And at 26, he is the youngest actor ever to play the Doctor. Yesterday the BBC named Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor Who. Andrew Pettie of the Telegraph has some ideas about why this is a good move for the Beeb, and while the reactions at places like SciFi Heaven range the gamut, I find this promising. The actor has played in the Phillip Pullman screen renderings of The Shadow in The North and The Ruby in the Smoke, as well as showing up in an episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl; all with Who veteran Billie Piper. He has also worked with Moffatt on a few previous projects, so the new season should be fairly interesting.
The two deep voices of ’70s and ’80s SciFi in the UK, Tom Baker and Brian Blessed, are together at last. OK, it’s only for a cell-phone add series, not new audio Doctor Who adventures, but it is still fun. I even got a chuckle out of the fact they called him Tom Jones on the download page. Thanks to io9 for pointing that story out. There is also a new tune at SciFi Songs: Grasping for the Wind (The Linkup Meme Song), which names some of the best SF blogs online. If you haven’t been there before, be sure to check out the previous 13 songs as well.
In England, a SciFi fan sparked a bomb scare when police responded to a report of a man with a crossbow. When they got to the fans house they called in the bomb squad, afraid that the things they didn’t recognize might go boom. There is a new Watchmen trailer on Myspace. It gives a bit of the story for those who haven’t read the book, and looks really good. But that may be all the Watchmen we get for a while, as Fox fights to delay its release, once again proving Fox hates science fiction.
Doug Adams may be gone from our lives, but his legacy lives on, in many places online and off. One of the best is at HitchHikers, the new community repository. Then there are links like HitchHikers Guide, to let you play games and do a lot more. My favorite new BBC site is BBC 7, which includes the BBC’s SciFi Showcase, brand new and worth your attention! The Doctor Who entry alone is worth the price of admission… which is free, BTW. Ignore the fact that at the time of this page’s posting, the new Who series had not yet been signed off on! It is an old post, after all…LOL…
This was my first Blog entry, back in 2003. I started the site in 1993 as a way to get my bookmarks from any computer with internet access (not all that many, that year), and switched to a blog format a decade later. As Holley says, I may be slow, but I get there in the end…
The funniest SciFi show of all time, Red Dwarf is a creation of the BBC.
The premise was simple. Our hero made a mistake (involving a kitten he tried to smuggle on board), and he was put in stasis until the ship got back to earth, where he could be cashiered out. But before that happened, another crew mate forgot to tighten down a shielding plate, and the entire crew died of radiation poisoning; the ship drifted into deep space.
As our story opens, it is 3 million years later; Dave Lister is awoken from stasis, and finds out he is the last living human being in the universe. His crew mates on the ship are a demented computer named Holly (started out with an IQ of 12,000; these days, an IQ of 12 is about the best it can manage); A Hologram of the poor sap who caused everyone to die, named Arnie Rimmer; and the descendant of the cat he smuggled on board that got him in trouble, named Kat.
From that simple start, a wonderful reality grows. An American version was tried, with Frasier’s Daphne as Holly and Treks Jadzia Dax as Kat, but no one bought it and tried to release it. Too bad, it would have been fun to watch grow. But the BBC version kept on evolving, and won a world-wide audience.
As I enter this info, 8 seasons of TV are behind us, and their first feature-length movie is in production. Several books have also been released, which expand and enhance the story.
If you don’t already know and love this show, you should check out the web site, and look to your local BBC/PBS station to catch it. My personal favorite is Season VIII, but all of them are good. Here are a few links to get you started…