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Brian Blessed has revealed that he was approached to play the Doctor in the 60s.
I'm glad it didn't work for me. Oh, my word! I am satisfied with Pat Troughton.
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Posted: |
Sep 22, 2014 - 12:31 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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Donald Tosh was Doctor Who‘s story editor from 1965 to 1966, a time when original producer Verity Lambert was leaving and William Hartnell’s health was starting to force him to leave. Sadly, Tosh’s time on the show is still one of the hardest hit by the missing episodes.
The Scottish story editor, who eventually left show business, looked back at his time working on Doctor Who in a recent terrific interview on the Daily Record’s Scotland Now page.
Tosh came onto the show during its third series, and somewhat luckily, was a fan of William Hartnell’s pre-Who work. The story that he is most proud of is The Massacre (of St. Bartholemew’s Eve), now sadly completely missing from the archives, in which he re-wrote John Lucarotti’s script to give Hartnell a dual role:
“Bill Hartnell was a good actor, and I wanted to give him something different to do. I gave Bill a doppelganger story where I got him to play the Abbot of Amboise, not just the Doctor. He had great fun doing it, as he wasn’t having to learn all the usual scientific lines, as he had to do as the old man. As a result of that, when he came back to playing the Doctor, his performance had really improved. I thought it work brilliantly, and it’s one I’m still very proud of.”
Doctor Who biopic An Adventure In Space And Time
And as dramatized in An Adventure in Space and Time, Hartnell’s failing health was making filming more and more difficult. It sometimes fell to Tosh to smooth things over with the increasingly poorly star:
“The funny thing about Bill was that he had got very crotchety and there were times when he was really rather difficult. He was such a good actor – let nobody ever tell you any different – and I knew his work well, which was why we got on… I thought he was lovely, and when he was being difficult on set, I’d sometimes get a message saying, ‘Can you come down and speak to the old man?’ At the time, he was finding it very difficult with the scripts as he was unwell, which was why he eventually left.”
The former story editor also may be the unsung hero of Doctor Who‘s longevity:
“But by the time I left, I’d left behind the idea that the Doctor could change his face – you would have the camera on one actor and then you’d blend their faces together and the new man would take over, and because they’d seen it, the audience would accept it.”
Donald Tosh has stayed familiar with Doctor Who through the years, and still enjoys the show today. He was also a fan of former 80s story editor Andrew Cartmel and thought the show was making a comeback shortly before it was cancelled:
“I thought Doctor Who improved a lot towards the end of its first run on television with Sylvester McCoy. They had a clever young script editor in Andrew Cartmel, and they brought new and proper life to it… But I do enjoy it now. I enjoy the jokes and the humour that underlines everything. It’s much darker these days, but it really challenges the mind much more than a lot of things they did after I left… It’s virtually an adult programme.”
http://www.kasterborous.com/2014/09/ex-script-editor-donald-tosh-doctor-virtually-adult-programme/
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Posted: |
Jan 4, 2015 - 12:02 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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It was sixteen years ago that two fans in New Zealand were to discover that an episode of Doctor Who held by a local collector was to be an episode absent from the BBC Archives for over twenty years...
Originally recorded on the 5th March 1965 and broadcast on BBC1 a few weeks later on Saturday 27th, episode one of The Crusade, The Lion was wiped alongside a number of other first Doctor episodes as part of the standard videotape recycling practice by BBC Engineering on the 31st January 1969, as the story itself had been copied to film by BBC Enterprises for worldwide distribution and so was considered redundant. The story was to be seen in a number of countries over the course of a decade, but by the late 1970s it had been presumed that all copies distributed for broadcast had been returned and subsequently destroyed, though 'fortunately' a copy of episode three, The Wheel of Fortune, had survived in the BBC Film Library.
One of those copies had made its way to the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation during 1967, but the story wasn't broadcast in the end owing to it falling foul of censorship issues. As part of the agreement with BBC Enterprises once the rights to air had expired prints were either forwarded to another broadcaster or destroyed; however, The Lion slipped through the net, and when ultimately sent to a rubbish tip in 1974 as part of a clearance at NZBC it was amongst a number of films intercepted by a private collector.
Fast-forward to 1998 and the print caught the eye of film collector Bruce Grenville at a collectors convention - he was unaware that the episode had been "missing" for decades at that point, and decided to purchase it simply because he liked Doctor Who. It was shown by him on a number of occasions in the coming months to friends, eventually seen by Cornelius Stone who then mentioned it in conversation with fellow fan Neil Lambess - who realised that the episode in question might well be one missing from the BBC Archives, though it might well have simply been the existing The Wheel of Fortune instead.
Neil recollects the moment when he contacted Bruce for the first time:
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!
Arrangements were made for him and fellow fan Paul Scoones to visit Bruce to see the episode in question, and on the 3rd January 1999 they sat down to watch ...
Paul successfully negotiated the loan of the film print, and it was formally returned to to Steve Roberts at the BBC on the 11th January 1999 for copying, whereupon a digital 'master' was taken. The recovery was celebrated on BBC1 in the United Kingdom on 10th February in the National Lottery show Amazing Luck Stories, and after restoration work was undertaken to clean the episode up it was released on VHS in October. In 2004 the episode saw further restoration work carried out for its release as part of the Lost in Time DVD collection of 'orphan' episodes in November 2004.
