed the BBC7 companion gig, Charley’s days have been numbered for quite some time. Following the departure of C’rubbish in Absolution, we now have Charley’s swansong in The Girl Who Never Was. Written by her creator, Alan Barnes, it gives us more than a few reminders of why she was once so good as well as few bemusing moments that I will now coin a new adjective to describe: Bigfinishian.

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Friday’s final news of 2007

21 December 2007 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

News will be back on January 3rd. That is, assuming you still want it as you flit about in your jet packs in the exciting dynamic future that 2008 will be, of course…

Doctor Who

Film

  • Trailer for Hellboy 2
  • Rachel Nichols, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Said Taghmaoui join up with GI Joe

British TV

US TV

  • Shirley MacLaine to play Coco Chanel in a Lifetime mini-series
  • The Daily Show and The Colbert Report coming back Jan 7th without writers
  • Zack Braff and David Denman to do drama for Fox
Audio and radio play reviews

Review: The Companion Chronicles – Old Soldiers

19 December 2007 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Old SoldiersAfter yesterday’s tussle with awfulness – aka the Companion Chronicles’ Helicon Prime – we come face to face with something a whole lot better. Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier has been a companion of sorts – or at the very least a practising Friend of the Doctors – since the Troughton years, appearing opposite him, Hartnell (in The Three Doctors), Pertwee (for most of the era), Tom Baker (a couple of stories), Davison (The Five Doctors and Mawdryn Undead) and Sylvester McCoy (Battlefield). He’s also been something of a Big Finish regular, cropping up in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor (with Colin Baker), Minuet in Hell (with Paul McGann), the UNIT range of stories as well as a few others. So quite why they need him to have one of his own Companion Chronicles, I’m not sure.

All the same, of the three stories in the second series of the Companion Chronicles, Old Soldiers is probably the best. A traditional narrative in which Courtney reads the story to the listener rather than to another actor, it’s firmly in keeping with the Pertwee era and fleshes out both the Brigadier and UNIT a little.

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