The Krotons
Release date: 2nd July 2012 (brought forward from 9th July) (available for pre-order)


Special Features

• Commentary with cast members Philip Madoc (Eelek), Gilbert Wynne (Thara), Richard Ireson (Axus), production team Bobi Bartlett (costumes), Sylvia James (make-up), David Tilley (assistant floor manager), and Brian Hodgson (special sound), plus moderation by Toby Hadoke
• Second Time Around, a retrospective on the Troughton era, with contributions from Anneke Wills, Deborah Watling, Wendy Padbury, Frazer Hines, Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks, Victor Pemberton, Christopher Barry, Robert Shearman and Gary Russell
• Doctor Who Stories - Frazer Hines, part one of an in-depth interview with the actor
• The Doctor's Strange Love, a look back at the story with writers Joseph Lidster and Simon Guerrier
• Radio Times Listings (DVD-ROM)
• Programme Subtitles
• Production Information Subtitles
• Photo Gallery
• Coming Soon Trailer

The Greatest Show In The Galaxy
Release date: 30th July 2012 (available for pre-order)


Special Features

• Commentary by cast members Sophie Aldred (Ace), Jessica Martin (Mags), Christopher Guard (Bellboy), with production input from Stephen Wyatt (writer), Andrew Cartmel (script editor) and Mark Ayres (composer); moderated by Toby Hadoke
• The Show Must Go On, a feature on the production of the story, which includes contributions from Aldred, Cartmel, Ian Reddington (Chief Clown), Mike Tucker (visual effects), David Laskey (designer), Alan Wareing (director), and the late producer John Nathan-Turner
• Deleted and Extended scenes
• The Psychic Circus (music video)
• music demos for Remembrance of the Daleks by Mark Ayres
• Tomorrow's Times, with Anneke Wills presenting media coverage of the Seventh Doctor
• sketch from Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV (originally released with The Curse of Fatal Death on VHS)
• Radio Times Listings (DVD-ROM)
• Programme Subtitles
• Production Information Subtitles
• Photo Gallery
• Coming Soon Trailer

Planet of Giants
Release date: 20th August 2012 (available for pre-order)


Special Features

• Commentary by Clive Doig (vision mixer), Brian Hodgson (special sound), Sonia Markham (make-up), and David Tilley (floor assistant); moderated by Mark Ayres
• Originally a four-part story, producer Verity Lambert decided the storyline was too drawn out so re-edited the final two episodes into one. For this DVD release, those two episodes have been recreated, based on the original scripts and featuring newly recorded dialogue and animation!
• Rediscovering The Urge To Live, a feature on the recreation of episodes three and four, including contributions from William Russell (Ian), Carole Ann Ford (Susan), John Guilor, Toby Hadoke, Ian Levine (reconstruction director) and Ed Stradling (DVD producer)
• Doctor Who Stories - Suddenly Susan, with Carole Ann Ford discussing her role as the Doctor's granddaughter
• The Verity Lambert Tapes, the second part of Verity Lambert's look back on being the first producer of the series
• Prop Design Plans (DVD-ROM)
• Radio Times Listings (DVD-ROM)
• Programme Subtitles
• Production Information Subtitles
• Photo Gallery
• Coming Soon Trailer

We’re going to have the most Daleks we’ve had on screen ever – but they will be from every era, quite deliberately. We’re calling them in from everywhere! All of them! Even the Special Weapons Dalek. They'll all be there...

Plaything of Sutekh is a new A5 Doctor Who fanzine covering all eras of the series with 40 pages and colour covers with artwork throughout. The magazine can be ordered from the website

• What Did the Sixties Do For Who? – a look at how the Troughton era of Doctor Who reflected the changes facing Britain in the late 60s
• Franks’s Who – the lasting influence of Frank Bellamy’s Radio Times art on Doctor Who illustration.
• Secret Who – we re-evaluate a clutch of less popular stories and find there’s more to them than meets the eye: Underworld, The Krotons and The Android Invasion. They're better than you may think!
• Accidental Art – while Nation and Adams were pulling in opposite directions, Ken Grieve’s innovative approach raised Destiny of the Daleks above the norm.
• A New Direction? – a look at the evolution of Doctor Who under Steven Moffat
• DWDVD – recent DVD releases Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Daemons
• Return of the King – a look at (or a listen to) Tom Baker’s return as the Doctor in Big Finish audios

Featuring the tenth incarnation of the Doctor, Time Leech is a compilation of a three-part web comic originating on the Kasterborous Doctor Who news and reviews website.

This compilation is being released as a non-profit project, with all proceeds being split 50-50 between the annual Children in Need event and the Association for International Cancer Research (AICR), of which David Tennant is patron.

Created by Christian Cawley and Brian Terranova, Justin Abbot and Rick Lundeen, cover art is Martin MacIntosh, with additional credits to Colin Brockhurst and former Doctor Who Magazine editor John Freeman, who advised on the project.

A 30 page adventure through time and space, the comic strip originated as a project to find a new comic book artist.

Time Leech will be available for £4.99 plus p&p, or £7.99 plus p&p for overseas readers.

The ebook version is available CBR and PDF and can be purchased for 99p. The electronic version is available now from the website; the printed comic will be available to purchase from mid-May 2012.

Well At Least It's Free is a book compiling fanzine and website articles by fan writer Tim Worthington.

Including

• An overview of the sixties historicals
• A robust defence of The Underwater Menace
• An epic-length look at The Daleks' Master Plan
• Thoughts on the Russell T. Davies era.

Also articles on The Tripods, The Box Of Delights, and Barry Letts' adaptation of Pinocchio.

Well At Least It's Free is available in print and eBook form, and you can read more about it at Tim Worthington's blog.

1. We have been asked to survey the field of published science fiction, in its relevance to BBC Television Drama.

2. In the time allotted, we have not been able to make more than a sample dip, but we have been greatly helped by studies of the field made by Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, and Edmund Crispin, which give a very good idea of the range, quality and preoccupations of current SF writing. We have read some useful anthologies, representative of the best SF practitioners and these, with some extensive previous reading, have sufficed to give us a fair view of the subject. Alice Frick has met and spoken with Brian Aldiss, who promises to make some suggestions for further reading. It remains to be seen whether this further research will qualify our present tentative conclusions.

3. Several facts stand out a mile. The first is that SF is overwhelmingly American in bulk. This presumably means that, if we are looking for writers only, our field is exceptionally narrow, boiling down to a handful of British writers.

4. SF is largely a short story medium. Inherently, SF ideas are short-winded. The interest invariably lies in the activating idea and not in character drama. Amis has coined the phrase "idea as hero" which sums it up. The ideas are often fascinating, but so bizarre as to sustain conviction only with difficulty over any extended treatment.

5. These remarks apply largely to the novels too. Characterisation is equally spare. People are representative, not individual. The ideas are usually nearer to Earth - in every sense - and nearer to the contemporary human situation. They are thus capable of fuller treatment in depth. By and large the differences between the short stories and the novels are also the differences between the American and British schools of SF. This again helps to limit our field of useful study.

6. SF writing falls into fairly well-defined genres. At one end is the simple adventure/thriller, with all the terms appropriately translated. Any adult interest here lies in the originality of invention and vitality of writing. On a more adult level this merges into a genre that takes delight in imaginative invention, in pursuing notions to the farthest reaches of speculation. The subtlest exponents here are a group of American writers headed by Ray Bradbury, Kathleen Maclean, Isaac Asimov. In a perhaps crude but often exciting way the apparatus is used to comment on the Big Things - the relation of consciousness to cosmos, the nature of religious belief, and like matters. The American writer Edward Blish, in "A Case of Conscience", is surpassing here. More pretentiously, far less ably, the novels of C.S. Lewis likewise use the apparatus of SF in the service of metaphysical ideas. Then comes the large field of what might be called the Threat to Mankind, and Cosmic Disaster.

Most of the novels, and most of the British work find their themes here. This is the broad mid-section of SF writing, that best known to the public and more or lees identified with SF as such. The best practitioner is John Wyndham. Exploiting instinctive psychic fears, the literature of Threat and Disaster has the most compulsive pull and probably indicates the most likely vein for TV exploitation. All "Quatermass" and "Andromeda" fall squarely into this genre. Finally, there is a small lively genre of satire, comic or horrific, extrapolating current social trends and techniques. Again, the practitioners are largely American.

7. We thought it valuable to try and discover wherein might lie the essential appeal of SF to TV audiences. So far we have little to go on except "Quatermass", "Andromeda" and a couple of shows Giles Cooper did for commercial TV. These all belong to the Threat and Disaster school, the type of plot in which the whole of mankind is threatened, usually from an "alien" source. There the threat originates on earth (mad scientists and all that jazz) it is still cosmic in its reach. This cosmic quality seems inherent in SF; without it, it would be trivial. Apart from the instinctive pull of such themes, the obvious appeal of these TV SF essays lies in the ironmongery - the apparatus, the magic - and in the excitement of the unexpected. "Andromeda", which otherwise seemed to set itself out to repel, drew its total appeal from exploiting this facet, we consider. It is interesting to note that with "Andromeda", and even with "Quatermass" more people watched it than liked it. People aren't all that mad about SF, but it is compulsive, when properly presented. Audiences - we think - are as yet not interested in the mere exploitation of ideas - the "idea as hero" aspect of SF. They must have something to latch on to. The apparatus must be attached to the current human situation, and identification must be offered with recognisable human beings.

8. As a rider to the above, it is significant that SF is not itself a wildly popular branch of fiction - nothing like, for example, detective and thriller fiction. It doesn't appeal much to women and largely finds its public in the technically minded younger groups. SF is a most fruitful and exciting area of exploration - but so far has not shown itself capable of supporting a large population.

9. This points to the need to use great care and judgement in shaping SF for a mass audience. It isn't an automatic winner.

No doubt future audiences will get the taste and hang of SF as exciting in itself, and an entertaining way of probing speculative ideas, and the brilliant imaginings of a writer like Isaac Asimov will find a receptive place. But for the present we conclude that SF TV must be rooted in the contemporary scene, and like any other kind of drama deal with human beings in a situation that evokes identification end sympathy. Once again, our field is therefore sharply narrowed.

Conclusions

10. We must admit to having started this study with a profound prejudice - that television science fiction drama must be written not by SF writers, but by TV dramatists. We think it is not necessary to elaborate our reasons for this - it's a different job and calls for different skills. Further, the public/ audience is different, so it wants a different kind of story (until perhaps it can be trained to accept something quite new). There is a wide gulf between SF as it exists, and the present tastes and needs of the TV audience, and this can only be bridged by writers deeply immersed in the TV discipline.

11. Only a very cursory examination has sufficed to show that the vast bulk of SF writing is by nature unsuitable for translation to TV. In its major manifestation, the imaginative short story with philosophic overtones, it is too remote, projected too far away from common humanity in the here-and-now, to evoke interest in the common audience. Satiric fantasies are presumably out. As far as the writers themselves are concerned, nearly all of them are American, and so not available to us even if we wanted them.

We are left with a small group of works, and writers, mainly novels written by British novelists. With the exception of Arthur Clarke and C.S. Lewis, they represent the Threat and Disaster school, which as we have said, is the genre of SF most acceptable to a broad audience. John Wyndham is the chief exponent. Wyndham's books were studied in the Department on an earlier occasion, and we decided that with one exception they offered us nothing directly usable on TV. The exception was "The Midwich Cuckoos", which of course was snapped up for a film. This is indeed the likely fate of any SF novel that could also serve us for TV.

12. Two exceptions to "Threat and Disaster" are Arthur Clarke and C.S. Lewis. The latter we think is clumsy and old-fashioned in his use of the SF apparatus, there is a sense of condescension in his tone, and his special religious preoccupations are boring and platitudinous. Clarke is a modest writer, with a decent feeling for his characters, able to concoct a good story, and a master of the ironmongery department. Charles Eric Maine, who again can tell an interesting story without having to wipe out the human race in the process, is too much a fantasist: he is obsessed with the Time theme, time-travel, fourth dimensions and so on - and we consider this indigestible stuff for the audience. There is scarcely need to mention Fred Hoyle; we consider his ideas exciting, well related to the present day, and only need proper adaptation to TV to achieve great success. We consider "Andromeda" both a warning and an example.

13. It is of course not possible to say what sort of hand Clarke, say, or Wyndham, or any other practitioner would make of writing directly for TV. Perhaps their best role at present would be as collaborators, in the way we are using Hoyle. They are obviously full of specialised know-how, but only a trained TV writer could make proper use of it.

14. Our conclusion therefore is that we cannot recommend any existing SF stories for TV adaptation, and that Arthur Clarke and John Wyndham might be valuable as collaborators. As a rider, we are morally certain that TV writers themselves will answer the challenge and fill the need.

Addenda to Joint Report

I met Brian Aldiss, editor of Penguin Science Fiction (editing another volume now) in Oxford. He is very knowledgeable and has a large reference library of SF. I believe he is the Honorary Secretary of the British Science Fiction Association, and he told me of the conference mentioned by Duncan Ross. He has been engaged by Monica Sims for the "Let's Imagine Worlds in Space" programme. He will call me sometime soon and come to London, at which time he could meet someone regarding SF for television. He would be a valuable consultant - not a crank - with definite ideas about what could be achieved visually.

There are several sources of short stories which might be considered for a series of single-shot adaptations of the kind mentioned in Eric Maschwitz's memo, Perhaps the best would be the Faber (several volumes of which we have read only one) and Penguin Anthologies of Science Fiction. These seem to be the best quality short stories available.