I've watched the first couple of episodes of The Web of Fear and absolutely love it. Marvellous stuff.
Doctor Who... Page 1,022
If you're on the look out for it, it seems there may be the first trailer for the 50th before or after Atlantis tomorrow.
I saw a bit of Atlantis last week, which seemed to consist of about ten minutes of various people successfully leaping over a bull. Even the fat one from The Thin Blue Line.
That scene did go on a bit.
Quote: zooo @ October 18 2013, 11:57 PM BSTThat scene did go on a bit.
Isn't it written by Misfits man? I'd hope it's at least funny.
Quote: zooo @ October 17 2013, 12:30 PM BSTOoh.
(If that pic works.)
The Ugly, The Good & the Bad
(Fair dos)
A cool little vid. No doubt trailers with footage from the special itself will start creeping out in the next few weeks.
Love it.
Why do they keep Troughton in silhouette in the trailer? That made me a little sad.
According to SFX hurt is filling in cos ecclestone wouldn't do it
Quote: Ben @ October 20 2013, 7:49 PM BSTWhy do they keep Troughton in silhouette in the trailer? That made me a little sad.
You also only get the back of Colin Baker, McGann peeking from behind an Ood. It's all very cool, though.
Quote: sootyj @ October 20 2013, 8:00 PM BSTAccording to SFX hurt is filling in cos ecclestone wouldn't do it
Filling in might be the wrong words. If he was added because of his absence, the story has obviously been changed a lot to take on board this swerve. Nine wasn't the Doctor's shameful secret, for example.
Ecclestone really does come across as a miserable f**ker.
Excerpt from Broadcast Magazine:
Mark Gatiss, Doctor Who
30 October, 2013 | By Robin Parker
Writer Mark Gatiss tells Robin Parker about seeing his 'passion project' finally come to life, the challenges of dramatising real-life events and the constraints of BBC budgets
CREDITS
Production company BBC in-house
Length 1 x 90 minutes
TX TBC, November, BBC2
Commissioners Ben Stephenson; Janice Hadlow
Writer Mark Gatiss
Producer Matt Strevens
Executive producers Mark Gatiss; Steven Moffat; Caroline Skinner
Director Terry McDonough
There are passion projects, and there are passion projects.
For Mark Gatiss - lifelong Doctor Who fan, actor, writer of six on-screen stories, several tie-in novels and audio plays - the origin of his favourite show really is the story he's wanted to tell for years.
His first formal pitch for An Adventure In Space And Time came ahead of the 40th anniversary 10 years ago, before the BBC had even revived the show, but execs didn't really embrace it until the 50th dawned, by which time BBC4 had triumphed with another affectionate look at the birth of a much-loved TV institution, The Road To Coronation Street.
Forefront in Gatiss's mind from the outset was that if you make a drama about making telly, it risks becoming an indulgent love-in for telly insiders.
More limiting still, a show about the making of Doctor Who, from an obsessive on the inside of the current productions, could alienate anyone but the most hardcore fan.
"I had to kill a lot of babies - or baby monsters," he admits in mock-sinister tones. "It's difficult to shrug off your anorak. Focusing it down was the real challenge, because I know all these stories so well and there are so many fascinating ones. In a funny way, if I was writing, say, the history of Z Cars, I would do that without compunction."
Gatiss went through 10 drafts, jettisoning an entire sub-plot from his first draft about the creation of the Daleks, before settling on a structure that devotes its first half to the efforts of producers Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman to get the show on air, and the second to how playing the Doctor completely changes actor William Hartnell's life.
According to the writer, the final piece has echoes of such lofty texts as King Lear and Death Of A Salesman, as well as one more recent fact-based drama.
"Watch The Social Network, which everyone should: it could not have a less prepossessing concept, you'd think. But it's absolutely spellbinding because of the personalities involved, and because of this curious series of events. That's much more important than being a blow-by-blow history of how it all comes about."
Fact and fiction
So how could he reconcile what was interesting to him from a production point of view and what could be great mainstream drama? Gatiss rattles off his favourite facts, including the detail that Doctor Who's first transmission, back in 1963, was derailed by John F Kennedy's assassination, which gets a nod here; moreover, he tells me: "The show genuinely nearly got killed after four episodes.
"They accused Verity Lambert of overspending," he says. "After £4,000 was spent on the TARDIS, a memo said: 'You're not to do any more after these, that's it.' She went in and told them: 'No, you told me you wanted this show to run all year round, so I spread this cost over a year.' They went 'oh, OK then'. It came that close.
