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Karen Gillan is the Eleventh Doctor's companion
The BBC has revealed that 21-year-old Karen Gillan will be the lucky companion joining Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith in the Tardis when the next full series of Doctor Who starts next spring.
As she prepares to begin filming this summer, a clearly enthusiastic Gillan said, "I am absolutely over the moon at being chosen to play the Doctor's new companion. The show is such a massive phenomenon that I can't quite believe I am going to be a part of it.
"Matt Smith is an incredible actor and it is going to...
Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead preview
Are you as excited as we are about The Doctor's upcoming Easter adventure (Saturday 11 April, 6:45pm), Planet of the Dead? Want to know more about it? Well, Radio Times reviewer Mark Braxton has seen it, and had this to say:
"The Time Lord seems to have met his match in the chic, catsuited Lady Christina. As the naughty aristocrat, Michelle Ryan is given quite an entrance here, diving like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible into a Fort Knox-style museum to steal a priceless artefact. Evading the police, she meets the Doctor on board...
Matt Smith is new Doctor Who
If we could only stop seeing that moody shot of Matt Smith on the news. That one endlessly repeated shot where he's looking down at the camera and seems even younger than he really is. Other than that, I'm sold: this new Doctor is a superb choice. It's a brave one but it had to be: the only way to follow David Tennant is to be bold and brave and different.
Peter Davison faced the same criticism when he took over from Tom Baker aged 29, but he had an easier job: Tennant is leaving when it seems...
Doctor Who Christmas special
Radio Times editor Gill Hudson gives her verdict on the Doctor Who Christmas special, The Next Doctor (Christmas Day, 6:00pm, BBC1):
We're in 1850s Victorian London. It's 24 December. It is snowing, it is bustling, it is Christmas-card perfect. And guess who just landed right in the middle of it?
Correct.
So far, so not terribly surprising for about 60 seconds, anyway. And that's when another character arrives on the scene and, wouldn't you know it, he's calling himself the Doctor too, complete with sonic screwdriver and Tardis. Mad, bad, dangerous to know, or all three?
...Doctor Who: Journey's End
Daleks, Doctors, Donna and always someone shouting out the plot until you bought them a beer: this was event drama, this was party television. Everyone watched this, everyone. Pubs that usually are locked to Sky Sports were tuned to BBC1 and if you didn't get to watch it with friends and food, get 'em all round for the BBC3 repeats.
You did have to feel a bit cheated about the regeneration but it was done with such a knowing laugh - Russell T Davies gleefully enjoying all the fuss he helped create last week. It's going to...
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
Crikey. A Dalek finally shoots the Doctor after 40 years of trying - and the Doctor Who production team keeps secrets better than the MoD does.
It must be fantastic being them tonight: the whole country caught off guard, no-one knowing this would happen. Even news organisations weren't ready. Nobody was ready, and a furious, just furious rush begins right now to find out who the new Doctor is.
It looks as if David Tennant has lied to us all when repeatedly saying he's doing the specials next year - unless there's something even weirder going...
Doctor Who: Turn Left
No question: Doctor Who monsters are scary. Take a look at the new Radio Times survey: vote for which is the most frightening monster and you could win Doctor Who DVDs. But tonight's is the first creature to make me feel ill since 1974. Jon Pertwee's final tale, Planet of the Spiders, had that disagreement between the Eight-Legs and the Two-Legs that might normally have gone our way but for how the Eight-Legs were bloody huge. Thirty-four years later and I just shuddered at that memory - although, true, the fact that it was nearly four decades...
Doctor Who: Midnight
We never found out what the monster of the week really was - and I couldn't care less if you paid me to. The monster, the jokes, those gorgeous landscapes on the planet of Midnight - it was all there just to get people in a room shouting at each other. Fantastic.
And add it up. There were six ordinary passengers in the luxury cruise bus, plus a hostess and, of course, the Doctor. Add in the driver and mechanic who stayed in their control cabin, bung in this thing banging on the hull and top...
Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead
I called it on River Song, you can't say I didn't. True, writer Steven Moffat thought of it, wrote the script, and in part one pointed us very firmly toward a type of tragedy the show has never done before. But I guessed.
I reached this conclusion after a cascade of deducing, which you were probably doing too, especially if you happened to have studied the extended trailer that ran on Eurovision night and has zoomed around YouTube since.
But even if you'd worked out what would happen to her, there was still plenty to keep...
Doctor Who: Silence in the Library
Best story so far - and I'm not just saying that because writer Steven Moffat is taking over. No, I'm saying this next bit because writer Steven Moffat is taking over: you're the greatest writer in all the land, Doctor Who is in tremendous hands, we've all put the US version of Coupling behind us, now gimme a job.
I first met him on the set of Press Gang and in the last couple of years we have disagreed on countless things, every last one of which I now completely accept I was wrong about.
That's the creeping...
Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp
Admit it, you want to read Agatha Christie novels now. Tonight's Doctor Who was a 43-minute advert for her and I'd have said there could be no harder customer to convince than me. Miss Marple leaves me looking at my watch, the Orient Express is just a train and Poirot makes me crave slapping people. Mostly Poirot himself.
But put the woman herself into a Doctor Who comedy murder mystery with a jewel thief called the Unicorn and a ten-foot wasp and I'm sold. It's only a surprise that ITV1 didn't go the same route when it revamped...
Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter
The Doctor wouldn't tell you in tonight's episode, so I will: the answer to Donna's question is that a woman Time Lord is called a Time Lady.
It wasn't a hard answer, you could argue she might reasonably have worked it out herself, and it's true that the Doctor was occupied. But still, it sounds somehow naff. They definitely did not think of Time Lady first and then work out the male equivalent. Time Lord sounds a little posh, Time Lady is just somehow dismissive, like you married a Time Lord for his Tardis. And Time Ladies is...
Doctor Who: The Poison Sky
Second parts are a killer. I know this because I once wrote a Tuesday episode of Crossroads and the sole fun part was standing in my kitchen talking to the writers of Monday and Wednesday's episodes about how they fit together.
But as good as it was to see actors saying my lines on TV, we three were only chatting because we needed a social life. There was no real need to compare notes like that because when you're on a soap, you are all lumbered with an intensively detailed outline, I mean preposterously detailed. When you're on...
Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem
OK, so, yes: watching Doctor Who is a collective experience, sure it is. We're all there on Saturday nights and that's a great thing, whatever. But stuff what I said about that - this week I got a preview DVD! I only mentioned preview discs to you before as an aside and now here I was, the gold-dust parcel in my hands: tell me honestly, what would you do?
I borrowed headphones, got a bowl of chilli con carne from the BBC canteen and tried very hard to watch quietly. Sixty pairs of eyes burnt into my back...
Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood
So this time when someone stopped me in the corridor, I was ready. You'd like this guy, it was Moray Laing: tall, smart, and he edits Doctor Who Adventures magazine, so he knows everything. Including how I would react to this week's episode.
"You'll cry," he warned me. And I don't want to say whether he was right or not but, cough, the rest of this blog is about football.
He did have one thing to ask me, though: "Do you write your blog immediately after the show?"
What does he think I am? What kind of social...
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