A Girls Best Friend is a 1981 a pilot for a potential Doctor Who spin-off series called K9 and Company, but the BBC didn't commission it for a series.
Sarah Jane pays a Christmas visit to an Aunt in MoretonHarwood. She finds Aunt Lavinia, a noted scientist, has left early for a lecture tour of the US, but meets Brendan. In the house is an old box sent to Sarah Jane by the Doctor years ago, containing K9. Brendan is kidnapped by a local coven of witches, who want to sacrifice him to the goddess Hecate... The story ends with K9 singing We Wish you a Merry Christmas.
Its not a terribly Christmassy story, but is set at the right time of year, here is K9 caroling...
This is for dale on a new Zealand eBay style site, its already at NZ$3,000!
I built this for my son, but we are doing something else, so up for sale it is possibly one of the best custom made beds you will ever see. I build things from scratch for people who expect the best I am described as a fantasy builder, I can put a model of your business in a bottle or build a childs playhouse that stops traffic, rocket powered skateboards, robot bugs, anything thats a little out of the square. I have multiple endorsements including museums, and top end firms I am personally endorsed by Sir Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop...
Lots more iunformation on the site, plus 15 photographs, here.
Warning, international shipping may be expensive :) Thanx to Ben for the Heads-up.
The Doctor Who Podcast Episode #53 A very exciting episode this week for you. We have managed to secure an interview with Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke, authors of a new book from the fine bods at Mad Norwegian Press. Play it here.
Two-minute Time Lord 178: Shearman and Hadoke's Running Through Corridors, Reviewed Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke's new book is the first in a series that takes a deep look at every Doctor Who episode from 1963 through 2009, beginning with the Hartnell and Troughton years. If you have any curiosity about the classic series at all, no matter how many stories you've actually seen, you won't regret snapping up a copy. Here's why. Play it here.
The Cultdom Collective Commentary: The Runaway Bride Dr Who Commentary 'The Runaway Bride' For Christmas 2010 The Cultdom Collective Podcast with daveac, Ian 'The 6th Doctor' & Mike 'Randal Thor' bring you the second of our Dr Who Christmas Commentaries. Play it here.
I've been promised a photograph of this for a while, and at last Darren was calling in to Hull Road Garage in York (earlier this week, before the heavy snow), he tells me there is some Star Wars stuff inside too!
The Sixth Doctor and Peri visit the planet Varos to obtain supplies of a rare ore called Zeiton 7, vital to the functioning of the TARDIS. Varos was once a colony for the criminally insane and the descendants of the original guards still rule, while the poverty-stricken people are kept entertained by screenings of public torture from the Punishment Dome.
IMHO pretty pricey at £24.99 from Forbidden Planet.
At 6 foot 8 inches, Sylvester McCoy is the tallest actor to play the Doctor. As John Nathan Turner loved his audition, but wanted a smaller Time Lord, every actor, including monsters, for the 7th Doctors TV stories had to stand on a box.
From the pages of The Brilliant Book, as posted here. Now you too can impress your friends at dance parties and weddings, even if you're just the imaginary friend.
This year's Christmas special, "A Christmas Carol", will be broadcasted in Australia on 26th December at 19:30 on ABC1. This marks the first time Doctor Who has aired in Australia within twenty-four hours of its UK première.
As most everyone knows by now, Life, Doctor Who, and Combom is now a proud member of WhoNews, the iOS application that collates Doctor Who news, but only from the very best sites and blogs. Last week, on the 47th anniversary of his favorite series, WhoNews creator Paul Gee began donating all of his profits from the application to the prestigious Make-A-Wish Foundation.
It's been an international effort to give WhoNews its best week ever! The application is currently being sold on iTunes for £2.39 (or $3.99), and what Apple hasn't taken in profits has gone directly to fulfilling the last dreams of terminally ill children.
Well it’s one week since the WhoNews wish appeal got under way and I can already tell you the appeal has racked up 375 downloads and raised £594.42/ $925.56. Now nearly £600 in a week is an exceptional achievement and we will make a difference to many children’s lives.
That kind of sum will allow Make-A-Wish to buy sparkly tiaras to transforms 30 little girls into princesses for a day or send 6 children to Paris via the Eurostar. Maybe 4 boys will receive a mini tuxedo and become James Bond or 3 children can now swim with dolphins in Florida. Who knows, what you can be sure of is that by purchasing WhoNews you will be touching a life and putting a big smile on a face.
I’d like to say a big thank you to 375 fans who have downloaded WhoNews, I sincerely hope you are finding the app useful and continue to find it so in the future. Rest assured it is constantly under development and we are heading towards v2.0, I’ll say no more about that for the moment. As River Song would say “Spoilers...”
Later in his Thank You list, Paul Gee hints at recent test runs of WhoNews for Android devices. So if you don't have an iPhone, this could be the alternative.
