Ray Winstone...
Doctor Who gets one-off special to mark Time Lord's 50th year on telly
Doctor Who passes an important milestone in 2013 having - by then - been on British TV screens for 50 years. It's unsurprising then that the Beeb has decided to uncork a special one-off drama to celebrate the Time Lord's undying appeal with sci-fi fans. The telly show was first aired in glorious black and white on the BBC way …
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Thursday 9th August 2012 13:19 GMT DJV
Obvious
Use colourised clips of William Hartnell's face from the classic series CGI'd onto another actor of the same stature and build a story around that! The fun part would be trying to find clips where:
* they had a reasonable shot of Hartnell's face while he spoke
* there was not too much background noise
* the line/scene is relevant to the storyline
* Hartnell didn't actually fluff his lines :)
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Thursday 9th August 2012 15:19 GMT Peter Stone
Re: "I remember the first transmission." Me too.
I'm another one who remembers the first episode, though at the time, I couldn't understand why the BBC were talking about postponing Dr Who, to show a programme about some guy who had been shot in America the previous day, then again, I was only 12.
(I've told this tale to younger people, & watched them fail to understand just how big & remote the world seemed back then.)
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Friday 10th August 2012 11:19 GMT Arctic fox
@Peter Stone Re: "I remember the first transmission." Me too.
Indeed. The world of instant communication/information that we are all immersed in today (for better or worse) is very different from the world we grew up in - certainly in the socio-psychological sense, for want of a better expression. -:)
AF.
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Thursday 9th August 2012 15:19 GMT Andus McCoatover
Alexi Sayle's quote always has me in stitches...
"But it was the Daleks I wanted to meet and, well, what a stuck-up bunch they were! When I say Daleks I mean the men who trundle around inside the monsters. They all seemed to be ex-dancers who'd been 'doing' Daleks since they were invented in the Sixties and had got very prissy about it. They wore black dance pants and black polo necks and during rehearsals trolleyed round in 'rehearsal Daleks', which were the usual castor-mounted robot but with the top lopped oft, like a convertible Metro. To represent the Daleks' eye on a stalk they wheeled round with their arms held out in a rigid Hitler salute. When they read their lines they would open and close their fists to represent the opening and closing of the Dalek's eye - and they didn't smile while they were doing it. It was like being surrounded by demented Nazi tea trolleys. At lunchtime they sat by themselves and wouldn't talk to anybody else - annoying, but I suppose you had to respect them for taking their craft seriously."
If I to commemorate 50 years of hiding behing the sofa when it came on, trundled the streets holding an egg whisk and a sink-plunger, I guess it'd be some nut-house in an instant!
Ref: http://nzdwfc.tetrap.com/archive/tsv35/spacemuseum.html
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Thursday 9th August 2012 15:51 GMT Andus McCoatover
Oh, bit more trivia...
Friend of mine, long deceased, who was a BBC sound engineer, told me how the Dalek's voice unique sound was at that time produced.
He told me the actors spoke into a mic., which in turn had it's circuit repetitively interrupted by a reed relay, opened and closed at about 20 Hz or so, fed by an electromagnet/oscillator combo.
(As an aside, he also told me the (analogue) tape recording the BBC has of "Under Milk Wood", narrated by Richard Burton is a copy of the original. His friend, also a sound engineer, kept the original....)
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Thursday 9th August 2012 18:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Andus
I only read stories about that and can whole heartedly agree that they did an awesome job back then. Not merely the Daleks but other sound designs too (obvious example the sound of the Tardis).
I'm fascinated with sound / sound synthesis / sound design and the developments in this segment have gone so fast that in my experience many people find it hard to imagine that such a design could have been so much work.
Would I want a "Dalek effect" nowadays I'd pull up Reason ('sound software'; because of its extraordinary routing capabilities), pick up my mic signal, add a vocoder, perhaps a 'Scream' device for distortion and optionally some filters.
Back in the days there /was/ no such thing as Reason :-)
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Thursday 9th August 2012 18:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Joerg
I think the only thing you could "accuse" him of is the repetition factor, that got a bit predictable. I'm referring to building up the season and in the finale end with a whole "re-run" but then seen from a different angle / aspect.
But apart from that I don't quite agree with you. It had episodes following the red line of the "season story", it had individual episodes and some were silly, some were sort of funny and some were even a bit scary (sort off). I could imagine some kids not really fancying the Silence. Speaking of which; that was an interesting twist; see & forget.
Personal preference here of course but I'll take the Silence over the weeping angels.
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Friday 10th August 2012 11:41 GMT Tom 13
Re: Last season was a huge disappointment
I don't dislike the current doctor, but recently I've been having trouble name the actors for the new Doctors. I didn't realize quite why until I bought and read a puff piece in the US publication Entertainment Weekly. In it they'd done the usual "who is your favorite Doctor" survey and next to it they had their pictures with vote percentages. Looking at the pic for the old series, each of the Doctors stands out as an individual character. Even Eccleston carries it off, but the last two come across as interchangeable male fashion models.
Don't get me wrong, I think Tennant was a wonderful Doctor on screen, and Smith is doing a decent job too, but just looking at the photo jumble,.. Well, there's just an element of sameness there which should never, ever happen with a Doctor.
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Friday 10th August 2012 11:44 GMT Tom 13
Re: I hope...
Agreed. A 50th anniversary show ought to have as many of the still living doctors, and companions on as possible. And a few who are no longer with us should be represented by good character actors/actresses who also look the part. Something on the order of The Five Doctors only without Baker stuck in a timestream because he didn't want anything to do with the project.
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Thursday 9th August 2012 21:13 GMT Adam Foxton
Another crossover... with a twist
Bring back Colin Baker, McCoy, Eccleston and Smith if you must... but the real story is Peter Davidson and David Tenant.
Both already met in a canonical TV episode so the newer audience is already at least aware of the older Doctor. Both are still alive and, with a bit of timey-wimey hand wringing the age gap between his time as the Doctor proper and now can be explained.
But, crucially, David Tenant is married to Peter Davidson's daughter. And David Tennant / Georgia Moffett now have a daughter together (and a son).
You've had "The Doctor's Daughter", now you can have "The Doctor's GrandDaughter". With the Doctor's actual granddaughter, as well as the Doctor's actual Daughter! Properly written this could be (a) a good episode and (b) the cause for a never-again-seen nerdgasm/mindfuck that will set the Internet alight for a good long time.