Doctor Who Live has launched an official Twitter account. The feed provides news and updates from the team behind the live show, due to tour the UK this Autumn.

Details of David Tennant's new 4 part drama series, Single Father, have been released by the BBC Press Office. In the series, filmed in Glasgow, Tennant plays a photographer facing the seemingly impossible job of bringing up four kids alone after the sudden death of his wife, Rita. The Daily Record has been reporting on how Tennant prepared for the role.

A Doctor Who inspired stage adventure is being performed at the Charles Cryer Studio Theatre in Carshalton in South West London. Hell Blossom, by Ian Wheeler, is part of a trilogy of Doctor Who plays. It runs from 30th September - 2nd October.


The actress Margaret Hickey has died. Hickey played Mary Smith, an inhabitant of Salamander's underground community, in the Second Doctor story The Enemy Of The World.

The Doctor Who Audiobook Dead Air has been named the 2010 Audiobook of the Year.

Written by James Goss and read by David Tennant the story was the seventh and final exclusive-to-audio adventure to feature the Tenth Doctor.

The award was selected by voters visiting the Audiobook store. It beat other books nominated including Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years, Othello, Animal Farm, Shakespeare in Love and War Horse.

James Goss told the Doctor Who News Page he wished to thank all the fans who voted for the story.


Michael Stevens, Commissioning Editor for AudioGO said
The winner was announced at 5pm on Saturday 18th September, at Chiswick Book Festival.

Tenth Doctor David Tennant has been spotted on a banner taken from the remake of the 1985 horror film Fright Night. In the film due to be released next year, Tennant plays Peter Vincent, a master of illusion. The film also stars Colin Farrell, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Toni Collette and Imogen Poots.

Steven Moffat and his wife Sue Vertue will be giving a BAFTA master class exploring how the modern day version of Sherlock Holmes arrived on our small screens this summer. The event on Thursday 9th September is part of the Kaleidoscopic Festival taking place at Glyndŵr University and Wrexham Library in North Wales. Limited tickets are available from BAFTA.

Sixth Doctor Colin Baker has been talking to the Yorkshire Post prior to his arrival at the Grand Opera House York later this month to play Inspector Morse in a new murder mystery, House of Ghosts. He told the paper "I loved my time on Doctor Who, loved it, for three years it was among the happiest times of my career".

Karen Gillan will join Steven Moffat at the Edinburgh International Television Festival for a question and answer session about Doctor Who. The Masterclass is being held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on Sunday morning. Moffat will also appear on the panel for special Question Time on Saturday night alongside Diane Abbott MP and Mariella Frostrup.

Update: It was announced Saturday that the Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss production of Sherlock has been recommissioned by BBC One controller Jay Hunt. There will be three new 90-minute episodes in Autumn 2011. Talking of the Sherlock recommission, Gatiss and Moffat, said: "We've been overwhelmed by the warmth of response to our new Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and can't wait to take them on three new adventures next year. There'll be baffling new puzzles, old friends and new enemies – whether on two, or four legs. And we might well be seeing the cold master of logic and reason unexpectedly falling. But in love? Or over a precipice? Who can tell?"

David Tennant has been listed as one of the top ten Hamlets by The Guardian newspaper. Tennant, who played the role in Stratford and London in 2008, was described as sardonic and volatile, a Hamlet so graceful that at times he seemed almost to dance across the stage.

BBC4 is to dramatise Douglas Adams's 1987 novel about anti-hero Dirk Gently. Adams was Script Editor for Season 17 of Doctor Who and wrote The Pirate Planet and co-wrote City of Death. He was writing a third Dirk Gently book, The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death in 2001. The books have formed the basis of a play and a BBC Radio 4 series but have never before been filmed for Television.

