IT'S ALL OUT WAR IN DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE 395

David Tennant and the cast of the latest Doctor Who adventure discuss the war-loving, potato-headed, baddies in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine.

"Sontarans are great," beams David, while sitting on a deck chair, and watching a troop of Sontarans march across the Doctor Who set. "I think that's partly because they come from a very specific world. That back story gives them a great context. Robert Holmes didn’t just create a race, back in the 1970s: he created a world that they came from. Even if you never saw that planet, you understood why they did what they did."

Also this issue:

• An exclusive interview with Georgia Moffett on what it’s like being the Doctor’s Daughter.
• Previews of the next four episodes of Series Four - The Doctor’s Daughter, The Unicorn and the Wasp and Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead – featuring new and previously unpublished photos!
• Russell T Davies reveals all about Partners in Crime’s top secret scene in Production Notes.
• There’s a crisis in the Caribbean as Donna makes her comic strip début in Part One of The Widow’s Curse.
• DWM visits Rome and reveals the true story of how a disaster was created, in an exclusive report on the making of The Fires of Pompeii – featuring interviews with actor Francois Pandolfo and writer James Moran.
• Rose returns? Missing planets?! Vanishing bees?!? What can it all mean? We look at the clues.
• What are Ood, but a reflection of ourselves? Find out as we go behind-the-scenes on the Ood-sphere and talk to the cast and crew of Planet of the Ood, including Keith Temple, Tim McInnerny, Paul Kasey and Adrian Rawlins.
• Actress Louise Jameson tells what it was really like to work with Tom Baker in Doctor Who.
• The Time Team discover if Karfel is really as awful as its reputation, as they watch Timelash.

PLUS all the latest news, exclusive photos, reviews, previews, competitions and even more!

Doctor Who Magazine is out on Thursday 1 May 2008 across the United Kingdom.

Final ratings and audience profile data for Season Two ofTorchwood is now available in the Doctor Who Forum.

The final episode, Exit Wounds achieved an Appreciation Index of90, the highest score the series has ever received. It was most appreciated by Welsh females aged 16-34.

The episode was also the highest rated on BBC2 for the week, with an official rating of 3.13 million viewers.

The Doctor Who Restoration Team website has published an article confirming the release of the K9 Tales box set later this year, and announcing the extras package being provided for the two stories - 1977's The Invisible Enemy and 1981 spin-off adventure K9 and Company.

The extras for The Invisible Enemy are:

A commentary Louise Jameson, John Leeson, Mat Irvine and Bob Baker.

Documentary feature Dreams and Fantasy, looking back at the making of the story.

Studio Sweepings - behind-the-scenes studio footage.

Visual Effect - a look at the visual effects work on this and other stories.

Blue Peter - an extract showing K9's first appearance on the famous children's magazine show.

Optional CGI effects.

Trailers and continuity announcements, on-screen production notes, a photo gallery, coming soon trailer, and PDF files of Radio Times billings.


On K9 and Company:

A commentary with Elisabeth Sladen, John Leeson, Linda Polan and Eric Saward.

The K9 Files - a documentary looking at the making of this production.

K9 - A Dog's Tale, K9 is interviewed about his life.

Pebble Mill at One - K9 appears on the BBC1 lunchtime chat show.

BBC trailers and continuity announements.

PDF files of K9 Stories, four books starring the dog originally published in the 1970s.

A Photo Gallery, Coming Soon trailer, Radio Times Billings PDFs, Programme subtitles and Subtitle Production Notes.

Episode four of series four, The Sontaran Stratagem, achieved an Appreciation Index of 87. This was the highest score for the day on any of the four main channels.

With overnights now available for the whole week, Doctor Who is currently the 18th most watched programme of the week. Final figures will be released byBARB in 9 days time.

Saturday's edition of Doctor Who Confidential was watched by 0.55 million viewers, according to unofficial overnights. The programme, which had a share of 3.2%, was the 5th most watched on multi channel television on Saturday.

Sunday's BBC3 repeat of The Sontaran Stratagem got an overnight audience of 0.87 million, a 4.1% share and was the 4th most watched programme on multi channel TV for Sunday. Doctor Who Confidential got an audience of0.51 million for the repeat showing.

Meanwhile last Friday's repeat of Planet of the Ood got an audience of 0.51 million and was the 5th most watched multi channel programme for the day.

