I remember when 2020 seemed a long way away!
Hope we get some news soon on exactly when this is coming.
Doctor Who – What The Flux?
- This topic has 994 replies, 32 voices, and was last updated 3 years ago by
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a mindwiped orphan from another dimension with any number of former incarnations who was abused as a child
Finally, a Doctor I can find relateable!
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Here it is:
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2020-03-21/doctor-who-new-moffat-scene/
I enjoyed it. Well-written considering the real-world limitations.
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Good writing and voice work. I enjoyed that little video.
And it was fun re-watching The Day of the Doctor.
Moffat always got too complicated, but I miss his dialogue.
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His Years and Years show was excellent. A bit too prescient for comfort.
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Aw, this is cute though.
Incoming transmission. #MessageFromTheDoctor #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/WRTROxWRQy
— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) March 25, 2020
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She’s great.
I wish I still liked the show, but she’s great.
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So this is the “prequel”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/entries/4acfd237-6eee-47b5-93bd-1c16cd065614
It’s absolutely brilliant.
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Normally in the UK import tax is only applied if the value is over £150.
I know because I got into a long conversation with a customs agent at Heathrow about it after being asked to bring in a portable TV (which was under the limit). So if you find more Canadian bargains, order them one at a time.
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Yeah, there’s usually a charge for anything over £15 (customs I guess rather than import tax) and it’s been more stringently enforced in the last few years.
Amazon US does an Import Fees Deposit scheme where they calculate and charge you up front so you at least don’t have to pay a handling fee to DHL or Royal Mail or whoever (and will get refunded the difference if they’ve over-estimated it, but I’ve never had that).
That’s pretty routinely applied on all stuff I’ve imported – DVDs, Transformers etc. When I looked at getting one of the Who blu-rays from Amazon US, it was quoting about £6-10 for IFD. That’s why I’m so surprised Canada aren’t charging anything.
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I’ll watch that one. Novelty isn’t a factor. I’m doing Netflix Party screenings of movies, with friends, almost every night. It’s fun and almost fills the gap of meeting people to watch movies and have a chat.
On top of all that of course, I think it’s a very good episode. I’m happy to re-watch it anyway.
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Maybe we should do one with the board!
Ooh! We should do BvS!
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I’m having a movie board screeny party thingy right now.
…
…You’re all very quiet…
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I feel like this misses the point of these watch-alongs a little bit. You’re not meant to be watching the episode as normal and giving it your full attention, it’s meant to be on in the background while it sparks off conversation from the people involved, and your attention is on that.
So far I’ve found it to be, broadly, “episode on. Is anyone tweeting anything about this bit? Full focus on Twitter feed. Nothing there. Check the hashtag. Try and make it update (even if it’s on latest). Scroll through all the noise. Can’t see anything from the interesting people. Switch to top comments. Has that bit happened already? Oh, it was five minutes ago, I missed that. Switch back to main feed, ok it’s not even showing me tweets I saw on the hashtag feed. Oh hang on, here are some tweets from Bill Nighy that haven’t been threaded properly about something that happened 10 minutes ago. Oh, is the episode over already?”
EDIT: It’s not nearly as successful as the Eurovision chats we’ve had on MW, for instance.
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ut we could also watch a GOOD movie.
Are… are you suggesting that BvS is NOT A GOOD MOVIE!? This is an extremely novel opinion, and, frankly Christian, I think you have quite the nerve.
I do generally like this idea. It is hard to tee up in time-zones and may require some organisation but now would be the best time to do this with us all in lockdown. We just need to find the right film…
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I did pick the right film. No one watched it with me.
But it’s okay, you all can pick the next one.
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Tim wrote: Ooh! We should do BvS!
… … …shit, that’s even on Netflix.
I’ve never been gladder that I don’t have Netflix.
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I agree that a movie most of us have seen might be best. […] A so-bad-it’s-good film might make for fun conversation, again a la Eurovision.
Oh dear. It’s actually going to be BvS, isn’t it?
