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Doctor Who 50th Radio Plays this week!

BBC4 Extra is pulling out all the stops this week in honor of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, and running a complete Radio Play story every day. Not that you can tell if you look at the episodes at 6PM and 6:30PM each day, since that is only the first two episodes of each story. But if you start at the following Midnight you will see every episode of that story listed, starting with Doctor Who and the Daleks this past Sunday morning, the 17th, which ran 8 or 10 episodes long. I should probably also mention that that one, along with a lot of the rest of them, are brand new, never before available Doctor Who stories, or at least not available from the BBC Radio service. They are only online for a single week, so start listening to them now, so you can hear them before they evaporate. They also have some serious original programming coming up that is only available in Radio format for the celebration, including Who Made Who, a three hour documentary on the anniversary itself next Saturday. Be sure to check the Doctor Who 50th web site, and absolutely hit the Guide to Doctor Who Specials across the BBC, which lists out every program on every channel.

Who Made Who
Who Made Who

TECHNE from NHK

I just stumbled into this show, and it is excellent! TECHNE: The Visual Workshop Special on NHK Premium is an experiential creative education TV show. In each episode they focus on one one visual technique and shows a whole lot of short video pieces made using that technique. The reason they have all those pieces is they challenge people to create their own new films using it, and then submit it to them. While the show is in Japanese, it runs English as its SAP or Second Audio Program. A lot of the entries are folks using the TECHNE logo in their pieces.

The first video is from NHK Online, and is a bunch of those short logo videos by a boatload of people strung together. The music video I am including is by Masashi Kawamura, one of the shows creators, and it gives you a feel for the kinds of things the program is doing.

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

New (Old) Doctor Who, download now!!!

It is a serious treat to learn they recently recovered 11 old Doctor Who episodes from a storage closet in Nigeria, 9 of which have not been seen since they originally aired! And now we can watch the first few.

They have already digitally remastered two of them and made them available for download on iTunes, both Patrick Troughton stories. The Web of Fear previously existed only as a rumor except for episode 1, usually mentioned when talking about how Pertwee’s end as The Doctor came at the mandibles of his old spider foes, who we had never seen before. Every so often someone mentions that was also the episode where we were introduced to Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, later to be promoted, and mostly referred to as The Brigadier. Episode 3 is still MIA, but they have the original audio track and 11 stills to use to reconstruct it, so the story will be intact. How nice to have the rest of them back for the first time in forever, and the missing episode partially reconstructed!

The Enemy of the World has Patrick Troughton being both the Doctor and the bad guy, the first time that had happened (Tom Baker was later to reprise that in The Mind Of Evil). This one they only had episode 3 of previously, with this discovery they now have all 6. Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) are in both of these stories, and while we have seen a lot of Jamie, most of Victoria’s stories were lost, so I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about who she was and what she brought to the role of a Companion.

I also have to mention that the link to download them from iTunes didn’t work for me. The link did launch my iTunes app, but then I had to search for each title before I could find the correct link to buy and download it from. A bit of a pain, but I am willing to go through a lot more than that to get Doctor Who episodes I have not already watched dozens of times each!

My apologies for posting the moral equivalent of commercials this time,but the on-screen words pretty much matched up to my attitude on each episode, so I just posted them as is.

Almost Human trailer

The new Fox program Almost Human kicks off on November 4th. It looks very much like a remake of >Total Recall: 2070, which was itself an amalgam of a number of Philip K. Dick’s more paranoid police state stories and the Isaac Asimov series of R. Daneel Olivaw/Elijah Bailey mysteries. Robot Daneel and his human partner Elijah were cops who were very good at solving locked room murders, although the “room” was generally a sealed habitat either in orbit or on a planet.