The BBC has released new pictures from this year's Christmas special, Last Christmas.

The story can be seen on BBC One at 6.15pm on Christmas Day, followed by screenings around the world.

German DVD distributer Pandastorm Pictures released a picture of the cover of the Season 25 boxed set, titled Siebter Doctor Volume 2, as well as a promotional picture on their Facebook page.

The 5 discs set will contain all the content of the UK releases, including the extras, and will include the German dub and the original English version. It will be released in Germany on 27th February 2015.

Volume 1, containing all episodes of Season 24, was just released a week ago. It can be ordered from  Amazon Germany. More season sets of the Classic Series are planned to come out in 2015.

BBC Worldwide have given an update on the status of the last classic story expected to be released on DVD, The Underwater Menace:


The highly anticipated DVD will include the only known existing episode that has yet to be made officially available to own, episode two (rediscovered in 2011).

The actor Ian Fairbairn has died.

Ian Fairbairn was a veteran actor on British television, appearing in a variety of programmes during the 1960s to 1980s, including Emergency Ward 10, Z Cars, The Onedin Line, Shoestring, The Professionals and Last of the Summer Wine.

He first appeared in Doctor Who in 1967 playing Questa, a human who lived in a colony secretly ruled by Macra, in the first Episode of The Macra Terror. He returned to the series in 1968, playing Mark Gregory, a researcher for International Electromatics in three episodes of The Invasion.

In 1970 he appeared in the third Doctor story Inferno as Bromley, a technician who became the first person to mutate into a Primord. His final apperance in the series was in 1976 when he played Doctor Chester, a medical doctor stationed at the South Bend base in Antarctica, in the third episode of The Seeds of Doom.

The BBC have confirmed that the Doctor Who Christmas Special, Last Christmas will premiere on BBC One at 6:15pm on Christmas Day.

Additional cast members and their characters have also been confirmed for the hour-long special: Michael Troughton (The New Statesman, Breathless) will play Professor Albert, Faye Marsay (The White Queen, The Bletchley Circle) will play Shona, Maureen Beattie (Finding Bob McArthur, The Decoy Bride) will play Bellows and Natalie Gumede (Coronation Street, Strictly Come Dancing) will play Ashley Carter; they join Dan Starkey as Ian, Nathan McMullen as Wolf. The episode stars Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, Jenna Coleman as Clara, and Nick Frost as Santa Claus.

Figures showing the Live+7 performance of Doctor Who Series 8 are now available.

The LIve+7 figure is calculated by the BBC to try to get an accurate estimate of the total unique audience for an episode of a programme. Unlike official BARB figures the Live+7 uses data to include those who watched one of the broadcast repeats of the episode and those who watched the episode on iPlayer all within 7 days of the original transmission.

On average only 62% of the total audience of Doctor Who watch the programmme live or, as a recording, on the same day as broadcast, compared with an average of 86% across all BBC programmes. Around 24% timeshift the recording compared with an average of 6%, while 4% watch one of the repeats compared with an average of 6%. Around 9% watch on iPlayer, the BBC average being 2%.

Live +7 figures give a fairly consistent ratings across the series, with almost 10.8 million tuning in for the twelfth Doctor's debut. The average rating drops to around 8 million for the rest of the series with Death in Heaven finishing with around 8.8 million watching.

The finale of Series 8, Doctor Who: Death in Heaven finished as the 14th most watched programme on British Television for the week, according to figures from Barb.

The episode had an official 28.8% share of the total TV audience.

Top for the week was Strictly Come Dancing which had 10.52 million watching, just beating ITV's Downton Abbey, which had 10.44 million viewers.

Doctor Who was the 6th highest rated programme on BBC Television.

The BBC have announced that the title for this year's Christmas Special will be Last Christmas, written by Steven Moffat and directed by Paul Wilmshurst.

In addition a new image for the episode has been released, featuring Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, Jenna Coleman as Clara and Nick Frost as Santa Claus, plus Dan Starkey as Ian and Nathan McMullen as Wolf, two of Santa's helpers as seen in the recent preview shown on this year's Children in Need.


The BBC Media Centre have released details on the BBC Christmas line up, which includes a brief synopsis for the episode:

The BBC has released highlights from the special Q&A event hosted by Frank Skinner with guests Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Samuel Anderson, Michelle Gomez and Steven Moffat, to mark the DVD and Blu-ray release of DoctorWho Series 8.



The Complete Eighth Series is out now in the UK and Australia - and will be released soon to the US and Canada.

The BBC has released figures on the performance of Series 8 of Doctor Who, the first series with Peter Capaldi taking up the role of The Doctor.

The series had an average consolidated audience of 7.4m viewers every week in the UK. This an increase of 39% on the initial overnight figures reported the day after broadcast. The 9.2m average audience that watched Deep Breath, Peter Capaldi's debut episode, is the highest figure for a non-special episode (Christmas/50th anniversary) since the opening episode of series 5 (Matt Smith’s debut) in 2010. These figures show how Doctor Who has consistently achieved big audiences across the last three series – series 7a/7b combined had an average consolidated audience of 7.4m, series 6a/6b attracted 7.5m and series 5 was viewed by 7.3m.

There has been over 18.9m requests to watch Doctor Who series 8 on BBC iPlayer - an average of 1.6m requests for each of the 12 episodes.

In the US, consolidated figures for the first 10 episodes have seen Series 8 experience a 23% uplift in total audience in Live+7 on Series 7. The series 8 premiere was the show’s highest-rated series premiere ever on BBC America, and is the first BBC Worldwide series ever to simultaneously hold the #1 slot in the Main TV Season Charts across all major Electronic Sell-through platforms in the US within 48 hours of episode 1’s release on August 24th 2014.

In Canada, on the Space channel, the first 10 episodes of Series 8 have seen a 22% uplift in consolidated audience size on Series 7.

Steven Moffat, lead writer and executive producer said:Danny Cohen, Director of BBC Television added:Doctor Who Extra, which offers viewers a behind the scenes look at making one of the nation's best loved dramas has had 1.3m BBC iPlayer requests and reached 2.4m people on BBC Red Button to date.