Three set reports from the past week's filming (most of it last Wednesday and Thursday) in Wales, courtesy readers Emma Sandrey, Paul Mount and Timothy Farr; click on the spoiler tag to reveal the text.

Outpost Gallifrey has been informed that, as we first reported some time ago, the press launch for series two has indeed gone ahead tonight with a screening of "New Earth," the first new episode due on 15 April. As noted in the MediaGuardian report (see the "Series Two" section of today's TARDIS Report column), there is a press embargo until tomorrow night on any reports coming out of the event, but we hope to keep you updated on what we find out... so far, in attendance (according to Outpost reader reports) we can confirm have been David Tennant, Billie Piper, Noel Clarke, Camille Coduri, director Graeme Harper, writers Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell, actors Nick Briggs and Annette Badland, Mike Tucker of the effects team, producers Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner, among others. More soon.

In addition to Doctor Who's nomination in the Pioneer Audience Award for Best Programme (reported by OG on 13 March), Series One has been shortlisted for Best Drama Series in 2005's prestigious television awards by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Also nominated in this category are Bodies (BBC Two), Shameless (Channel 4) and Spooks (BBC One); the results will be revealed in a televised ceremony on Sunday 7 May. The full list of nominations can be seen at the BAFTAwebsite, and the nomination has been reported by the BBC Doctor Whowebsite, BBC News and Media Guardian Media Guardian.

According to information from the programming department of the Sci-Fi Channel, Doctor Who did well its first night in broadcast. 1.58 million viewers tuned in to watch "Rose," says the report, with 1.61 million viewers watching "The End of the World" and .78 million viewers each watching "Rose" and "The End of the World" in their 11pm and 12am repeat slots. These numbers are somewhat lower than the standard viewing the channel received for its broadcasts of its original series "Stargate: Atlantis" and "Battlestar Galactica" in the same time slots, but higher than any broadcast of syndicated series that evening (including repeats of "Firefly" and "John Doe"). Final numbers including Nielsen rankings should be available within the next week or two. (Thanks to Joey Reynolds)

Doctor Who has been nominated for three prestigious Hugo Awards this year, according to an announcement made yesterday by the award's administrators and the 64th World Science Fiction Convention, L.A. Con IV. Taking three of seven slots in the "Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form" category are the Doctor Who episodes Dalek written by Robert Shearman,Father's Day written by Paul Cornell, and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, written by Steven Moffat. The three are running against an episode of the new "Battlestar Galactica" series, the Pixar animated short "Jack Jack Attack," and two live events, the stage play "Lucas Back in Anger" and the "Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony," both performed at last year's World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. (The latter was written by writers Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, both of whom have, coincidentally, written for Telos Publishing's Doctor Who novella range). The "Short Form" category was created out of the "Best Dramatic Presentation" category in 2003 to distinguish between films and television episodes, and describes a presentation lasting ninety minutes or less. The Hugo Awards, named for science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback, are the science fiction community's most prestigious awards, given out each year since the early 1950's; they will be presented at the Worldcon convention taking place this year in in Anaheim, California on August 26, with several of the writers expected to be in attendance.

Classic Series Broadcasting Update

Radio Times has now confirmed that repeats of the Jon Pertwee serial The Green Death will form part of BBC Four's season of programmes from and about 1973 (to tie in with the channel's screening of Life on Mars). From Monday 3 April to Wednesday 5 April, the six-part story will be shown in three double bills from 7.10 to 8.00pm, according to this linkand this.

BBC Focus Controversy

As reported by Outpost Gallifrey on 17 March, the April edition of BBC Focus dedicates its cover and a large article to the forthcoming book The Science of Doctor Who, with free copies of Paul Parsons' book going to the magazine's subscribers. Today's Media Guardian, however, reports that the "extensive coverage" has come in for criticism - because the magazine is edited by Paul Parsons himself - but that "the BBC has defended" Focus and its editor. A BBC spokeswoman is quoted as saying that there are "viable commercial and editorial reasons" to support the coverage, that Paul Parsons is a Doctor Who expert so a natural choice to write the magazine article, and that "all profits [from the magazine's sales] are returned to the BBC for the benefit of the licence fee payer." The full article is available at their website; it's also been reported at The Independent.

