Their Royal Highnesses, The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall visited Roath Lock Studios as part of their annual summer tour of Wales yesterday, coming face-to-face with the Doctor and a number of his foes!

In the first Royal visit to the BBC Cymru Wales Roath Lock studios since they officially opened in March 2012, the visitors were taken on a tour around the studios and the Doctor Who production office. After being given a rundown on how to fly the TARDIS, The Prince and The Duchess were then introduced to the Daleks, with the Prince demonstrating his own take on their famous cry. The were also treated to displays from the show’s costume designer, locations manager, graphics artist, set decorator and production designer, plus production secrets revealed with a green screen display, demonstrated by SFX.

The visit concluded with Their Royal Highnesses meeting some of the Skillset apprentices who are currently training at Roath Lock.


Commenting on the visit, outgoing Doctor, Matt Smith, said:
Jenna Coleman - who met the Queen at Broadcasting House last month - added:
Executive producer and lead writer Steven Moffat said:

Rhodri Talfan Davies, Director BBC Cymru Wales:
Danny Cohen, Director BBC Television:


Videos from the visit can be found on the BBC News site, which include Matt and Jenna's thoughts on meeting the Prince (and his chances of being the next Doctor!), and of the TARDIS set visit (which includes a brief discussion between Jenna and Prince about the 50th Anniversary Special). Photo galleries are also available from both BBC News and the BBC's Doctor Who website.

Remembrance of the Daleks is to be shown on BBC America this month as part of the channel's celebratory strand Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited.

Airing on Saturday 27th July in omnibus form, it will be preceded by a documentary at 7pm ET/PT entitled Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited – The Seventh Doctor, in which Sylvester McCoy, his companion actors Sophie Aldred and Bonnie Langford, plus current lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat will be among the people examining the darker side of this particular incarnation of the Doctor. They will also be viewing some of his surreal adventures and discussing The Rani.

Remembrance of the Daleks, written by Ben Aaronovitch and directed by Andrew Morgan, was originally shown over four episodes in October 1988 and saw the Doctor return to Coal Hill School as well as the Totter's Lane junkyard first seen in the show's premier episode. In addition, it continued the story arc of the Dalek civil war, and marked the last appearance of the Daleks and Davros in the original run of the show.
BBC America is celebrating the programme's 50th anniversary by showing a story per Doctor per month.

Award-winning Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman has written the seventh e-book short story in the range celebrating Doctor Who's 50th anniversary.

The Ripple Effect, to be released on Tuesday 23rd July by Puffin Books in partnership with BBC Worldwide, sees the Seventh Doctor and Ace encountering Daleks - but these are Daleks with a difference.
Blackman said: An extract is available via The Guardian's website, and a promotional video featuring Blackman will be available on the BBC's Doctor Who YouTube channel from Thursday 11th July.

Blackman, who will be the Children's Laureate until 2015, has written more than 50 books, including the critically-acclaimed Noughts & Crosses series of novels for young adults. She is acknowledged as one of today's most imaginative and convincing writers for young readers and has been awarded numerous prizes for her work, including the Red House Children's Book Award and the Fantastic Fiction Award. She has also been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. In 2005, Blackman was presented with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her contribution to children's books, and in 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children's literature.

Details about the e-short for the Eighth Doctor will be revealed on Tuesday 6th August.

Doctor goes up against Doctor in the final shortlist for the 2013 TV Choice awards with both Matt Smith and David Tennant being nominated as Best Actor, the latter for his role in Broadchurch. The two actors face competition from Brendan Coyle for Downton Abbey and Jeremy Piven for Mr Selfridge.

Jenna Coleman is nominated for Best Actress for her performance as Clara and faces competition from Olivia Colman for Broadchurch, Miranda Hart for Call The Midwife and former Big Finish actress Sheridan Smith for Mrs Biggs.

Doctor Who is nominated for Best Drama Series, a title it has taken for the past three years. It faces opposition from Call The Midwife on BBC One, Downton Abbey on ITV and Waterloo Road on BBC One.

Voting is open online until Friday 12th July with the winners being named at a ceremony hosted by Ben Miller at The Dorchester in London on Monday 9th September.