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Big Finish and Gaiman are discussing a Corsair spinoff;
I'm in. https://t.co/VgPfBHmbGm
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 11, 2020
A handy guide to the character as Gaiman saw it for a 2012 book (not to be considered canon of course).
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Ooo, the shade.
This isn’t quite so exciting now that we know 557 other Doctors could have turned up here #SubwaveNetwork
— Russell T Davies (@russelldavies63) April 19, 2020
Interesting that Chibnall’s taken something of backseat from this whole fandom engagement campaign during the pandemic, incidentally.
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“Gallifrey mirror dimension! Freyigall?”
“Hitler episode?”
“Young Time Lords on holiday? Time Lads!”
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“Hitler episode?”
They could go back and free him from the cupboard.
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I must have forgotten there actually was a Hitler episode. Was it any good?
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I must have forgotten there actually was a Hitler episode. Was it any good?
Moffat made the Hitler episode into a sort of screwball comedy which, depending on your point of view, might either be brilliant or cringey.
But ultimately, it was saddled with a bunch of River Song nonsense, had a handful of ideas that didn’t really gel (like the “smaller on the inside” robot), and was ultimately, as you noted, kind of forgettable.
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Interesting that Chibnall’s taken something of backseat from this whole fandom engagement campaign during the pandemic, incidentally.
Paul Cornell just revealed that he’s organising it all.
The last thing I want to say is that the person who brought the first part of this trilogy, 'The Shadow Pases' to you was Chris Chibnall, who's responsible for all the official Who content designed to help people in lockdown. Round of applause for him too. #DoctorOfMine
— Paul_Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) April 24, 2020
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Maybe he doesn’t want to take the credit? Featuring other people’s episodes and not his own.
A lot of people don’t like Chibnall’s writing but that doesn’t mean he isn’t an OK bloke. I’ll trust Cornell on this since he’s in the middle of it.
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New time war multimedia cross over event
https://www.doctorwho.tv/news/?article=time-lord-victorious
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That’s not right, what a mess.
On the Time Lord Victorious I’ll be most interested in the Big Finish stuff. Be interesting if they crack the ‘you can get the story without buying everything’ aspect.
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Yeah, it’s going to be tricky to negotiate it. I’d love it (in a sense) if the escape room turned out to be the crux of the entire story and everyone who didn’t get chance to do it left completely in the dark about a massive plot twist.
Sounds just like the Bernice Sommerfeld book that stopped on a cliffhanger that lead into an audio – it was so annoying.
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My s12 blu-ray set arrived t’other day (I’d say safe and sound, but the case is actually damaged – the join between the front panel and spine is split down half its length, so I’ll have to replace it at some point) and I’ve made a start on it.
Initial impressions are pretty good. I haven’t made any direct comparisons with the DVDs – I suppose I could, actually – but the new restoration does look better than I remember the old ones being, which is enough for me. Certainly the location sections of Robot – which were filmed on outside broadcast video and so looked a bit dull and lifeless before – have been cleaned up and graded to flow much better with the studio filming. It’s all been stably set into a full 16:9 image, with the original aspect ratio preserved and flanked by black bars too, so you don’t have to worry about TV settings or anything.
The new special features are decent. Behind The Sofa – where people at least tangential involved with the show are recorded watching some/all of it – is more substantial, in length at least, that I was expecting. There’s one for each story and the Robot one was 45 minutes or so. Whether you can take 45 minutes of Janet Fielding is something you’ll have to decide for yourself though.
There’s a really interesting curio on the Robot disc – a film recording of a readthrough for the serial. It was done specially for a BBC documentary series that ended up not airing and unfortunately it’s got no sound. But it’s been synced up with the actual broadcast elements to approximate what’s being said. But it’s kind of fascinating seeing the cast and crew out of character and costume. Nicholas Courtenay’s there in a neckerchief like a cliche bohemian actor, which is just such a strange sight, while everyone except Ian Marter and the director are all smoking like chimneys. Even Tom and Liz, which an odd sight. And of course there’s Bob Holmes and Terrence Dicks in one corner with their Serious Writer Pipes. It’s a real shame the audio’s lost for this.