Other Items

BBC New Media has begun to unveil its plans for the development of the BBC's online presence, and a report today from BBC News highlights the intention to allow seven-day online access to television programmes "like Doctor Who." "Ashley Highfield, director of the BBC's new media division, shared a platform with Microsoft boss Bill Gates at a technology conference in Las Vegas. Mr Highfield said the BBC would work with technology firms like Microsoft. He also showed off the BBC's Integrated Media Player (iMP), designed to allow users seven-day access to TV shows. The iMP, which uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute BBC content across the internet, has been undergoing extensive user trials. 'Audience needs are changing. They want to consume media on their own terms, anytime, anyplace, anyhow,' Mr Highfield told the audience at the Mix06 conference. 'If we want to stay relevant in the digital age, the BBC must respond to this challenge by some seriously good technological innovation, resulting in products like the iMP, through partnerships such as this one with Microsoft.'"

Sci Fi Wire, continuing their daily coverage of Doctor Who with featurettes, reports that "Russell T. Davies, executive producer of the new Doctor Who, told SCI FI Wire that his revival of the long-running British SF drama was bolstered by a team of writers committed to the show's success. 'None of them had written for the program before,' he said in an interview. 'But they had started their own television series and written their own dramas, and they'd also commentated on Doctor Who in the absence when it was off the air. They were very well-known for it, and you needed people who knew all those tiny details that make all the difference in telling a science fiction story. For example, the Doctor can't do magic, and it's very easy for new writers to assume that the Doctor and the Tardis can do anything, because the program is a very free-format. He can travel in time and space and land anywhere, but there are actually very strong limits within that as to what you can do and how an adventure works, so I'm glad we went for people who were well-versed in that sort of storytelling, because I didn't need to have script meetings in which I was telling them how the science fiction of Doctor Who worked. In addition to writing half of the first 13-episode season himself, Davies came up with basic storylines and settings for the remaining scripts, which were divided up according to the writers' individual strengths. 'Mark Gatiss, for example, is one of the writers and stars of [the British sketch comedy show] The League of Gentlemen, which is a marvelously dark and gothic comedy. I knew he had a great love of Victoriana, so when we had an episode set in the Victorian era with Charles Dickens ['The Unquiet Dead,' airing on SCI FI March 24], it was absolutely automatic that we give it to Mark. Steven Moffat is the writer who invented Coupling, and he's brilliant at structure and plot, so he was the only writer outside of myself to be given a two-parter ['The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,' airing later this season], because they're very difficult to construct.' A relatively new writer, Rob Shearman, had previously written an audio play feature the Doctor's most famous nemeses, the Daleks. 'You could not get a cleverer, more intelligent and exciting take on the Doctor's old enemies than that,' Davies said. 'As a matter of honor, I felt we had to offer [the episode 'Dalek,' airing on SCI FI April 14,] to him, and it was a very big chance for Rob, writing a big piece of adventure television for prime time BBC1, and he did it magnificently. So all these decisions just made sense, really, and again, we've done that with the second [season].' Davies has written several scripts for season two, which is the final weeks of production back in the United Kingdom, and he has brought in Gatiss and Moffat as well as a group of new writers for the remaining episodes. 'They're very carefully chosen, because Doctor Who is so unique and it's so different every week. Each episode even has a different style, so you need to balance the writers and work out where their episodes play within the overall season, so we plan it all out very carefully.'"

