** New ** Comment on the Doctor Who Exhibition Closure at our Sister Site http://www.doctorwhoblackpool.com

Here is the official press release it its entirity…….

“LAST CHANCE TO SEE! – DOCTOR WHO BLACKPOOL MUSEUM

Doctor Who Exhibitions would like to announce the last chance to see the classic collection of Doctor Who items at the Doctor Who Museum in Blackpool. After five years in Blackpool, the Museum will close its doors for the last time on the 8th of November after which some of the collection will be being re-distributed to other Doctor Who Exhibitions around the UK. The Museum features a unique collection of props, monsters and costumes from throughout the long history of Doctor Who, Britain’s best loved Science Fiction Drama.

The Exhibition will be open every day from 10.30am to 8.00pm until the end of November 8th 2009.

Please note that there is a shop on site but none of the display items will be for sale.”(end)

Need to get in touch?

I Know that many of you will have questions regarding the museum but please be aware that the museum phone line will be VERY BUSY this month, if you have trouble getting through you can call our alternative line on 01253 297522 ot better still email me using the contact-us page and I will reply every evening to your emails.

Here are a few questions you may want answers to:

When will the museum close?
The 8th November is the official closure date

What are your opening times?
from 10am till 8pm

How much will it cost?
£7.50 adults £5 children £22.50 family tickets.

for more info please visit: http://doctorwhoexhibitions.com/

Also don’t forget that our online store will remain trading as usual

www.DoctorWhoCollector.com

Dalek Appears On Mountain

A 100ft Dalek has appeared on the side of a mountain which overlooks Belfast.

However, people living in the city are presumably safe enough from this particular inhabitant of Skaro as it is made from bed linen.

The ‘artwork’ was created on Black Mountain at the weekend by Denis Rush of the UT Events group.

The stunt comes ahead of a charity convention for fans of Doctor Who and a number of other sci-fi TV series at the Europa hotel in Belfast.

Skaro is the name of the Daleks’ home planet

“There was meant to be a giant question mark beside the Dalek, but I ran out of bed linen,” said Denis speaking to BBC News.

“I got permission from the woman who owns the field to do it. She was only too happy to help when she heard that the convention is in aid of the Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice.”

The giant Dalek took two days to make after Denis had ‘exterminated’ his family’s entire supply of bed sheets.

“The first day it was just myself up there and then on the second day my girlfriend Tory gave me a hand,” he said.

“I must have asked every single member of my family for any spare bed sheets they had.”

The Daleks were created by writer Terry Nation

“It was tough going as it must be a 50 degree slope, but it was definitely worth it.

“We don’t make any money out of our events and don’t have any marketing budget to speak of, so hopefully this will get people talking about our latest event.”

‘Vortex’ is billed as a one-day convention for fans of Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures.

Paul Marc Davis, who has appeared in all three shows, and Chipo Chung, who has played two different characters in recent series of Doctor Who, are to take part in the conference.

Gareth David Lloyd, who stars in the spin-off series Torchwood, will also be making the trip to Belfast.

Delegates will be able to have a look inside the Tardis and also get the chance to shake hands – you know what I mean – with a Dalek.

Popular

The Daleks were created by writer Terry Nation and designed by Raymond P. Cusick.

They were introduced in December 1963 in the second Doctor Who series, becoming an instant hit with viewers.

Last year, nine out of ten children in a National Trust survey were able to identify a Dalek correctly.

Only 47% of the children surveyed by the heritage charity were able to identify a barn owl.

Doctor Who boss reveals talk of Star Trek Crossover

RUSSELL T DAVIES has revealed that he had planned a crossover between the Doctor Who and Star Trek TV series.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, the Doctor Who showrunner said: “I would have loved to have done a Star Trek crossover. The very first year, we talked about it. Then Star Trek finally went off air.

“Landing the Tardis on board the Enterprise would have been magnificent. Can you imagine what their script department would have wanted, and what I would have wanted? It would have been the biggest battle.”

Davies quits the hit show after this year’s four specials, the first of which airs at Easter, and will be replaced by Steven Moffat. Star Trek makes a return to the big screen in May.

Anyone who has read his book, The Writer’s Tale, which tells the inside story of the making of series four, will know that Davies is a man whose tear ducts get plenty of exercise. But ending his tenure on Doctor Who came without recourse to a hankie

. “I’m absolutely unsentimental about this sort of thing,” he says, talking in his Cardiff flat. “I would have thought that when I handed in the last script I might have burst into tears or got drunk or partied with 20 naked men, but when these great moments happen you find that real life just carries on. The emotion goes into the scripts.