This week's Radio Times features an interview with Freema Agyeman who, last week, returned to Doctor Who in the role of Martha Jones, now a fully fledged member of UNIT. Has joining the Unified Intelligence Taskforce toughened her up? "It's affected her definitely" says Agyeman, "but she's still the same Martha underneath. She still wants to help and heal people,"

And who thought sparks would fly between Martha and Donna (Catherine Tate). "Too obvious!" laughs Agyeman. "Everyone was expecting that, so it's brilliant to have wrong-footed them." What about the Sontarans? Was she able to keep a straight face opposite them? "Tiny little warriors who look like potatoes, Well, they look cute, but they’re totally obsessed with war and bloodlust and death and honour. I think they're suffering a bit from small-man syndrome."

The Radio Times Website also contains a couple of articles related to the return of UNIT, including an interview with the Brigadier, Nicholas Courtney.

Unofficial figures show that episode four of Series Four,The Sontaran Stratagem, was watched by 6.4 million viewers, giving it a 35.5% shareof the total television audience.

The programme was the second most watched of the day, being beaten by ITV1's Britain's Got Talent, which was 3 million viewers ahead of any opposition with 9.4 million viewers. Doctor Who won the time slot, beating Animals Do the Funniest Things, which got 3.3 million viewers and it was the highest rated programme on BBC1 for the day.

The programme is currently the 17th most watched for the week. Final figures will be released by BARB in ten days' time.

Doctor Who has won six categories at the 17th annual BAFTA Cymru Awards, given to films and television programmes produced in Wales. The ceremony was held tonight at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

The programme took the awards for Best Drama Series (Phil Collinson, for "Voyage of the Damned"), Best Screenwriter (Steven Moffat, for "Blink"), Best Sound (BBC Wales Sound team), Best Director, Drama (James Strong, "Voyage of the Damned"), Best Director of Photography (Ernie Vincze for "Voyage of the Damned") and Best Make-Up (Barbara Southcott and Neill Gorton at Millennium FX for "The Shakespeare Code".)

Spin-off series Torchwood took one award, Best Costume for the episode "Captain Jack Harkness".

IC Wales and BBC News both have reports.

Team Torchwood is slated to make an appearance on Radio 4 this summer. The 45-minute show, airing as Radio 4's Afternoon Play, has been written by Joseph Lidster (A Day In The Death) and will feature the voices of John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Freema Agyeman. Recorded in March, the story will be transmitted on Radio 4 as part of a day's programming dedicated to the CERN project, expected to air in June or July. According to an interview in Torchwood Magazine with writer Joseph Lidster, Martha calls the team while investigating strange goings-on at the CERN nuclear facility in Switzerland, leading to Torchwood's very first international adventure!

The story will be the first time that Torchwood has not featured Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori, though Lidster says their characters Owen and Tosh, who died at the end of series two, do have a part to play in the story.
"But the story isn’t about death," says Lidster, "and I think it will appeal to those Radio 4 listeners who don't usually watch Torchwood, as well as the fans."

Classic Series composer Tristram Cary has died at the age of 82, at his home in Adelaide, South Australia.

Cary worked on many of the earliest stories of Doctor Who, providing incidental music for some of the most memorable episodes. He scored the very first appearance of the Daleks in 1963 and his last contribution for the programme was for The Mutants in 1972.

Cary holds a unique place in contemporary music. While serving as a wartime naval radar officer in 1945, he independently conceived the idea of electronic and tape music, and was a world pioneer in this field. His work ranged from concert and entertainment musical repertoire to pure electronic music and from instrumental solos to orchestral and choral works covers.

He provided the scores for many well known British films including the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers in 1955 and the Hammer productions of Quatermass and the Pit in 1967 and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb in 1971.

Cary was a citizen of both Australia and Britain, and in 1991 was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to Australian music. In 1999 he received the SA Great Music Award for the year, and in 2001 he gained the degree of Doctor of Music at Adelaide University.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop would have been 50 years old this month. Disbanded a decade ago, the Workshop - based at the BBC's Maida Vale studios in London - was the in-house audio special effects team responsible for the majority of the special sounds, sound effects and electronic music heard in the classic series of Doctor Who.

To commemorate the anniversary of the Workshop, the BBC News website has today published a feature looking back at its work, including embedded video content. Interviewed are Dick Mills and Mark Ayres, both of whom worked extensively on Doctor Who, with Ayres still being involved in the sound restoration for classic series DVD releases.

Speaking about the creation of the iconic voices of the Daleks, Mills says: "We tried to give the impression that whenever a Dalek spoke, it wasn't speaking like we do, it was accessing words from a memory bank, so they all sound the same - dispassionate, mechanical and retrievable."

Both Mills and Ayres are scheduled to appear on Breakfast on BBC One tomorrow. According to a posting by Ayres on the Restoration Team forum today, they will be on about 9.45am. He adds: "In other words, any time between 9.30-10.00am, as long as a more important story does not break."

(Additional reporting by John Bowman, with thanks to Tony Clark.)