While we're on the subject of that Thank You list: Gee was kind enough to thank eight of WhoNews' most generous supporters. We can't fit everyone on this post, despite many of those supporters being friends of ours, so click here to read more about everyone who threw their online weight behind the charity campaign.
. . . [Thanks to]Life, Doctor Who and Combomfor throwing their support behind WhoNews and the appeal at very short notice. I’m really glad to have you guys onboard, the honour is mine. . . .
The support from the Doctor Who community has been superb from the fans of the series and to the “High Council” whose passion is the creation of sites, podcasts and blogs listed above. Thanks to everyone of you.
Well, that's our good deed for the week. Now you can do yours. Please consider downloading this incredible application through iTunes, if only for all of the children you'll be supporting, as well as actually having this brilliant app in your hand, organizing all of the latest Doctor Who news, even from us!
Sir Michael Gambon, upcoming star of "A Christmas Carol", has earned an award for his lifelong achievements on stage, on the silver screen, and as memorable, intricate characters, some of the very best.
Stars of stage and screen turned out to celebrate the best of British theatre on Sunday at the Evening Standard theatre awards in London.
Veteran thespian Sir Michael Gambon, best known as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, collected the Lebedev Special Award for his life's work in British theatre.
Martin Freeman [Sherlock] and Sir Ian McKellen, who will both star in the upcoming film adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, also attended the event and shared their views on film and theatre.
To watch the proceedings of the event as well as further interviews, click here for the BBC's report.
The Doctor Who News Page has posted the official ratings of each Series 4 episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. You can find both the CBBC Channel broadcast viewing figures and the BBC One viewing figures (BBC Two figures in the case of The Nightmare Man).
The series averaged at 1.29 million viewers, with part one of "Lost in Time" receiving the highest combined rating at 1.57 million.
There is an interview with Piers Wenger, the producer of Doctor Who, at CraveOnline, here. It has some very important things mentioned;
[Amy and RorysMarrage is] part and parcel of the [storyarc] of season six. I don't want to say too much about that other than Steven's got more dastardly complications to throw at them than anyone else on the planet.
No classic Doctor Who monsters in 2011.
Bringing Paul McGann back is quite unlikely.
Season six will be more about testing those relationships, making them more complicated as the Doctor faces a particularly sadistic challenge.
We're probably not finding that out [who River Song is] quite yet, but stay tuned. I think you'll get really great clues in the coming season.
[In A Christmas Carol] Amy and Rory are trapped on a [space] train.
Toby Whithouse is writing an episode for next year.
With the announcement of The Mazes of Time for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, one question remains. Will the upcoming Apple iOS game — screenshots here — soon be made available for Android mobile devices? Oli Smith, who scripted the game, wrote the following:
Developed by the talented developers at Tag Games, this action puzzle adventure charts the adventures of the Doctor and Amy as they attempt to rescue an innocent family, scattered through time by the fallout from a Dalek attack, and will be out sometime in December!
After this, the official announcement came with the advertisement above, which clearly states that the game will be developed for Android. Most recently, Tag Games confirmed this on its Twitter page.
As the title suggests, this is the second post in SFX's series of things they love about Doctor Who. The first was right here.
#2 — Lash-Ups
We don’t have a problem with the sonic screwdriver, but we prefer it when the Doctor has to improvise from bits and bobs, MacGyver style. It could be turning the TARDIS’s portable log into a device that gives Daleks a brainstorm (“Planet Of The Daleks”), knocking together a time-wimey detector from a telephone, a lunchbox and some tape reels (“Blink”), or constructing a scanning device from a clothes dryer, an ironing board, and a load of garden implements (“The Lodger”). It’s certainly more entertaining than recalibrating the chronodeflector to generate a tachyon pulse, like they did on Star Trek: Voyager every ruddy week.
The Doctor Who Advent(ure) calendar is back! And this year they say its better than ever with new festive features like Haven't I Seen Your Fez Somewhere Before? alongside old faves including Christmas cards, games, screensavers and original stories. They have videos featuring Matt Smith and the rest of the team, a few fantastic previews and something else new - The Christmas Questions.
The calendar is the BBC countdown to the Christmas Special and then they extend it for a further week so the exclusives keep coming until the New Year!
Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day.
Here are the best five out of the ten listed on the Smithsonian's post.
1.) Hiccups — The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water).
Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.
2.) Backaches — The backs of vertebrates evolved as a kind of horizontal pole under which guts were slung. It was arched in the way a bridge might be arched, to support weight. Then, for reasons anthropologists debate long into the night, our hominid ancestors stood upright, which was the bodily equivalent of tipping a bridge on end. Standing on hind legs offered advantages—seeing long distances, for one, or freeing the hands to do other things—but it also turned our backs from an arched bridge to an S shape. The letter S, for all its beauty, is not meant to support weight and so our backs fail, consistently and painfully.
3.) Choking — In most animals, the trachea (the passage for air) and the esophagus (the passage for food) are oriented such that the esophagus is below the trachea. In a cat's throat, for example, the two tubes run roughly horizontal and parallel to each other before heading on to the stomach and lung, respectively. In this configuration, gravity tends to push food down toward the lower esophagus.