"Now, that is so dry; you can't make a dramatic point about a budget overspend. So I've changed it: in a different situation, she's still out of her depth and that's interesting. I realised you can get caught up in those things."
He's happy with the concessions he has made to a general audience, but one edit still rankles. Gatiss admits he regrets excising a scene that tipped its hat to the fact that Ridley Scott was originally due to design the Daleks.
"Everything would be so different. I wrote this jokey scene where the head of department says: 'Ridley did some preliminary drawings before he left the project.' You don't see them, but they roll them out on a drawing board and designer Ray Cusick goes '... I think I'll go my own way'." Could the Daleks have turned out like the phallic alien of Scott's breakthrough movie? The mind boggles.
A fortuitous discovery unlocked the human story at the heart of the piece: an interview resurfaced in which William Hartnell, in the only visual recording of him talking about Doctor Who, reflects on his time on the show three months after he left. "It's amazing, it's like the whole film in two minutes," Gatiss reflects. "I showed this to a lot of people. It was a good way in."
Meanwhile, it was with some irony that in depicting a show in which writers' imaginations often dwarfed the practical abilities of a crew working to a BBC budget, Gatiss was thwarted in recreating some of even the crudest of 1960s effects.
"A story called Planet Of The Giants is a perfect story about how TV production works: one of Sydney Newman's original ideas is that the team come out of the TARDIS three inches tall. It was beset by problems and they cut one episode because it wasn't working, but it's visually amazing to this day: brilliant sets, a giant plughole, a big telephone, a giant fly. Obviously I wanted some of that but we couldn't afford it! They could in 1964 - but not today. I was keen to do an excerpt from the episode The Web Planet with a butterfl y and giant ants because it's insanely ambitious. We couldn't afford to put them on wires."
What they could afford to do was to recreate the original TARDIS at Wimbledon Studios. "Everyone I brought down to the set, including Peter Capaldi, just gawped at it, because it's the real thing. It has never been that big since then."
Depicting reality
It turns out that the responsibility of depicting real life (something of a departure for Gatiss the writer, though as an actor, he has essayed Malcolm McLaren, Bamber Gascoigne and Johnnie Cradock) is harder than the time-and-space spanning complexities of science fiction.
"Writing Doctor Who, you don't give a monkey's [about giving diehard fans what they want]," he laughs. "You write it for your audience, not for the people who will watch it anyway. I don't mean to sound contemptible at all - I'm a fan so there are a lot of things that I want to nod to or embrace - but you can't be ruled by that. Here, this is holy writ; they're real people."
And as for that sizeable contingent of fans who are not backwards in venting their spleen at every perceived transgression of the canon of the cult show? Is he ready for the backlash? "Oh, I'm totally prepared for howls of protest," he grins. "In a funny way, it's similar to when I made my horror documentaries for BBC4. Every day on Twitter, someone would say: 'How can you not have this? Where is Nosferatu?'
I would tiresomely reply: 'If I included everything, it would be just me sitting in a chair going '... and then The Abominable Dr Phibes happened'." "Doctor Who fans exist for the minutiae. They'll complain about everything. They'll probably complain about Verity Lambert's shoes. But I made it for everybody and I hope it's very touching."
GETTING THE LOOK: MARK GATISS ON HAMMERS' INFLUENCE
"I wanted to make it look like a film that was made in the early 1960s. I gave director Terry McDonough some early Hammer films: Kiss Of The Vampire and Brides Of Dracula. They're shot in Eastman colour, which makes them very saturated and beautiful.
We've used a lot of maroons and greys. It's a very post-war world, quite smoggy, but it's just the beginning of the 1960s, when there was a real sense of excitement and urgency. "Then in the studio, something magical happened. We had four Marconi cameras, which they used at the time.
We filmed using modern cameras inside them - except one, which is a working original. When you attach it to its monitor, it gives the same image that it did in 1963. Given the extraordinary likeness of the cast, it's amazing: I was watching recreations and it was like being in the studio - they were there. It was uncanny; it's like lost studio footage. We're going to put some of those on the DVD."
Look out for this week's Doctor Who 50th anniversary special edition of Broadcast including an interview with Steven Moffat and the show's producers, an insight into the innovative VFX techniques used and the challenges of filming the show in 3D