Another report on Sci Fi Wire says that "Euros Lyn, who directed the Doctor Who episode 'The Unquiet Dead' (airing on Sci Fi Channel March 24 at 9 p.m. ET/PT), told SCI FI Wire that it was an enjoyable challenge to create the period adventure with a guest appearance by Charles Dickens. 'There were lots of things we wanted to do in the episode,' he recalled in an interview, 'including lots of crowd duplication shots in the theater. But knowing we had to get the dramatic scenes done first and get the story covered, we had to leave big-scale shots to the end of the day, which meant we sometimes didn't get them. Sometimes we'd reach the end of our day, and some of those grander shots fell off the list, so that was tough. We also had big snow scenes with paper snow in whipping wind, with horse-drawn carriages and lots of extras, and those were really tricky to achieve as well, so there were lots of big set pieces that were a real challenge.' In 'The Unquiet Dead,' the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper) travel back to Cardiff on Christmas Eve of 1869, where they discover the bodies of the dead are being possessed by the alien Gelth. Their main ally against the creatures: a world-weary playwright named Charles Dickens (Simon Callow). 'It was brilliant to get him,' Lyn said about the casting of Callow. 'He's an actor of such great stature and experience, and the work that he's associated with is work of quality. The secret to getting him interested was the script. He read the script and loved it, but he's also a Dickens freak. He loves everything about Dickens and has written books and performed one-man shows about him, so the material was of great interest to him, and I think that helped. Yes, it's Doctor Who, and yes, it's popular drama, but it also has an erudite and classical dimension to it.' The director is currently working on another history-based episode for season two, which begins airing in Britain in April. 'The Girl in the Fireplace' is set in 18th-century France and guest-stars Sophia Myles (Tristan and Isolde) as the French noblewoman Madame du Pompadour. 'They're very different episodes, but that's one of the brilliant things about Doctor Who: Every episode is a genre piece and utterly different to each other. It's like starting again every time; virtually nothing is current from one episode to another. One day you could be shooting on a set 2 billion years in the future, and the next morning you're stepping onto a set in 1879. So that's wonderful.'"

The Capital Times of Wisconsin says of the new series, "And it's really quite a hoot, faithful to the goofy charm of the original series while doing the serious upgrading and improving that was so desperately needed. Right from the opening credits, which use the spacey original theme music and show the Doctor's TARDIS, which looks like a 1950s emergency phone booth, winging through space and time, you know you're in good hands. For the uninitiated, the Doctor is a renegade space/time traveler who zips through the cosmos battling bad guys, trading quips with aliens and otherwise having a grand old time. ... In the first of last Friday's two episodes, the Doctor met up with Rose while trying to save London from being overrun by sentient department store mannequins. You see, this alien consciousness was able to animate plastic, using the London Eye Ferris wheel as a transmitter, and ... you know, not many 'Doctor Who' plots hold up on paper. Just know that everybody seemed to be having a good time, and this is that rare science-fiction show that not only puts an emphasis on comedy but is also pretty funny. I don't know who Piper is, but she's pretty great as Rose, sometimes gobsmacked at the wonders that the Doctor shows her and other times amusingly unfazed. She and Eccleston develop great chemistry: part father-daughter and part friends, with maybe a little sexual tension thrown in for good measure, quite quickly. The second episode was even better, as the Doctor and Rose whisk forward a few million years to watch the destruction of the Earth with a roster of VIAs (Very Important Aliens), who for some reason decide to commemorate Earth's passing by playing what they think is one of our world's great pieces of art: the '80s pop hit 'Tainted Love' by the group Soft Cell. Fans used to getting their fix of gritty, violent science fiction every night from 'Battlestar Galactica' (which coincidentally is also a remake of a cheesy old sci-fi series) might have a little trouble to adjusting to the whimsy of 'Doctor Who.' But I'll bet even they'll catch the groove of this amiably daffy show, and Sci-Fi will have another remake on its hands that tops the original. What's next, an Emmy-quality reimagining of 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century'?"