Not so in humans. Modifications of the trachea to allow speech pushed the trachea and esophagus further down the throat to make way. Simultaneously, our upright posture put the trachea and esophagus in a near-vertical orientation. Together these changes leave falling food or water about a 50-50 chance of falling in the “wrong tube.” As a consequence, in those moments in which the epiglottis does not have time to cover the trachea, we choke. We might be said to choke on our success. Monkeys suffer the same fate only rarely, but then again they can’t sing or dance. Then again, neither can I.
4.) Goosebumps — [They] don't really help. When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair.
The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.
5.) Our brains squeeze our teeth —A genetic mutation in our recent ancestors caused their descendants to have roomy skulls that accommodated larger brains. This may seem like pure success—brilliance, or its antecedent anyway. But the gene that made way for a larger brain did so by diverting bone away from our jaws, which caused them to become thinner and smaller.
With smaller jaws, we could not eat tough food as easily as our thicker-jawed ancestors, but we could think our way out of that problem with the use of fire and stone tools. Yet because our teeth are roughly the same size as they have long been, our shrinking jaws don’t leave enough room for them in our mouths. Our wisdom teeth need to be pulled because our brains are too big.
Oh, since these were so great, why not another? Here's the Smithsonian's brief explanation of everything it didn't cover.
10 to 100. The list goes on — I have not even mentioned male nipples. I have said nothing of the blind spot in our eyes. Nor of the muscles some of use to wiggle our ears. We are full of the accumulated baggage of our idiosyncratic histories. The body is built on an old form, out of parts that once did very different things.
So take a moment to pause and sit on your coccyx, the bone that was once a tail. Roll your ankles, each of which once connected a front leg to a paw. Revel not in who you are but who you were. It is, after all, amazing what evolution has made out of bits and pieces. Nor are we in any way alone or unique. Each plant, animal and fungus carries its own consequences of life's improvisational genius. So, long live the chimeras. In the meantime, if you will excuse me, I am going to rest my back.
SFX is giving you the chance to vote for your favorite Christmas episodes in all of science fiction. Guess which Time Lord happens to be on the list a total of seven times? Unfortunately you are only allowed to vote five times, fitting nicely with every single Doctor Who Christmas special.
About a month ago through 76 Totter's Lane we reported on a Lego TARDIS in New York City. Friend of the blog Myst400 has graciously provided us with photos she personally took of that TARDIS.
Doctor Who Magazine might be resurrecting the Axons, but Big Finish is soon coming out with an even better story, exclusively for audio, starring Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. The events of The Claws of Axos are coming back to haunt the Doctor . . .
"Axos calling Earth. Fuel system exhausted. Request immediate assistance."
Many years ago, the vast space parasite Axos attempted to suck the planet Earth of its energy. Now it’s all but forgotten – a dried-up husk, marooned in orbit, still stuck in the time loop it was placed in by Earth’s defender, the Doctor.
Forgotten, that is, except by space tourism billionaire Campbell Irons – who’s hatched a plan to solve the world’s energy crisis by reviving Axos, and transmitting its power back to Earth. But the crew of the spaceship Windermere aren’t alone aboard the parasite. The Doctor has returned, to correct an error of decades past . . .
Although the shops have been selling Christmas stuff since September, the run-up to Christmas starts today, with Advent calendars, people putting their decorations up (although this year I have seen a lot of them in November), and we start to think about Christmas shopping too!
So here it comes, theres the Countdown to A Christmas Carol, a Christmas jigsaw at noon each day, plus our advent calendar, the Festive Fifty twice a day too!
I thought about a numbered front end, created with flash, making you click more times than necessary, but in the end I decided people would rather read than click, also the text is often too long! Here goes...
Doctor Who at Christmas all began with Russell T Davies, Right? - Wrong!
On Christmas Day 1965, part 7 of the Daleks Master Plan, called The Feast of Steven, was broadcast. The TARDISlanded outside a police station in a polluted 1960s England, the crew got arrested, but managed to escape. The TARDISthen landed on the set of a 1920s silent movie, causing problems for the film crew (such as the lead actress almost quitting because she thinks the director wants to replace her with Sara Kingdom) before escaping again - Why does this sound like a Carry On movie or a Benny Hill sketch?
At the end they have a toast to Christmas, andthe first Doctoraddresses the viewers with A Happy Christmas to all of you at home!
At the time it was considered not possible to sell this episode to other countries, so videotape masters were destroyed, and no tele-recording was made for international distribution.
- This became the first episode of Doctor Who to be lost forever. - It was the first Doctor Who episode set at and transmitted on Christmas Day. - It was the first episode to let one of the main characters break the fourth wall with the Doctor addressing the camera.
At amazing personal expense (ahem), here is a fantastic animated re-creation using the original soundtrack...