Andrew Smith has been talking to the Rutherglen Reformer about his return to Doctor Who and his new script for Big Finish Productions. Smith wrote the 1980 Fourth Doctor story Full Circle. The new story is called The Invasion of E-Space and once more features Lalla Ward as Romana. Smith told the Reformer: "I wrote the first draft, sent it off, and I didn’t hear back for a little while. I was getting really paranoid as I had no idea how it had gone down, but I was quite relieved when they got back to me and said they loved it."

Doctor Who has dominated the 2010 Portal Awards, held by Airlock Alpha part of the BlipNetwork.

Doctor Who was named Best Series/Television with 65% of the vote beating Torchwood into second place.

David Tennant was overwhelmingly voted Best Actor/television with a massive 68% of the vote, beating John Barrowman who was in second place with 10% of the vote.

Bernard Cribbins won Best Supporting Actor/Television for his portrayal of Wilfred Mott in The End of Time with 59 percent of the vote. The End of Time was itself voted Best Episode/Television.

Alex Kingston was voted Best Special Guest for her portrayal of River Song in Time of Angels.

The award for Best Actress/Television went to Eve Myles for Torchwood - Children of Earth, beating Karen Gillan into second place

The Gene Roddenberry Award for lifetime achievement was given to Russell T Davies for his work on Doctor Who and Torchwood.

This was the 11th year for the Portal Awards, which started in 1999 as the SyFy Genre Awards. An international nominating committee generated a list of five nominees for each category and readers then had 30 days to vote.

Doctor Who has won seven awards over the years, and is third to Star Trek: Voyager (18 wins) and Farscape (eight wins).

Full list of winners.

David Tennant's acclaimed performance as Hamlet Prince of Denmark comes to PBS Wednesday evening as part of the Great Performances series. Immediately following the broadcast, the film will be available online in its entirety on the Great Performances Web site.


Hamlet aired in the UK on Boxing Day 2009 to an audience of more than 900,000. In an article in The Observer, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote: “Like many people, I had my love of Shakespeare reawakened by David Tennant’s TV portrayal of Hamlet over Christmas.”

Tennant made his debut in October as the host of MASTERPIECE CONTEMPORARY on PBS. His many other credits include his recent portrayal of Barty Crouch Junior in the big-screen blockbuster Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Tennant has also received numerous awards from the theatre community for his lead roles in several Shakespearean productions and other classic plays.

Veteran stage and screen actor Sir Patrick Stewart reprises his 2009 Laurence Olivier Award-winning role of Claudius in the screen version, which is directed by Gregory Doran, who also returns to reprise his stage direction of the production. Co-produced by Illuminations Television and the RSC for the BBC, in association with Thirteen for WNET.ORG and NHK, the adaptation recreates the tone and atmosphere of the stage production in a film-style interpretation shot in HD on location at St. Joseph’s College in Mill Hill, London. The production is produced for television by John Wyver and Sebastian Gran.

Check local listings here.

The Telegraph is to give away a series of Doctor Who Audio adventures starting next weekend with an early release of Matt Smith reading a brand new adventure for the Eleventh Doctor, The Runaway Train. It is understood this will be in the paper on Saturday 24th April.

The news comes from Doctor Who author Peter Anghelides, whose own story, Pest Control, featuring the Tenth Doctor and read by David Tennant, will be the second story released on the 25th and 26th April.

The promotion is part of a deal with BBC Audiobooks. Commissioning Editor Michael Stevens says
Other stories included are: Slipback, the Colin Baker story originally heard on BBC Radio 4 in 1985; Genesis of the Daleks and Exploration Earth featuring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen; and finally Mission to the Unknown, the soundtrack of the 1965 story, which was the one Doctor Who television episode not to feature the Doctor or any of his companions.

This article asks: “Is this the Doctor Who general election? And are Labour hoping that some of the popularity of the show will rub off on them?” The forthcoming UK general election and Doctor Who do seem to be becoming evermore interlinked.

