April 2015
Eh? Doctor who? What's he talking about...? “Well, I don't like it either! It's all right up to the eyebrows, then it just goes haywire! Look at the eyebrows. These are attack eyebrows. You can take bottle tops off with these!” — 12th Doctor
Volume 1, Number 1
Doctor Who will run for at least another five years, according to Steven Moffat in the latest issue of ‘Doctor Who Magazine’. He is quoted as saying “When I first took it over, the BBC said to me, ‘We’ve done all our calculations. The ratings will now fall. Expect to lose quite a bit. We don’t mind that. We’re going to keep it going. So long as it’s a good show we won’t mind if the ratings stop being quite as amazing as they were. That’s absolutely fine.’ And they didn’t. They pretty much stayed the same.” He went on to say: “I thought it would last ten years. I didn’t think it would last ten years with BBC Worldwide trying to get me in a room to talk about their plan for the next five years! So it’s going to do a minimum of 15. I mean, it could do 26! It’s not easy to find new people. It’s not easy to find new Doctors. That could be the danger – that you start to think that it’s easy. There’s nothing easy about doing Doctor Who.” BBC Head of Drama Commissioning, Ben Stephenson, in the same issue also sheds some light on why he thinks Doctor Who lasts on TV. “The brilliant thing about Doctor Who is that it’s so adjustable. It doesn’t have to be ‘There are 13 episodes and they start in September’. Of course, the fans want it to keep coming back with regularity but we could choose, as they did with David Tennant, to do a year of Specials. I’m not saying we’re planning that, because we plan to keep it regularly in the schedules. But because it’s such an amazing format, because you can constantly revive it and reimagine it, then as long as the people looking after it are passionate about it and the BBC is passionate about it, there’s absolutely no reason why it can’t do another 50 years.”
Maisie Williams – best known as Game of Thrones Arya Stark is to be a guest star in series 9 of Doctor Who, which is currently filming. On her first day on set Maisie Williams said, “I’m so excited to be working on Doctor Who as it’s such a big and important part of British Culture. I can’t wait to meet the cast and crew and start filming, especially as we’ll be shooting not too far from my home town.” Steven Moffat commented on the announcement: “We’re thrilled to have Maisie Williams joining us on Doctor Who. It’s not possible to say too much about who or what she’s playing, but she is going to challenge the Doctor in very unexpected ways. This time he might just be out of his depth, and we know Maisie is going to give him exactly the right sort of hell.”