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Monday, 10 January 2005 - Reported by Shaun Lyon
The Scottish Sunday Herald ran a feature in their magazine on January 9 called "101 Big Events of 2005". The introduction features a large picture of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. The byline begins "Thou shalt watch enraptured as Dr Who returns to the small screen!" The section of the article concerning Doctor Who read as follows: "#74 - DOCTOR WHO. Fifteen years after it was taken off the air, Dr Who is remembered as a defining piece of cult television. The programme was actually much bigger than that, a mainstream popular success sustained over 26 years, which only went into decline when the writers began catering to a niche market of sci-fi freaks and not the majority of the British public. In 2005 Dr Who will be returned to BBC primetime by a well-selected team of specialists - chiefly long-time aficionado and gifted populist TV writer Russell T Davis (Queer As Folk). Davis has hired like-minded talents to script the 13 new episodes, including League of Gentlemen co-founder and former Dr Who fan-fiction writer, Mark Gatiss. 'It's a brilliant reinvention,' Gatiss has promised. 'I'm not just saying that. Very funny, very scary. A great piece of television.' And the more you hear, the greater it sounds. The brilliant character actor Christopher Eccleston will be the new Doctor - that curious, inscrutable, vaguely unsettling alien time-traveller who defends humanity for his own whimsical reasons. Billie Piper will be his sidekick. Simon Pegg of Shaun Of The Dead will appear. There will be episodes set in the forties and the Victorian era. Simon Callow will be Charles Dickens who helps save the world from alien infestation. And there will be Daleks." (Thanks to Francis O'Dowd, John Bollan)




FILTER: - Press