The Guardian Unlimited – Wednesday 13th August, 2003

Dr Who and others are appearing on the net, which is becoming a new medium for original productions.

By Guy Clapperton.

And the new Doctor Who is… on the internet instead of TV. To celebrate 40 years of everyone’s favourite time traveller, the BBC has commissioned a new story, The Scream of the Shalka, and a new doctor in the shape of Richard E Grant, but you won’t see it on telly.

This will be the latest of a short line of Doctor Who plays that have been internet-based only, with two of them later released on CD. Horror fans can watch The Ghosts of Albion by Amber Benson, who played Tara Maclay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Amateur audio and film producers have been using the net for some time, as a glance at Atomfilms.com will confirm – but the interest from the professionals is new.

The format of the BBC webcasts is simple. The BBC broadcasts the dramas in RealPlayer format in bursts of five minutes or so, five or six of which make up an episode. A new episode is added each week until the story is complete. The Doctor Whos to date have had illustrations and some basic animation, most recently based on Macromedia Flash, to accompany them. Ghosts of Albion had full, if crude, animation from Dangermouse producers Cosgrove Hall, as will Richard E Grant’s Doctor Who.

Gary Russell has produced two of the Doctor Who webcasts – Real Time featuring Colin Baker, and Shada, from a never-completed Douglas Adams script, featuring Paul McGann. When he wrote Real Time, says Russell, he was writing as if for one of the BBC-licensed Dr Who audio plays his company, Big Finish, has been producing for some years, effectively ignoring the fact that illustrations would be added. “Shada was more of a cross-pollination of the two,” he says. For example, in the original there is a bicycle chase. “I thought we’d have to cut that out, it would be terribly boring in sound – but BBCi said no, keep it in, and with the pictures and a little extra dialogue, it worked.”

Russell did not have to take into account the downloadable nature of a webcast, and the waiting time. At the end of every TV episode, give or take, there’s a cliffhanger to keep the viewer interested for the following week. On the net, they need to be kept motivated to download the next section every few minutes. “I didn’t worry about that – BBCi hadn’t even decided where those breaks were going to be while we were recording. I just wanted to keep people coming back the following week.”

New Doctor Richard E Grant confirms that recording the new story was much like recording a radio drama. “Read through a scene, get director’s notes, then record, then re-record sections and move on,” he says. “The great advantage is that there is no dawn wake-up call, locations in the middle of nowhere, make-up, wig or costume requirements. As it was so hot this summer, we were all in shorts and grateful for the strong air conditioning in the sound studio.” He was never aware of any need for it to be different because it was going on the internet.

Meanwhile, having spent one day on a read-through with the supporting cast, including Sir Derek Jacobi and Diana Quick, then four days in the studio, he has been bemused by some of the requests.

“Where I grew up in Africa, television arrived in 1980 and did not include Dr Who. Since doing the recordings, there have been offers to go to Dr Who conventions and sign autographs, which I never anticipated and have not taken up. I don’t feel I qualify, as it is just ‘a voice’.”

It is somehow appealing that Doctor Who should be at the forefront of what is slowly becoming a new medium for original productions. Various TV technologies such as blue screen and Quantel were developed very much with that series in mind, so acting as a test-bed for a new format is nothing new for the Time Lord. The interesting thing will be to see whether internet dramas can make the move from cult appeal to the mainstream.

Doctor Who: The Scream of the Shalka will be on www.bbc.co.uk/drwho around November for the anniversary.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited.

SFX Magazine – August 2003

Edited by Guy Haley and Ian Berriman.

Move over Paul McGann, the eighth Doctor is now officially history. And his replacement? Enter McGann’s old Withnail and I sparring partner, Richard E Grant.

Grant will star as the ninth Doctor in a new BBCi webcast entitled “The Scream Of The Shalka” a 40th anniversary story which will be shown as six 12-minute episodes later in the year. Of course, it’s not the first time Grant has played the Doctor. In the 1999 Comic Relief spoof “The Curse of the Fatal Death”, he played a preening, vain Doctor in love with his own reflection.

This will be a fully animated Doctor Who adventure, unlike the more primitive Flash-style animations that have been used on previous webcasts. A DVD release will follow, and the quality of the animation means there’s nothing to stop it being shown on TV at a later date.