The new issue of Radio Times, harking back to its 30 April to 6 May issue from 2005 (opposite), shows the Daleks in the colours (blue, red and yellow) of the three main UK political parties, David Tennant, earlier this year, declared his support for the UK’s Labour Party and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the party’s current leader. Earlier this week, the Labour Party turned to the Doctor and a son of the Doctor in it’s campaign to win re-election in the contest.

The first party-election broadcast of the campaign premièred on YouTube before airing on UK television channels. In the Labour Party broadcast, The Road Ahead, the third Doctor Jon Pertwee’s son, Sean Pertwee, appeared, while the tenth Doctor David Tennant provided the voice-over.

See our earlier story about this week’s Radio Times and the interview with Brown, who reveals that Tennant is his favourite Doctor, and that he saw him recently in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In recent months, both Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat have separately warned against David Cameron’s Conservatives winning the election, fearing the future of the BBC would be under threat. Citing Moffat’s comments, the Daily Mirror claimed that Saturday’s episode, The Beast Below, featured a message blasting the Tories:

In February, the Sunday Times claimed that writers wove anti-Tory propaganda into Doctor Who scripts in the 1980s.

As for the Liberal Democrats, their candidate for Blaenau Gwent, Wales, is one Matt Smith!

David Tennant has topped Daniel Craig to become the Best Dressed Man of 2009, according to Hello Magazine. In the online poll, the former Doctor pulled in over a third of the votes, with 35.4% of the 10,254 voters, a clear 12% majority over the current James Bond star's 23.3%.

Tennant recently lost out in Hello's Most Attractive Men poll, coming in at fifth place.

Official figures released by BARB reveal Doctor Who The End of Time, Part Two was watched by 12.27 million people and was once more the most watched programme of the week on British television.

The figures were finally released Monday, after a delay caused by the implementation of a new data collection system. These final ratings are more accurate than the initial overnight figures, and include those who recorded the programme to watch within seven days of transmission. The figures for BBC One give The End of Time a rating of 11.79 million viewers, second for the week behind the episode of EastEnders which directly followed the regeneration. However, unlike EastEnders, Doctor Who was simulcast on the BBC HD channel, where it was watched by an extra 480,000. If these figures are added to the BBC One number it gives Doctor Who a total of 12.27 million, enough to push the programme to the number one spot for only the third time in its 47 year history.

It makes The End of Time, Part Two the 3rd highest rated episode since the series returned in 2005. Overall the episode has the 25th highest rating in the series history.

The edition of Doctor Who Confidential, looking back at the Tenth Doctor, got a final rating of 1.21 million viewers on BBC Three with an additional 150,000 watching on BBC HD. It was the second highest rated programme on Multi Channel for the day.

As well as being the end of David Tennant as the Doctor, The End of Time also brings to an end the stewardship of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner. Speaking after the launch of the series in 2005, the then BBC head of drama commissioning, Jane Tranter, spoke about her hopes for the series and the audience it would attract. "I told myself I'd be completely and utterly thrilled if it got 6.5 million" she said, "but there was a little voice inside whispering '4.5 million".

The fact that every single episode since the relaunch has exceeded her highest aspirations show how tremedously successful the series has become. Not only bringing large numbers of viewers to BBC One, but also drawing people towards new services such as BBC Three, the BBC iPlayer and , in the last year, BBC HD. If the number of viewers who watched the End of Time on all platforms is calculated, the total stands at around 16 million, roughly the same as the highest rating ever achieved by the classic series, 16.1 million for City of Death in 1979.

Over the last five years 60 episodes have been transmitted making a grand total of 756 since the series began in 1963. Of those sixty 10 have made the top five programmes of the week, something only one episode from the classic series ever achieved. Twenty Six episodes, over half of those made by the team, made the top ten, with only two episodes falling outside the top twenty.

The top rating story of the era was Voyage of the Damned, the Christmas story from 2007, with 13.3 million viewers, the lowest rating story was The Satan Pit with 6.1 million.

Full ratings data and audience analysis for all sixty episodes can be found in the ratings threads in the Transmission section of Gallifrey Base