Following on from the popular global viewing of The Day Of The Doctor last Saturday, a followup event featuring the first episode of 21st Century Doctor Who, Rose is planned for this coming Thursday, 26th March at 7:00pm GMT - the exact time of its fifteenth anniversary! As with #SaveTheDay, viewers around the world are invited to watch the episode and comment along.

With Steven Moffat getting involved last weekend, original writer and showrunner Russell T Davies has announced he too will be rejoining Twitter to join in the fun on Thursday, revealing something special to mark the occasion via his Instagram account:

A new, specially written scene is to be released online tonight at 6:30pm GMT to introduce the #SaveTheDay initiative for an international viewing of the 50th Anniversary story The Day Of The Doctor.

The scene has been written by the story's writer and former showrunner Steven Moffat; organiser Emily Cook told Radio Times:
Details of the scene, and who will present it, are being kept under wraps, but the writer has briefly returned to Twitter to celebrate the event, saying:

The worldwide "watchathon" takes place at 7:00pm GMT/3:00pm ET/6:00am AEDT/8:00am NZDT.
Tweet #SaveTheDay

The latest audio release from Big Finish, the Seventh Doctor crossover story Doctor Who: Dark Universe is released today.

Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and Mark Bonnar star in a brand new story that picks up the threads of the relationship between the Doctor and an older Ace, in her now grown-up role as CEO of A Charitable Earth,.

Doctor Who: Dark Universe is available now as a collector’s edition CD or on download at the Big Finish website from £12.99. Mark Bonnar returns as the Eleven, a Time Lord psychopath in his eleventh incarnation who retains the personalities of all his previous incarnations, in his first chronological meeting with the Seventh Doctor.

Producer, David Richardson, said Actor Mark Bonnar said Doctor Who: Dark Universe is available now as a collector’s edition CD or on download at the Big Finish website from £12.99.

Pupils at a special needs school in Wales have produced their own episode of Doctor Who, narrated by Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy.

Ysgol Pen-y-Bryn is a school based in Swansea, for pupils aged 3-19 years, with a wide range of special needs.

Throughout the past year, their film enterprise group have been filming around Wales and making their own props for a special Doctor Who project.

Today sees the launch of the completed episode (just under 40 minutes in length) on the school's YouTube channel for free.

Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End, the first novel from Sophie Aldred who played the Seventh Doctor’s companion Ace, is to be published 6th February 2020.

Once, a girl called Ace travelled the universe with the Doctor – until, in the wake of a terrible tragedy they parted company. Decades later, she is known as Dorothy McShane, the reclusive millionaire philanthropist who heads global organisation A Charitable Earth.

Dorothy is haunted by terrible nightmares, vivid dreams that begin just as scores of young runaways are vanishing from the dark alleyways of London. Could the disappearances be linked to sightings of sinister creatures lurking in the city shadows? Why has an alien satellite entered a secret orbit around the Moon?

Investigating the satellite with Ryan, Graham and Yaz, the Doctor is thrown together with Ace once more. Together they must unravel a malevolent plot that will cost thousands of lives. But can the Doctor atone for her past incarnation’s behaviour – and how much must Ace sacrifice to win victory not only for herself, but for the Earth? Past or future, which path do you choose?

Sophie Aldred said Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End by Sophie Aldred is published by BBC Books on 6th February 2020. RRP £16.99.

It will also be available as an audiobook in CD and digital download narrated by Sophie Aldred.

Those attending this year's New York Comic Con in October will be able to purchase two exclusive vinyl figures from Titan, based on the Doctor from her first series appeaances in Rosa and Kerblam!.


The limited edition items will be available from Titan Booth #2142.

HTC has teamed up with BBC Studios to offer the chance to embark on a virtual reality adventure through time and space, with Doctor Who.

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th September, visitors at Hackney’s Protein Studios in London, will have the chance to step into the TARDIS and take up the role of the Doctor’s assistant in Doctor Who: The Edge of Time.

HTC is celebrating the launch of the VIVE Cosmos, its latest premium PC-based Virtual Reality (VR) system. Attendees will be amongst the first to try ‘Doctor Who: The Edge of Time’, produced by Maze Theory for BBC Studios. After stepping into the TARDIS, players will interact with the Doctor themselves and will try to pilot the spacecraft – which is temperamental at the best of times – before embarking on an epic adventure to solve the mystery behind the ‘Reality Virus’.

During the event, visitors will use HTC’s newly released VR headset, the VIVE Cosmos, which is built to be the highest performance and most versatile headset on the market.

Fans can sign up for a free 15-minute slot here or simply turn up on the day to secure a walk-in slot (subject to availability).

Please note, players must be aged 12+.