.As previously reported, Splendid Chaps is a year-long performance/podcast project to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who hosted by comedian Ben McKenzie (Dungeon Crawl, Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour) and writer John Richards (ABC1 sitcom Outland, Boxcutters podcast)

Described by its creators as part intellectual panel discussion, part nerdy Tonight Show, Splendid Chaps is a combination of analysis, enthusiasm and irreverence. The first episode went to number 1 on the iTunes TV & Film Podcast chart in Australia, and to number 4 in the UK.  The podcasts to previous episodes are now available at www.splendidchaps.com or at  iTunes.

Tickets are now on sale for their 7th Doctor show! This show discusses the seventh and final Doctor of what we now call the classic era, played by variety performer and actor Sylvester McCoy. Famous for escapology, spoon playing and putting ferrets down his trousers, McCoy’s casting raised a few eyebrows, but his performance changed many doubters’ minds – especially when combined with Sophie Aldred as Ace, and under the new direction provided by the incoming production team under Andrew Cartmel. Of course, no-one knew that the program’s days were numbered…

Splendid Chaps are also looking at the theme of “religion” in Doctor Who. The Doctor has been all across space and time and encountered zealots, fanatics, kindly priests, and beings who believed themselves to be gods or demons or the devil himself. But what does the program say about religion, faith and belief? Is the Doctor Who universe truly a rational one in which the supernatural is really just advanced science, or is The Beast really the Devil? Is faith worthwhile, and if so, what does the Doctor believe?

Hosts Ben McKenzie, John Richards and Petra Elliott are joined by guests including writer and game designer Paul Callaghan, comedian and television writer Dave Bloustien, and for their discussion of religion, the Reverend Dr Avril Hannah-Jones, Uniting Church minister and founder of the Church of the Latter Day Geek (as seen on Adam Hills In Gordon Street Tonight)! Plus a very special musical performance from the one and only Lee Zachariah, and all the usual prizes and surprises!

Space: The Public Bar, 238 Victoria Street, North Melbourne (opposite Victoria Markets)
Time: Sunday 14 July; recording starts 5 PM
Accessibility: This venue is wheelchair accessible.
Tickets: $15 (plus booking fee where applicable)
Bookings: via trybooking.com or at the door (subject to availability)
Podcast: not yet available; released 23 July 2013.

Sunday 30th June sees the broadcast of the 1985 Colin Baker story, Revelation of the Daleks on Australian and New Zealand television. The story is presented as part of the 50th Anniversary season of Doctor Who on the UKTV channel.

The story screens at 4:15pm in Australia and 4:10pm in New Zealand.

The UKTV billing describes Revelation of the Daleks as follows:

The Doctor arrives in a facility where the wealthy can have their newly-deceased bodies cryogenically frozen until medical science can cure what killed them.

Revelation of the Daleks was first broadcast in Australia in 1986. New Zealand first saw it in 1988, as part of a week of special screenings to mark the series' 25th anniversary. The story was originally screened in Britain as two 45-minute episodes, but was first broadcast in Australia and New Zealand in four parts. The UKTV transmission will feature the two-episode version.

UKTV is showing stories throughout the year in the lead-up to the anniversary in November. In July the focus is on Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor, with the following stories scheduled: Paradise Towers (7 July); Remembrance of the Daleks (14 July); The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (21 July); The Curse of Fenric and Survival (both 28 July).

Up-and-coming broadcasts from both 20th and 21st Century series of Doctor Who can be found via UKTV's Doctor Who sections for Australia and New Zealand.

The BBC has announced the winners in the Doctor Who: Create a Soundtrack competition, launched in April.

The challenge was for secondary school students to create their own musical soundtrack for a scene from Doctor Who, to be performed at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

The winners – two in each of the categories, junior (11-14) and senior (14-16), attended a workshop with Ben Foster, the orchestrator and conductor of Murray Gold’s music for Doctor Who, and Samuel Thompson the orchestration coordinator for the television series. The workshop was held earlier this month at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios, former home of the BBC Radiophone Workshop, and the place where much of the soundtrack to the classic series was created, including the iconic theme music.

Winners of the Junior Category (11-14) were William and Jordan of the Biddulph High School in Stoke-on-Trent, who commented Winners of the Junior Category (14-16) were Gabe and Matthew of Cirencester Deer Park School in Gloucestershire, who said The jury which included Executive Editor Music Television BBC Cymru Wales Paul Bullock, composer Anna Meredith and conductor Ben Foster were extremely impressed by the quality of music submitted. Paul Bullock commented:The 2013 Proms season starts on Friday 12 July with Prom 2 and Prom 3 featuring some of the music from Doctor Who.