Voice work was recorded at Shepherd’s Bush in the week beginning 18 June, and now Cosgrove Hall (the company behind Danger Mouse and Count Duckula) is in the process of animating the story. They are keeping the likenesses of the actors involved and promise a rich, gothic style.

The story’s writer is former SFX columnist Paul Cornell, who’s managed the impossible by keeping a Doctor Who project secret for almost 18 months!

“I was asked to do this because I was already working with BBCi on other projects,” Cornell told us. “I think they were quite surprised that I had a Who education! Throughout, we tried to be traditional but original.

That is, I think that this is Who in a shape that will appeal to those with fond memories of the TV show in the 1970s – it’s about a town in Lancashire under siege by mysterious forces – but there are no continuity references at all, apart from the regulars being very much in character and the TARDIS. We’re trying for mass appeal Doctor Who that will also please the fans, which is a difficult juggling act. There’s a big gap between where we meet up with the ninth Doctor and when last we saw the eighth, in which some big things have happened, that we’ll be finding out about as we journey with the ninth Doctor.”

“There’s a space for everyone’s personal version of continuity to work itself out; we’re not treading on anyone’s toes. But we are going determinedly off into the future with new monsters, new characters and a new Doctor.”

Grant’s ninth Doctor promises to be an interesting new take on the character.

“Oh, he’s impatient and angry with humans; he’s caring; he’s passionate; he’s bitingly witty; he’s vulnerable; he’s brittle and a little bit of a snob!” Cornell says. “The part was written for Richard, and I think he’s done an incredible job, finding all manner of subtleties in there. In this story, he meets his new companion, Alison Cheney, and the two actors really struck sparks from each other.”

Producer Muirinn Lane Kelly has assembled a stellar cast. Acclaimed thespian Sir Derek Jacobi will star alongside Grant as his arch-enemy, The Master – proof that the BBC are taking this unconventional return seriously. Amusingly, Jacobi will also be playing the Doctor in another Who spin-off.

The new companion is played by Sophie Okonedo, who recently appeared in the Stephen Frears movie Dirty Pretty Things, and the Doctor gets a new military comrade in the form of Thomas Kennet, played by veteran Irish actor Jim Norton. Filling out the cast are Craig Kelly (who starred as Doctor Who-obsessed Vince in Queer As Folk), Diana Quick and KY-TV’s Michael Fenton-Stevens. The drama is directed by Seattle-born stage director Wilson Milam. “He’s the best director I’ve ever worked with,” Cornell enthuses. “He’s brought a sense of tremendous logic and character development to the piece, helped by this tremendous cast.”

The BBC are keeping schtum on when the finished story will be transmitted, but our bets are on November, given that Doctor Who will be celebrating its 40th anniversary on the 23rd of that month.

BBC Restoration Website – Friday 8th August, 2003

Built: 1903-6
Listing: Grade II*
Celebrity Advocate: Richard E Grant

A Mancunian Art-Nouveau masterpiece. Built in 1906 as municipal swimming and Turkish baths,
you can still read the sign for the three entrances: Males-First Class,
Males-Second Class, and Females. This was also the order in which the
water was recycled for the three pools.

Jolie has just sent me an article taken from SFX Magazine’s August issue about the upcoming Doctor Who BBC animation featuring REG as the good Doctor. There’s also a pic included in the article that has been done in the style of the opening credits for Doctor Who (though depicting his “Withnail” side) and you can see it all here.

I’ve also included a snippet that Denise sent me ages ago that was originally on the Waterford-Kamhlaba website. It’s just a short news entry about Richard’s visit there midway through last year and you can check it out here.

I received an article from Joan which she found buried in the pages of the Sunday Mail’s “Night & Day” Magazine earlier this month. It’s just a short article on the upcoming “Tooth” movie featuring REG and Jerry Hall and it includes some cool behind-the-scenes pictures of them both courtesy of Rex Features. You can see that here.

Jolie sent me a short piece about a “Teddy Bear T-Shirt” auction that REG submitted an autographed T-Shirt to in aid of the Birth Defects Foundation Newlife Action appeal. The auction took place back in May this year but you can still see the T-Shirt here.