Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.
A blast: A destructive wave of highly compressed air spreading outwards from an explosion.
A News Blast: An instructive wave of brightly compressed news spreading outwards in the standard paragraph form.
That’s right: it’s time to unleash some compressed air with today’s gusts featuring a warm south eastern breeze of property violation, a rich, woody chinook of discovery, and a blustering storm in a teacup.
Forced Dematerialisation
The Doctor and the TARDIS have faced down foes as formidable as the Daleks, the Cyberman and the Master but now, they face their greatest enemy: Floridians.
The Lexington Home Owners Association of Tampa Florida have levied a notice of violation against a couple who placed a life-sized replica of the TARDIS in the driveway of their home.
In a letter to the couple the council rather ominously describe the type 40 time travel capsule that had previously been a plot in their Doctor Who themed wedding as being: “in violation of The Governing Documents” – giving the couple a 15 day ultimatum by which to materialise it elsewhere or face their very own trial of a Time Lord.
Taking the notice in their stride the couple posted on Facebook that: “I’m slightly amused by this… I maintain this is a mode of transportation, therefore I have every right to park it in my driveway.”
When The Lion Was Found
Celebrating sixteen years since lost episode The Lion slipped through the net and was discovered in the hands of a private collector by two fans from New Zealand, Doctor Who News has recounted the episodes journey from obscurity to its place on the ‘orphan episodes’ collection Lost in Time in 2004.
After being transferred to film and shipped to New Zealand for broadcast by the NZBC – who in actuality never broadcast the episode due to censorship issues – the episode slipped the net, ending up in a rubbish tip in 1974 as part of the station’s clear out.
Fast forward to 1998 and the print caught the eye of collector Bruce Grenville at a film convention – who was unaware that the episode had been missing. He then screen the episode for fans where eventually word got to fellow fan Neil Lambess who recalled the moment he and Bruce made contact:
“For me the moment has to be when I was taking to Bruce on a call box telephone and he told me that what he actually had was the first episode of a Doctor Who serial called The Lion. That was the moment when I knew that it wasn’t a hoax. I paused a few seconds and then told Bruce, “actually what you have there is the first episode of a serial called The Crusade and until just now it wasn’t believed to exist anymore!” The feeling was and still is indescribable, but at the time I was thinking how staggeringly appropriate it was that I had found out inside a public call box!”
For Bruce himself, the most important lesson to take from the return of The Lion taught fans was to keep the faith in regards to finding more lost episodes: “I was delighted that my random celluloid film turned out to be a lost episode, and glad that the BBC was able to restore the film and release it on video & DVD. But really, ALL DW fans are hoping for all the other lost episodes to be re-discovered and appreciated. I continue to talk about this whenever anyone asks me about DW, and urge others to do so too!”
A Role To Get Your Teeth Into
Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lector – perhaps the second most famous biter of human flesh after Luis Suarez – could very well be tucking into some Tenth Doctor chow (David Tempora? David Tenderloin?) if a fan campaign to get David Tennant to appear on the critically acclaimed TV series Hannibal is successful.
What’s more Tennant has already spoken to Bryan Fuller, the Hollywood director behind the series, and it seems both are keen to get this feast underway: “I know Bryan a little bit,” Tennant told journalists. “It’s a conversation that’s been had a couple of times.”
As for Fuller himself? Well he seems keen. Speaking to the Metro he said: “I would love to have David on the show. Or just write for David! I would kill and eat somebody to work with David!”
However Tennant has warned fans not to the Chianti in just yet but he was hopeful of working with someone with Fullers ‘rare talent’.
I’m going to say that pun was definitely intended.
Bigger on the Inside Beds
Now, how about a TARDIS murphy bed that’s literally bigger on the inside?
This awesome feat of physic-bending construction was made not by Time Lord Science but by Stubbs from The Stubby Thumb (with a sexy duvet set from Laain Studios over at Red Bubble) but don’t let that fool you into thinking this was a small task; far from it.
Going by the detailed breakdown on her blog it might actually be easier to harness the power of the Eye of Harmony and the architectural reconfiguration system what with the 3 redo’s, sacrificing your living room table for a month and the calls to the makers of the Murphy bed to see whether it was actually possible; but as you can see, it was worth all the hardship.
Imperrrrsonating Peterrrr
Do you want to hear Sylvester McCoy impersonating current Doctor Peter Capaldi? Of course you do! You’re only human. Unsurprisingly, this video from Absolute Radio contains shouting. Surprisingly, it doesn’t contain any swearing.
Shut Up
How do you make the Doctor strange when most of his adventures and exploits are available on a wide range of mediums? Well, if you’re Peter Capaldi, you take away a fundamental part of NuWho: the flirtatious relationships between the Doctor and his companions and bring back the silence and the darkness.
Attempting to avoid the ‘icky’ nature of an older Doctor and a young companion, Capaldi immediately nixed any and all kissy eyes aboard the TARDIS.
Speaking to Unreality TV he said: “I always felt it would be inappropriate for someone my age to be in any kind of flirtatious relationship with a young person. But I think everybody felt that. The Doctor has to be a mysterious figure. It’s hard when a show’s been around for 50 years and every episode, apart from the lost ones, is avail- able on DVD and there are people who know the minutiae of every detail of it. How can he be mysterious, how can he be strange? But he is strange, he’s an alien. Your responses to events aren’t necessarily human.”
Shuttity-Up-Up-Up
And finally, the BBC are using Doctor Who to ‘promote’ a gay agenda, according to complaints published in a report by the BBC Trust.
In the report, which covers complaint received by the BBC between February 2013 and September 2014, three viewers complained that the show was ‘promoting homosexuality’ – a complaint that was also levelled at the whole of the BBC.
Last August, OFCOM received six complaints after airing a lesbian kiss between Madame Vastra and her human wife Jenny Flint in Deep Breath – eventually OFCOM dismissed the complaints as did not ‘raise issues worth investigating’.
A spokesman for the BBC told The Independent: “The complaints framework that the BBC Trust put in place in 2012 allows the BBC to close down, after an initial response, complaints that for example are hypothetical, use abusive language, fail to cite any evidence or breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.
“Only about 10 per cent of complaints fall into this category and if complainants are unhappy they can appeal to the BBC Trust.”
That’s all for now. But join us again soon for a compressed slice of news, probably filled with a large proportion of time and space…
The post News Blast: Biting Impressions & Thunderous Teacups appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.