And then another element that is seemingly trivial, but if you had enough of the DVDs you’ll appreciate the importance of: menus and pre-title bumpf. The amount of logos and warnings and nonsense on the front of the DVDs meant that later releases took the best part of three minutes to even get to the main menu (and it was all stuff you couldn’t skip), where you’d immediately be assaulted by loud, looped clips from the story (which was a bit of pain if you’d never seen them before). The blu-ray has some logos and adverts (BBC Store, amusingly, which I think shut down weeks after this was released) but they’re all skippable and then it loads up into a nice, calm, quiet menu screen of a CGI recreation of the TARDIS.
So far, which is admittedly only 1/6 in, it definitely feels like a worthwhile upgrade, even despite the palaver to get it.
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How does the toy tank look in high-def?
Like a really well shot toy advert.
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My pet hate on the pre-title bumf were the 1 minute anti-piracy ads you couldn’t skip or fast forward. The irony being you are only forced to watch that if you already went and bought an original DVD, the pirate ones leave them off or let you skip. It was a truly dreadful idea.
It’s like having an anti drink driving campaign and thinking the best place to force everyone to see the message would be a temperance hall or a mosque.
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My pet hate on the pre-title bumf were the 1 minute anti-piracy ads you couldn’t skip or fast forward.
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There’s another odd curio special feature on the s12 blu-ray which is a long audio recording of a meeting in the BBC canteen between Philip Hinchcliffe, Tom Baker, Liz Sladen, Ian Marter (who says next to nothing), Hinchcliffe’s secretary and a guy called Keith Miller, who was the head of the Who fan club in the 70s.
It’s a wide ranging conversation and its fascinating how forward thinking Hinchcliffe is. At one point he’s almost seeing the home video market, saying that he asked higher-ups at the BBC about doing Saturday morning cinema compilations of old serials, but the contractual issues about repeats and other formats (along with the fall in Saturday morning cinema takings) nixed it. He worries about the show ever having to later pay more to cover future repeat rights. He also talks about the synergy potential of the fan club newsletter, the Target books and the Exhibition and you can feel him sort of grasping for the idea of DWM as an official hub of fandom. There’s also talk of radio versions of Who (discounted by Hinchcliffe in case someone at the BBC decides it would be more cost effective and end the show).
Another interesting bit is talk about Miller’s fan club vs a Pertwee one that double-crossed him after asking to be a regional branch of his. You end up getting the show almost suggesting mediation between the two. Fandom cliques and conflict is as old as the hills, I guess. But in the course of that and Hinchcliffe wanting to have a central clearing house for interested fans, he name drops Peter Capaldi.
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Repeat rights are interesting. In the 70s and 80s there were endless complaints at the BBC because the schedules just repeated shows, especially sitcoms, that had just been on.
They’d run a new series of something like Ever Decreasing Circles and then almost as soon as it had finished it would be on again during the Summer. The anger was why show that when we can still remember the jokes, use something from 10 years ago if you have to repeat.
It turns out it was the contracts for repeat fees, if they showed it again within a certain amount of time it was free from paying royalties. A completely different system to the US one with syndication after 100 episodes etc.
So the BBC played some US shows like the original Batman or Star Trek almost on a loop but would never repeat something like Doctor Who.
Hinchliffe was perfectly right and ahead of his time, even in the mid 80s the Saturday morning cinema shows were showing some right crap from the Children’s Film Foundation 20 years previously. The kids would have lapped up a four part Tom Baker era Doctor Who serial shown in full.
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There was another Lockdown tweetalong tonight, a double bill of New Earth and Gridlock (fittingly) and RTD wrote another short to go with them.
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Some cracking journalism from the Express.
Moffat is stepping down!? You’ll be telling me Matt Smith is leaving next!
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Well, darn. I was hoping they came to their senses, shitcanned Chibnall, and decided to retcon that “Timeless Child” nonsense.
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You’ll be telling me Matt Smith is leaving next!
Not going to happen. He’s too popular. I hear he’s eyed for a role in Star Wars Episode IX…
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Dave, what the fuck did we do to you to have deserved the inflicting of a Daily Express article?
It’s all very “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”.
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