(Thanks to Steve Tribe, Paul Engelberg, Peter Weaver, Cliff Chapman, Paul Hayes)

More media coverage from this evening of the US premiere of the series today:

Zap2It, in an article being printed Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, notes that "Once upon a time, there was a BBC science-fiction series called "Doctor Who" whose special effects were of the bubble-gum-and-rubber-band variety and whose basic premise sounded as cheesy as the show looked: A wanderer from the distant future fights intergalactic evildoers while traveling through space and time in a machine that is camouflaged as a London police box. Uh, right. Yet somewhere along the line, 'Doctor Who' became the longest-running sci-fi series in TV history (26 years), spawned several movie spinoffs, a mini-publishing empire, audiotapes, memorabilia, conventions, you name it. Now, after being off the air for 17 years, a new 'Doctor Who' series, first seen on the BBC last year, comes to the Sci Fi Channel on Friday (March 17). And therein lies a tale. When 'Doctor Who' first appeared on the BBC in 1963, it was a show for older children that aired late on Saturday afternoons. But quicker than you can say 'Daleks' -- the race of robots who became the title character's chief nemeses -- the program became a national sensation. The reasons were soon evident. The doctor's ability to go backward and forward in time meant that story lines were highly flexible. Although obviously a kids' program, 'Doctor Who' also had a wink-wink sense of humor that appealed to adults. Then there were the seven actors who played the doctor, who tended toward the warmly avuncular. And because Doctor Who takes on traveling companions from the places he visits who then join him on his adventures, the show could bounce its protagonist off against an ever-changing roster of foils. Plus, 'Doctor Who's' cheesy look actually worked in its favor. 'It was shameless about its shortcomings,' says Russell T. Davies, executive producer and head writer of the new series. 'They did intergalactic wars and invasions of the Earth with $2. Somewhere, by accident, they captured something very true about the world, that the future is very clumsy and nailed together. There is something beautifully normal about the 'Doctor Who' universe.' Los Angeles resident Shaun Lyon, who wrote 'Back to the Vortex,' a book about the new series, and whose Outpost Gallifrey (gallifreyone.com) is the premier 'Doctor Who' website in this country, echoes this 'It's the story line, stupid' sentiment by noting that America's most popular science-fiction program also had similarly cheesy production values. 'If you look back at the original 'Star Trek,' you'll see the same thing -- bad special effects,' Lyon says. 'The appeal is in the storytelling, even if there are no $10 million visual effects budgets. It's the stories, the characters, the actors themselves.' Although the series has been seen on PBS over the years, 'Doctor Who' never really developed a massive fan base in this country. Competition from shows like 'Star Trek' certainly held it back, and its chintzy foreign flavor didn't always translate well. But it did acquire a rabid cult following that now sponsors several 'Who'-oriented conventions (last month's L.A.-based Gallifrey One conclave was the 17th annual). But as with 'Star Trek,' 'Doctor Who's' 1989 demise did not end the appetite for it. So when veteran British TV writer Davies ('Queer as Folk') pitched the BBC a new version of the venerable doctor, the network went for it. 'I knew it could work again,' says Davies, 'that there was a new generation that could enjoy it. But I wasn't certain what the BBC wanted, whether they wanted an ironic version late at night. What they wanted was 7 o'clock prime time on a Saturday, which was how I wanted to bring it back. There hadn't been a sci-fi show on prime time in Britain for over 20 years, since 'V.' ' Davies understood that the fan community would want to have a say in the series' new direction, but he completely ignored the sci-fi message boards, claiming, 'It's the most stupid thing you can do, and people are seduced into believing that the most creative thing you can do is engage with your online fandom.' He also instinctively realized that the 21st century version of the doctor would have to be hipper, smarter and sexier than any previous incarnation. 'I decided to write it like anything else I'd write,' he says. 'I write character, I write funny, I write dramatic, and there's no way science fiction can't be the same thing. You just have to not steep it in nostalgia and not write techno-babble either.' Gussied up with state-of-the-art special effects and the kind of self-referential story lines that both kids and adults appreciate, the new 'Doctor Who' debuted on the BBC in March 2005 and proved an immediate smash hit (the series is in production on its second season). When he was developing the show, says Davies, 'I was thinking of 'Toy Story.' We were specifically aimed at getting a family audience, which people said didn't exist anymore. It was simply following the pattern of the old 'Doctor Who,' which was quietly witty while appealing to kids at the same time. The Pixar art of aiming at adults and kids is really difficult, but that's the path I tried to follow.'"