BBC Studios have announced that Season 26 will be the next instalment in the DOCTOR WHO: THE COLLECTION Blu-ray range

Released on Monday 23rd December is the acclaimed final season from the series’ original run, starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred:

Doctor Who – The Collection: Season 26

• BATTLEFIELD
• GHOST LIGHT
• THE CURSE OF FENRIC
• SURVIVAL

In 1989, Doctor Who was on a creative high, with the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace revitalising the programme for a new generation. Season 26 featured four epic adventures traversing a future Britain invaded by inter-dimensional knights, a strange Victorian house haunted by ghosts from Ace’s past, an alien world populated by Cheetah People and a 1940s army camp under siege from monstrous vampires.

With guest stars including Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart), Anthony Ainley (The Master), Jean Marsh, Nicholas Parsons, Anne Reid, Ian Hogg, Sylvia Syms and comedy duo Hale & Pace, this fondly-remembered set of stories saw the end of an era for Doctor Who, and set the stage for its hugely successful revival.

With all episodes newly remastered from the best available sources, this Blu-ray box set also contains extensive and exclusive special features including:

Rare Restored Extended Cuts

• The Curse of Fenric VHS Extended Version
• The Curse of Fenric DVD Special Edition
• Battlefield VHS Extended Version
• Battlefield DVD Special Edition

5.1 surround sound & isolated scores

• On all 14 broadcast episodes, plus 5.1 sound on all extended versions of The Curse Of Fenric and Battlefield.

Behind the Sofa

• New episodes with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, plus companions Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Anneke Wills and Jodie-Whittaker-era writers Pete McTighe & Joy Wilkinson.

Showman - the Life of John Nathan-Turner

• A feature-length look at the life and career of Doctor Who’s longest-serving producer, who fought to keep the programme on-air during the 1980s. Contributors include Peter Davison and Colin Baker.

Making ‘The Curse of Fenric’

• A brand new documentary featuring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Tomek Bork, Nicholas Parsons, Cory Pulman, Marek Anton, Ian Briggs, Andrew Cartmel, Mark Ayres and Ian Collins featuring unseen behind-the-scenes footage and photographs.

In Conversation

• Matthew Sweet chats to companion Sophie Aldred.

The Writers’ Room

• Ben Aaronovitch, Marc Platt, Ian Briggs, Rona Munro and Andrew Cartmel discuss their work on Season 26.

Becoming The Destroyer

• Actor Marek Anton and prosthetics designer Stephen Mansfield recall the creation of one of Doctor Who’s best ever monsters.

The seven-disc box set also includes hours of special features previously released on DVD.

Pre-order on Amazon.

On Saturday 23rd November, the BFI Southbank will be screening Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric (from the Special Edition Blu-ray) and holding a Q&A with actor Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel. Tickets are available from the BFI on the following dates:

• Monday 16th September – BFI Patrons and Champions
• Tuesday 17th September – BFI Members
• Tuesday 24th September – public booking

The latest in the series looking in detail at the making of Doctor Who, Black Archive, has been published by Obverse Books

Edition #34 looks at the seventh Doctor story Battlefield and come from range editor, Philip Purser-Hallard.

Often seen as the black sheep of the final season of 20th century Doctor Who, Battlefield also happens to be one of Purser-Hallard's favourite Who stories, but he's not allowed that fondness to blind him the serial's faults - though fair to say he doesn't pan it either.

Battlefield (1989) sees a clash of mythologies, as the progressive, anti-racist, sporadically pacifist Doctor Who of the late 1980s takes on Britain’s authoritarian, chivalric national myth of King Arthur. With a script by Ben Aaronovitch, now a bestselling urban fantasy novelist but then only the writer of the previous year’s acclaimed Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), it forms with its predecessor a ‘philosophical pair’, replacing its 1960s setting with an imagined 1990s and showing a Doctor dealing with the repercussions of his future actions, rather than his past. Even as a script Battlefield falls short of complete success, yet it remains an emotionally literate, politically engaged and thematically complex piece. It finds areas of overlap between Andrew Cartmel’s radical conception of Doctor Who and Arthurian myth in the legend of a past golden age, represented by the return of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, and in the identification of the Doctor – always presented by the series as a wizard, a prophet and a mentor – with Merlin. It interrogates the patriarchal attitudes of both the Arthurian myths and 1970s Doctor Who from a contemporary perspective, and questions the attitudes to war found in both.

It also does an exemplary job of worldbuilding, sketching in a convincing near future based on a handful of lines, and presents a complex, questionable, even sympathetic villain motivated by a value system alien to our own. Finally, it raises questions of predestination: through the other characters’ foreknowledge of the Doctor’s future; through the fate apparently decreed for Ancelyn and Bambera; and, perhaps, through the Brigadier’s survival of a story whose structure seems to demand that he should die.

Philip Purser-Hallard is the founding editor of the Black Archive range, the author of The Black Archive #4: Death in Heaven and co-author of The Black Archive #13: Human Nature / The Family of Blood.

He has published five novels, including a trilogy of near-future Arthurian urbanfantasy political thrillers, The Pendragon Protocol, The Locksley Exploit and Trojans, and a Sherlock Holmes novel, The Vanishing Man.

Link to Website