News Update

The cover of this week's DWM has been released. The main content relates to The Sarah Jane Adventures. The 'Fact of Fiction' covers the underwhelming Curse of the Black Spot. Surely a Sarah Jane Smith story would have made more sense, to give the issue more of a theme? It will be in the shops on Thursday.

One of the DWM interviewees, who worked on SJA is Phil Ford. In Radio Times, he has spoken about that other spin-off series, Torchwood. In this he states that it is highly unlikely that the series would return in the form where it left off (mainly due to the controversy surrounding John Barrowman, presumably) but he doesn't see why a prequel series couldn't be made. We know that RTD wants to create a "Universe", but whether or not this will include pre-existing spin-offs is unknown.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I was very much taken with a free e-book - Blackpool Remembered - concerning the Doctor Who Exhibition at Blackpool, which ran from 1974 - 1985. Having visited it myself between 1976 - 1978, it held a lot of nostalgia value for me. The book ran to 410 pages, and contained a lot of photographs of the exhibits, as well as a number of personal reminiscences of attendees (including a DWAS day-trip, Steve Cambden - K9 wrangler - and Edward Russell, brand manager of Doctor Who for many years). 

A follow-up e-book arrived the following year - Blackpool Revisited - which carried the story on to the later exhibitions, along with a sideways step to look at the Dapol exhibition in Wales, plus sundry other items. This ran to 639 pages.

I never visited the Longleat exhibition, which ran longer than the Blackpool one, but I will shortly be able to see images and read all about it in the third volume of this e-book series. It is due to be published on Saturday 1st April.

You can find the original Blackpool book at https://blackpoolremembered7485.wordpress.com, and from there you will see links to the other publications.

A second e-publication is due to be released on-line later this very day (27th Feb) according to its originator. This promises to be a series of e-books looking at the coverage of Doctor Who by Radio Times magazine. The website to go to is doctorwhointheradiotimes.com. 

As of the time of writing (1pm), it is still showing only a Password prompt box, but I will keep checking back. I saw some sample images on Facebook and they looked great.

UPDATE: unfortunately not available as a download, but well worth reading online. 

I was extremely disappointed that Radio Times did not produce any decent special edition for the 50th Anniversary. Hopefully they will for the 60th, as they always had a much better relationship with RTD than they did with Moffat. 

In the absence of anything official, however, it is nice to see what fans are producing - especially when they have such high production values.

Finally - I've found another nice colour picture of an original Police Box. This was in suburban London (the bus is destined for Moorgate).