Big Finish are to produce a couple of Doctor Who stories in association with former producer Philip Hinchcliffe, the man who led Doctor Who through one of its most successful and best remembered eras.

Starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Louise Jameson as Leela, the two audio plays will evoke the spirit and feel of the period when Hinchcliffe was in charge of production. Philip Hinchcliffe produced Doctor Who from 1975’s The Ark in Space through to the 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. He was responsible for a series of stories which regularly top fan polls of favourite titles and which include some of the episodes with the highest ratings in Doctor Who’s history.

The idea for revisiting the era came after Hinchcliffe visited the Big Finish studios to watch the recording of series three of The Fourth Doctor Adventures. Big Finish Producer David Richardson said
The first story in the set will be an epic six-parter set in Victorian London, adapted by Marc Platt, who wrote the TV story Ghost Light, which will be paired with a four-parter.

Hinchcliffe said he wanted to create stories that felt as if they could belong to his second or third season
Doctor Who: Philip Hinchcliffe Presents will be released in August 2014, and is available for pre-order.

BBC Radio 2 has told Doctor Who News it is to produce a documentary entitled Who is the Doctor? to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

The 90-minute programme will be broadcast on Thursday 21st November, just two days before the celebration date. More details when we have them.

Also on Radio 2, former companion to the Sixth Doctor, Bonnie Langford, will be Graham Norton’s guest this Saturday. The actress, who played Mel from 1986 to 1987 is scheduled to appear at around 12.15pm UK time. Questions can be sent to Norton at the usual address graham.norton@bbc.co.uk

BBC Radio 2 can be heard worldwide via the BBC website.

The thirteenth in our series of features telling the story of the creation of Doctor Who, and the people who made it happen.

The story so far: Pre-production is now under way on the new Saturday evening science fiction series Doctor Who. Conceived by Sydney Newman, the series was expected to air on BBC Television in the late summer. A producer had been appointed, Verity Lambert, but the show was far from being ready. With no completed scripts and no actors yet cast, the new producer was in for a rocky ride.

At the end of June Sydney Newman returned from holiday to discover all was not well with his new show. Like any big organisation the BBC throughout its history has often suffered from an overblown bureaucracy and middle managers determined to protect process over progress, Doctor Who was not immune from such obstacles and on the 27th June 1963, exactly fifty years ago today, Newman was determined to tackle the problem.

In a heated phone call with Joanna Spicer, the Assistant Controller (Planning) Television, Newman listened to some of the complaints. The new series had bypassed the proper BBC procedures and the production had been carrying out auditions without authorisation he heard. Indeed just two days before director Rex Tucker had been interviewing actresses for the role of Susan Foreman. Furthermore, he was told the series would place unacceptable demands on the servicing departments due to its ambitious nature. Scripts weren’t ready and production was way behind schedule.

Newman leapt to the defence of his team. He dictated a memo to Spicer which pulled no punches. It was entitled Doctor Who Hassle.
Newman's memo caused much discussion in the upper echelons of BBC Television. At a meeting with Donald Baverstock, Spicer and her Head of Department decided to rethink the early evening Saturday slot. The original plan was to fill 50 minutes with programming aimed at children. They now reduced this to 30 minutes between 5.20pm and 5.50pm each Saturday. The slot would be initially filled with the cartoon series Deputy Dawg and then Doctor Who. The new series would now need to be made in 30-minute episodes, so to give the production team more time it was decided Doctor Who would now be delayed by eight weeks. The pilot episode would be recorded on Friday 27th September and the series would debut on Saturday 9th November.

The budget for the series was now set at £2,300 per episode. Newman was asked to confirm that the costs of the 'time/space' machine would be met from an additional budget. The team were allocated Lime Grove Studio D. Newman accepted most of these changes but was unhappy about the proposal to increase the running time to 30 minutes. In this he was supported by Ronald Waldman, the General Manager of Television Enterprises, who favoured 25-minute episodes for overseas sales.

One major problem caused by the delay was the fact that Rex Tucker, the assigned director of the first story, would not be available to direct the story as he would be on holiday in Majorca at the time the episodes were in production. It was therefore decided to swap the first two directors around. The first story would now be directed by newcomer Waris Hussein, with Tucker taking on the second. With script editor David Whitaker now on board too, the production was now complete. But they still needed four character actors to play the main roles. Disliking Tucker's suggestions for the roles, Hussein and Lambert began the search in earnest.