Bruce says:
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!
Summing up their experience of confirming the discovery, Paul says:
I remember a moment soon after Neil and I had returned to from visiting Bruce Grenville to verify that The Lion existed. We were both giddy with excitement at the importance of our discovery. I said to Neil that one thing we could be sure of is that that by finding a missing episode we’d secured a place for ourselves in the history of Doctor Who. Sure enough, here we are sixteen years later, still talking about that glorious find back in January 1999. I remain immensely proud of my role in helping find The Lion and arranging its return to the BBC all those years ago.
You can read how The Crusade was distributed around the world via BroaDWCast, and the full story of The Lion's recovery via the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2015/01/moments-in-time-lion-030115110008.html
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Despite getting the thing for Christmas 2013, I only recently got around to watching Hartnell's swan song, The Tenth Planet. I liked it fine but was amused that no one he worked with had a kind word to say about Hartnell. He was a curmudgeonly, egotistical, racist asshole. lol However, all that went into making him a hell of a great Doctor Who.
Curiously, the commentary crew and bonus features fail to laud Jacqueline Hill or even mention her in any way. I wonder how she got on with her fellow cast members? The Meglos DVD has a tribute to her, but none of her castmates are present.
Here's the BBC Points West video. Part of it includes interviews with Pertwee and Baker.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-25007057
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Posted: |
Jan 23, 2015 - 12:45 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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“Will this man influence young minds?”
That was the question asked of Canadian parents 50 years ago on January 23, 1965, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) became the first North American broadcaster to air Doctor Who. At this time, only two other markets outside the UK, New Zealand and Australia, had aired the show. Efforts to sell the low-budgeted series had failed in the US where glossier British imports like The Saint held sway. But the CBC was very much like the BBC and low-budgeted, studio-bound productions were common, so Doctor Who found a Canadian home.
The fact the series was in part devised by Canadian Sydney Newman, who had worked for the CBC until the late 1950s, likely was a selling point in its favour.
To mark the debut, the January 23, 1965 edition of CBC Times (long-defunct Canadian equivalent of Radio Times) got into the spirit by publishing a faux memo to the nation’s parents, “warning” them of the impending arrival of “Dr. Who” in their living rooms, illustrated with an image of William Hartnell and a pair of Sensorites.
Broadcasts began with An Unearthly Child, with the series scheduled at 5 p.m. on Saturdays, mimicking the BBC’s scheduling (some CBC affiliates aired it at different times). After episode 6 of The Daleks, however, the CBC took Doctor Who off the air for more than two weeks and when it returned it was in a new timeslot on Wednesday afternoons.
With many CBC stations broadcasting close to the border, some American markets, such as Seattle and Detroit, would have been able to see the show, nearly a decade before the Jon Pertwee-era episodes were finally syndicated there.
Ultimately, Doctor Who was destined for a short run on the CBC. After July 2, 1965, the show was abruptly cancelled after the conclusion of The Keys of Marinus (according to the research site BroaDWcast.org, it’s possible at least one affiliate was forced to pull the show midway through the serial). Ironically, the show was pulled before getting to The Sensorites, the storyline promoted in the original CBC Times memo.
Doctor Who would not be shown in Canada again until 1976 when local broadcasters in Vancouver and Ontario began showing the Pertwee era. The episodes aired by the CBC in 1965 (minus the now-lost Marco Polo, but finally including the long-delayed The Sensorites) would not be seen again until the youth-oriented cable network YTV began showing them in the late 1980s, followed by Space in 1997.
The CBC would play a role in the revival of Doctor Who in 2005, receiving a co-production credit for the first few seasons and airing the show in prime-time only a few weeks after the UK. For Series 1, the network recruited Christopher Eccleston to record special bumpers and intros and promotions for a visit-the-set contest sponsored by TV Guide; Billie Piper (donning an iconic Roots top) performed similar duties when The Christmas Invasion aired only one day after the UK. The CBC also produced its own behind-the-scenes featurettes that aired alongside the main show.
Moments in Time By 2008, however, interest in the series at the CBC (which had similarly supported, broadcast, and then cancelled Torchwood) had waned. With Series 2, the gap between UK and Canadian airings extended to months and the CBC split the season (years before the BBC ever did) between The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit. It skipped the 2007 Christmas special Voyage of the Damned altogether, and aired an international edit of Journey's End that was heavily criticized by Canadian fans. In early 2009, Space picked up the rights to air The Next Doctor and everything that followed. The CBC continued to air Modern Era reruns for the next couple of years on the main network and its digital network Bold, before quietly ending its run.
The CBC’s original broadcast of Doctor Who has retained some interest decades later due to the fact one story shown in its entirety was the now-lost Marco Polo. However, despite the fact the series aired on affiliates from St. John’s, Nfld., to Vancouver, B.C., to date no copy of this serial has emerged from the Great White North.
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Learn more about the history of CBC and Canadian broadcasts of Classic Era Doctor Who at BroaDWcast.org. The site, run by Jon Preddle, John Lavalie and Steven Warren Hill, is always on the hunt for information about non-UK broadcasts of Doctor Who, including those in Canada. The ongoing adventures of Doctor Who on television in North America can be followed via This Week in Doctor Who.
http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2015/01/northamerica-debut-230115110008.html
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