About.com: "After being a smash on English TV, the latest incarnation of Dr. Who comes to America on SCI FI Channel tonight at 9 PM ET. For those who don't know, Dr. Who (so named because his real name is just too weird for us puny humans to pronounce) is a Time Lord, traveling around time and space with a human companion at his side. Rose works in a shop and is bored out of her mind when along comes a Time Lord with his promises of great adventure (after working with Rose to save the Earth). He delivers. This time around, The Doctor is being played by Christopher Eccleston, who brings a TARDIS-load of energy and humor to the role. Billie Piper brings, thank goodness, a lot more than 'spunk' to Rose. She's fun and funny in her own right."

The North Adams Transcript: "The two-hour American premiere of the revived "Doctor Who" (Friday, March 17, at 9 p.m. on the Science Fiction Channel) may be first honest opportunity this long-running British series has really had to appeal to Americans -- that is, beyond the usual oddball cultists. In its current incarnation, the show is accessible and fun, with just enough darkness to add to the tension and intrigue. ... As helmed by the versatile Russell P. Davies, creator of "Queer As Folk," this 2005 version has the Doctor appearing out of nowhere in a department store basement in order to save Earth from a bunch of killer mannequins. ... The series captures, with a great degree of sincerity, the same rollicking male/female adventure dynamic that films like "Austin Powers" lampoon -- if the Doctor and Rose aren't the John Steed and Emma Peel of our time, then I don't know who are -- and it's this dynamic that makes the series shine. The Doctor, a displaced alien whose only remaining calling in life is to show off his knowledge of the universe, and Rose, a bored teenager desperately looking for a better way to live, not only need each other, but love each other's company. It's an infectious relationship that rarely succumbs to the typical romantic television cliches. This is a tale of equals with different strengths. Davies has transformed the old children's show into a fairly sophisticated drama that manages to hold different levels of interest for all ages. The show is also high on satire and, throughout its 13-episode run, examines political and social issues -- nationalism, isolationism, consumer culture, war, class, sexuality, and justice -- with great humor. There are also echoes of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the corporate-controlled media, as well as natural human complacency in regard to the big picture. 'Doctor Who' is clearly one of the smartest TV shows around, but it doesn't decrease its enjoyment level through heavy-handedness. There are still plenty of aliens and monsters and space ships -- and, in the Doctor, we oddballs still have a hero we can believe in."

The Kansas City Star: "The British cult classic sci-fi series that periodically used a new actor to play the good doctor begins a 13-episode run with Christopher Eccleston as the traveling time lord in some 2005 episodes. The previous Dr. Who, of course, was the guy who played Screech on “Saved by the Bell.” (Well, we might be misremembering that particular piece of trivia, but with Daleks menacing everybody, what’s the difference?)"

SyFy Portal says that "New 'Doctor Who' Is Not So Niche-y" in an article that features interview clips from various Russell T Davies comments over the past year.

North Jersey Media Group notes that "Christopher Eccleston becomes one of the many actors to play the droll time traveler on the small screen in this remake of the long-running sci-fi series. Eccleston's Doctor finds his ideal traveling companion in shopgirl Rose Tyler (pop star-turned-actress Billie Piper)."

Now Playing magazine is reprinting reviews by Arnold Blumberg from last year in conjunction with the broadcast of the show.

Doctor Who is one of the three Daily Picks on the TiVo video recording network.

(Thanks to Paul Engelberg, John Mitchell, Scott Alan Woodard and Lewis Beale)

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has posted classifications for the special features for the UK DVD release of Inferno starring Jon Pertwee, due out later this year. Totalling just under 90 minutes, these are: