BBC America has organised a premiere screening of The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon and a Doctor Who themed party at the The Bell House in Brooklyn, New York on April 19. You can buy tickets for this even from the event page on TicketWeb. Full details below.

A preview screening of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon will be held in Chicago, Illinois on April 20.

BBC America and RedEye, a daily newspaper publication in Chicago will be hosting a preview screening of the first two episodes of Series 6 at 9:30pm on April 20 at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema.


RedEye will take the names of the first 200 people to RSVP. That will get you on the guest list but an RSVP does not guarantee admission. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. They advise people on the guest list to show up early. More details are on their website.

How to RSVP:

BBC America will host a premiere screening event in New York City on Monday 11 April 2011. The event will be hosted by Chris Hardwick, who previously hosted the Doctor Who panel at WonderCon on Monday 4 April.

Event details:

Yesterday it was reported that Smith, Gillan and Darvill will be appearing at Barnes & Noble in Fifth Avenue, NY on April 8 to sign copies of the Series 5 boxed set.

Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill will be making an in-store appearance this Friday (8th) at the Barnes & Noble store in Fifth Avenue, New York, to sign copies of The Complete Series 5 boxed set.


Last year, Matt, Karen and Steven Moffat went to New York for a publicity tour to promote Series 5. They attended a 'Meet the Cast' event at the Apple store in SoHo. It is not yet known if there will be a similar tour while the team is in New York this time around.

The annual Cambridge Science Festival kicks off next week, and Saturday (19th) sees Sixth Doctor Colin Baker opening a special display event hosted by the Hyde Fundraisers. The actor will be on hand throughout the day to sign official photographs and trying out the greenscreen photo studio to help raise funds for Children in Need and other charities.

The Hyde Fundraisers will be running their charity display on both the Saturday and Sunday between 10:30am and and 4:30pm in the Pitt Building. The display will feature characters including The Host, a Smiler, a Sycorax and Sec Hybrid, along with sculpture demonstrations by member Ray Phillips. There will also be visits by Clockwork Droids, Judoon, Timelords, not to mention the Daleks and their creator!

Information from the Cambridge Science Festival website:

Admission is through a donation of £2 (£1 children).

The UK's National Space Centre in Leicester is holding a special charity event over the weekend 19th-20th March to celebrate British Science Fiction.

Guests at the event include Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet) and Gareth Thomas (Blake's Seven), plus special effects duo Matt Irvine and Mike Tucker will be presenting talks and displays on their careers at the BBC Visual Effects Department, which of course covers Doctor Who. The press release also promises:
Many other guests and activities are expected to take place over the course of the weekend - you can find full details via the National Space Centre.

An official Doctor Who book signing will be taking place this Saturday 5th March 2011 from 11am – 1pm at the Doctor Who Experience.

Don’t miss this fantastic chance to meet the masterminds behind the exciting new Doctor Who adventure series from BBC Children’s Books. Justin Richards, Oli Smith and other Doctor Who experts will be ready to be grilled on all things intergalactic. The signings will be held in the café area at the Doctor Who Experience and no ticket purchase is necessary, but tickets for the Doctor Who Experience are selling fast so advanced booking is advised to avoid disappointment.

---

Today is World Book Day in the UK and Ireland and to celebrate, The Doctor Who News Page is offering readers the chance to win a copy of Doctor Who: The Good, the Bad and the Alien/System Wipe by Colin Brake and Oli Smith. To see how you could win a copy of this 2-in-1 book just head over to the competition page.

Following on from last year, Brit Movie Tours - an independent company that runs regular tours of television and film locations - has announced a further season of tours based on Doctor Who that will run through this coming summer.

This year will see a new regular bus tour running in Cardiff. Director Lewis Swan explains:
As well as Cardiff, the company also runs half-day tours of London locations, and a special three-day tour of locations around London, England and Wales; both include a visit to the new Doctor Who Experience.

You can find full details of tour dates and prices from the Brit Movies website.

After several test days and special preview visits, the Doctor Who Experience finally opened to the general public on Sunday morning.

Current Doctor Matt Smith was on hand at the Experience, during which he was to meet 'himself' in the form of a life-sized model: "I think he's sort of a bit musclier than I am! It's a surreal experience to have an image of yourself in 3D. So weird but one of the wonderful privileges of this particular job - you get rather mad experiences." The encounter didn't faze him, however, as he then straightened up his alter-ego's tie!

Executive Producer and lead writer Steven Moffat said about the project: "We're not setting out to frighten anyone, but kids will come here expecting it to be a bit scary, and I don't think we will be letting them down. But with the Doctor on screen following you around, hopefully you will know that you are in safe hands. After all, the Doctor always wins."

A video is available via the Experience home page, plus coverage of the launch via Sky News and Digital Spy. BBC Radio 1's Jo Whiley also visited the launch, which can be heard on her latest show from her website, which includes photos from the Experience.

---

Over the course of the week leading up to the grand opening, a number of articles/reviews featured in the press regarding the Experience, some of which are highlighted below: SFX Magazine reported: The big crowdpleaser, and reason to part with your money, will clearly be the walkthrough, a kind of mini-Doctor Who adventure with filmed snippets of Matt Smith ingeniously inserted along the way. From beginning to end it takes about 20 minutes, including a visit to a space museum, a daring step through the Crack (which opens up in front of you) a Dalek war, a flight in the TARDIS (with a moving floor bouncing you up and down – though not quite as violently as in the show), the previously mentioned 3D flight through the vortex and a few Stone Angels lurking in the shadows. It’s unashamedly aimed at the kids (the Eleventh Doctor urges grown ups to let the kids take the controls of the TARDIS) but if you can go with the flow it’s a good laugh. And because it uses props from the actual series, even the most “grown-up” fans can treat it like an animated museum if pretending to fight Daleks is all a little too silly. The Sun's TV Biz editor Colin Robertson enjoyed his visit: By the end, it was clear why it's dubbed "Experience", because it's far from being a boring exhibition of Doctor Who throughout the ages. Money and creative energy has been lavished on a labyrinth of themed rooms where all manner of Who-ness is within touching distance. Your guide here, and throughout this whistle-stop tour around the galaxy, is current Timelord Matt Smith, whose video image flashes up on screens in each room. But arguably the biggest treat is the exhibition at the end, where the entire prop department seems to have decamped. The Face of Boe, the Timelord's arch-enemy Davros, several Cybermen, Zygons, Melkurs, Doctor Who's many outfits through the years - even his doggy sidekick K9. All Who life is here. I got to grips with the old Tardis control console from the 1980s used by the sixth doctor Colin Baker and his immediate successor Sylvester McCoy. The Daily Mail's Michael Hellicar summed up: The whole Experience is, well, an experience. Children at the preview with me loved it — although one or two had to be persuaded by their parents to watch the scariest bits, and one six-year-old, dressed as Matt Smith’s Doctor, refused point-blank to go in once the familiar theme tune had struck up. Nigel Whitfield of Reg Hardware, concluded: Certainly the kids there seemed to be enjoying themselves, but there's perhaps less in it for the more mature fan. And if you've visited one of the other recent exhibitions, you may well feel, as did my companion, that – aside from the walkthrough experience – you’ve not seen anything really new. Daisy Bowie-Sell of the Telegraph said: I’m not the biggest Doctor Who fan. I love the series, I’ve watched a lot of the recent episodes and I’ll certainly watch it if I’m in that night, but I don’t study the Time Lord’s every movement. My knowledge of the pre 2005 Whos is patchy - I just about know who they are and what they look like. But even for me, the experience of standing next to a large, shouting Dalek threatening to exterminate all humans was thrilling. In this first section of the exhibition the current doctor Matt Smith appears via a screen: he needs you (me!) to help him out. You control of the TARDIS, irritate the Daleks, run past weeping angels (actually terrifying), and into a room where you watch a 3D film of all the nasty monsters Doctor Who has recently fought. Their arms/plungers reach out of the screen at you, as if they might drag you into a black hole. The Independent took a more personal look, with father and son Andy and Joshua McSmith visiting during one of the previews. Andy, being more of a casual watcher in comparison to his teenaged son, was to feel a little bemused by the proceedings, though overall enjoyed the experience: It was a bit like one of those school trips when I was taken around a museum to have my head filled with knowledge about Egyptian civilisation or the combustion engine, under the threat of being tested later. Except in those days, the experts were old. The sad thing is that, judging by the company at Olympia yesterday, they mostly still are. Groups who booked their tickets early were being admitted for a preview, and though there were a few children taking pleasure in the nonsense on display, most of the visitors were adult, solemn and knowledgeable. Myself, I could soak up the occasion with that bemused pleasure that comes from near total ignorance, but I don't envy the organisers their task, for I fear that if they have one fact wrong, they would face an irate horde of anorak-clothed Doctor Who wonks. For that very reason, I am sure they researched and assembled their exhibits with the same reverential care as a team of paleontologists assembling dinosaur bones.

Further to our article yesterday, some more details on the Doctor Who Shop at the Doctor Who Experience have emerged.

A special wi-fi service is to operate inside the shop which will enable customers to use their smartphones to access special promotions and additional facts and figures about the exhibition. The wireless network will also be able to provide subtitling facilities to assist the hard of hearing, which includes vocal command from the Doctor himself!

The functionality was part of the remit of the Brandnew Corporation, who are running the Experience on behalf of BBC Worldwide. Alex Johns, MD for Brandnew, said:

Over 400 different items of Doctor Who memorabilia are expected to be on sale, ranging from books, toys, games and other licensed merchandise items. The shop, which will be open to the public separately from the Experience, is circular in design and takes up some 130 square metres of floor-space; the checkout area is arranged within the centre of the shop so as to mimic the TARDIS console!

The shop will open to the public alongside the Doctor Who Experience from 20th February.

Read the BBC Worldwide Press Release for more details.
Newslinks: Licensing Biz; The Drum; Promotional Marketing; New Media Age; Event Magazine.