“That’s why I do the job. I find the emotional scenes emotional, the exciting scenes exciting. I laugh at the funny stuff and cry at the sad stuff. If you had a camera on me, sitting here at this computer, it would be like Diary Of A Nutter. They could show it on BBC3.”

Davies is 45, six feet six, loud, expressive and funny. Possibly because he’s gay, it’s never written in profiles that he is quite the alpha male. Yes, he suffers from midnight moments of doubt, but essentially he’s supremely confident in his talent, and the facts bear out that self-belief. His vision of Doctor Who as a soapy, poppy, flashy and yet, crucially, heartfelt drama has paid off with audiences in excess of 13 million and the complete annexing of the British mainstream.

It has also led to some interesting offers, such as Davies being invited to take part in Dancing On Ice. He declined. “But just after (Boyzone’s] Stephen Gately had been on it, I met him and he said, ‘Feel my arse.’ So I did. It was so hard it was like holding a skull. And then he said, ‘That’s what ice skating does for you.’ So there is something to be said for it.”

There will be four special hour-long episodes of Doctor Who broadcast this year, starting this Saturday with Planet Of The Dead. The final two episodes will be broadcast over the Christmas period and conclude with David Tennant’s regeneration into Matt Smith, at which point Scottish writer Steven Moffat will take over as executive producer for a new series in 2010.

“The church bells ring when Steven hands in just one of his scripts, so I think a whole series is going to be glorious,” says Davies. “We agree on so many other things, but he’s not going to come in and copy me. I have read his first episode and it’s phenomenal. There are such good times ahead.”

Although Doctor Who under Davies has been exciting and funny, there has often been a base note of sadness, specifically to do with characters being separated from one another. He acknowledges that his feelings about the death of his mother in 2002 may have found their way into the work; it’s not an experience one can address directly in art, he believes, but the emotions leak on to the page. “The day you lose your mother is one of the saddest days on planet earth,” he says, “and one of the saddest things is there’s almost nothing to be said about it.”

Davies, it seems to me, is your classic sad clown – jokey on the surface, sombre underneath. His Doctor is forever giving speeches about how wonderful humans are, but Davies’s own world view is more cynical. In the episode Midnight, passengers trapped inside a vehicle with a malevolent demon of an alien turn against each other and the Doctor in a bid to save their own lives. That’s how Davies sees life. But he feels he shouldn’t articulate such pessimism too often in a show watched by young people.

There is, however, no separating Davies from his writing. It’s how he defines himself, and the aspect of his life on which his self-esteem is based. “To me. It’s not a job, it’s not work, I wouldn’t even call it a vocation, it’s simply the way that I think, all day, every day.”

On occasion, he has written directly from his own experience. Queer As Folk, which was being broadcast on Channel 4 a decade ago, was a distillation of 15 years on the gay clubbing scene in Manchester between the start of his twenties until his mid-thirties. “I’d be out until five in the morning, get into work at Granada at nine, throw up in the toilets, then go and be brilliant at my job,” he wrote in The Writer’s Tale.

It was a period of a sometimes dangerous hedonism – and an overdose, which he’d rather not go into in any detail for fear of a My Drugs Hell headline – which ended up being dramatised in Queer As Folk. Was that series a fond farewell to his pleasure-seeking, self-destructive self? “I suppose it was. I didn’t realise it at the time, and it didn’t coincide so neatly because I carried on for a few years after that, but at 35 it was only a matter of time before they closed the club door on me and said, ‘Get out, grandad.’ And I got my lovely boyfriend just before I started writing Queer As Folk, so everything fell into the right place really. I suppose writing it did me some good. It’s all therapy in the end.”

The “lovely boyfriend” is Andrew Smith, a Customs officer. They have been a couple for 11 years but don’t live together as Davies believes he would probably kill anyone with whom he shared a home. “Bless him, he’s the one sane man in the whole world and is mildly disinterested in Doctor Who. And that’s nice. I see him in Manchester and he says, ‘How was work?’ and I say, ‘Fine’. He’s beautifully stable, so a good counterpart for me.”

Davies writes in Cardiff, through the night, head full of jokes, lungs full of smoke. “Sometimes the creative act is actually quite a sexy process,” he says. “When it’s working, when it’s on fire. You can fancy your characters, you can hate your characters. Writing has an obsessive, unstoppable quality in the same way that sometimes men are terrible monsters driven by lust.”

He believes his homosexuality had one significant influence on his writing – it made him an astute observer of behaviour.

“Nowadays there are kids who are confident enough to come out at school, but that didn’t exist when I was at school. So during those teenage years when everyone else is snogging and copping off at parties and you’re not, you spend a lot of time watching what’s going on. I think that watchfulness you develop when you’re in the closet does have an effect, but it’s not what creates the impetus to write in the first place.”

His love of stories goes back to being a child. Growing up in Swansea, the son of two classics teachers, he loved poring over an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman myths. Then there was his mother’s collection of Agatha Christie paperbacks, and his own beloved stash of Asterix and Peanuts books. Even now, he can hear the rhythm of Charles Schulz’s punchlines in his own writing.

The big question now is what will Davies do next? He has a number of possible TV projects, including one codenamed in his head as More Gay Men. He thinks, too, there’s a good chance he will go to America and work in TV there for a while. And he adds: “I do think that one day when I’m 65, if Granada would kindly open their doors, I might have a very happy retirement working on Coronation Street.”

So would he be content if, in time, all his other work was forgotten and only Doctor Who was remembered? “No!”

Not that he really cares about posterity. A resolute atheist who once cast Richard Dawkins in Doctor Who, he has no belief in the afterlife, so doesn’t believe he’ll be “looking down, beaming” as repeats of Queer As Folk are shown on UK Gold.

“And frankly,” he laughs, “in 50 years’ time we’ll all be foraging through the wilderness like wild dogs. So what the f*** does it matter what’s going to be on television?”

Doctor Who: Planet Of The Dead is on BBC1, April 11, 6.45pm

The trailer to the episode has already come out and it doesn’t really shed to much light on the story except that it’s going to be weird. Oh and the Doctor is without his TARDIS for this episode.

Doctor Who Easter 2009 Special: Planet of the Dead trailer
To be broadcast Easter SATURDAY 11th April 2009
Copyright BBC.

The spinoff series will include 13 half-hour episodes that have been co-produced by the original creator of K9, Bob Baker. It stars Robyn Moore (Undead / The Horsemen) as June Turner, newcomer Daniel Webber as Darius, and Keegan Joyce (who appeared in Superman Returns) as Starkey.

The first two episodes are part 1 and 2 respectively in a story titled ‘Feast of the Merrons’.

K9 Gets his own show!!!

K9 will be brought to the screen as both an animatronic prop and in CGI form.  K9’s new updated design has yet to be released, but according to the producers he will be sleek and different to anything seen before – but recognisable to new and old fans.

The image above is the first time the logo has been seen.

Paul Tams, the show’s co-creator and co-associate producer, told The Doctor Who News Page: “As eagle-eyed people may spot, I based the new logo on K9’s old-type font of Westminster, with an update. The font is also used on K9’s new body.”

The series is well and truly into its production with principal photography due to complete in May.  Although air dates have not been confirmed the first episodes are expected to air on Australia’s Network 10 later this year.  Yes, K9 is an Australian production by the Film Finance Corporation.

Get Your Own Remote K9 Here

Published on Mar 4, 2009

Two more names have been added to the cast of the upcoming Doctor Who specials; model Gemma Chan and former Neighbours actor Peter O’Brien.

Chan was spotted filming on the streets of Newport last week with Lindsay Duncan and David Tennant. According to a casting website, castingcallpro.com, the model will play a character called Mia Bennett in the Christmas special.

According to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, O’Brien has confirmed that he will be filming Doctor Who at the end of this month. The former Casualty actor added that he will be playing a villain in the episode, part of David Tennant’s final story, and it will be set on Mars. The Australian has previously worked with outgoing Who showrunner Russell T Davies on Queer As Folk.

So far the BBC has not confirmed the broadcast dates for any of the specials though it is believed that the first, Planet of the Dead, will air at Easter whilst the second will be shown on Christmas day. The very last episode will be screened in 2010, possibly New Year’s Day.

Dalek Found In Pond

A pond-clearance team from the New Forest had the shock of their lives when a Doctor Who dalek head popped up from the murky depths.

Team members were using rakes to bring up debris from the pond, near Beaulieu.

Marc Oakland, clad in waders, had already fished out an old table-football game, dozens of lager cans and even a muddy skateboard. But then he noticed something round and grey rising up from the muddy water.

“I’d just shifted a tree branch with my foot. I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface. I got the shock of my life when a dalek head bobbed up right in front of me!,” said Marc.

The sales executive, 42, added: “It must have been down there for some time. It was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage. But the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out.”