The BBC has released images from the colourised version of the second Doctor Who story, The Daleks, due to be screened on BBC Four on the 23rd of November 2023.

Originally broadcast as seven 25-minute episodes, the Terry Nation story has now been edited down to 75 minutes by Benjamin Cook and the result colourised. 

With brand new sound and a new score - created by Mark Ayres - The Daleks has been gloriously updated, whilst ensuring the original classic story remains as thrilling as it was when it was first seen back in 1963.

The colorised version will be released on DVD, Blu-ray, and as a Steelbook next February. 

This DVD release also includes the original seven episodes in black & white, as they were first broadcast plus a 15-minute exclusive featurette and all special features from the previous release.

The set can be pre-ordered from Amazon. 

 

 

BBC Studios have revealed that the next Blu-ray Doctor Who: The Collection will feature Season 2, the second season starring William Hartnell as the First Doctor.

Debuting later this year this collection is the biggest release yet and features a limited edition nine-disc box. 

 

Across a season of 37 episodes originally shown in 1964 and 1965,, the Doctor is joined by companions Susan (Carole Ann Ford), Ian (William Russell), Barbara (Jacqueline Hill), Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) and Steven (Peter Purves).

Together they face off against the dreaded Daleks, the marauding Mechonoids, the ant-like Zarbi and the meddling Monk, while visiting fantastic alien worlds and turbulent times in the Earth’s history.

The missing two episodes of The Crusade have been reconstructed using off-air photographs and the original broadcast soundtrack, while the remaining episodes have been newly remastered from the best available sources.
 

This nine-disc box set also includes hours of special features previously released on DVD including Documentaries, Featurettes, Audio Commentaries, Overseas Soundtracks and more.

 

The Boxset is available for pre-order on Amazon

 

The Storyteller | The Collection: Season 2 Announcement Trailer | Doctor Who

A  narrated version of the First Doctor story, The Sensorites, is to be released by Demon Records.

The story, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor, was first broadcast during the summer of 1964 as part of Doctor Who's first season. 

Presented across 3 x 140g Sense-Sphere marble vinyl discs, this 1964 TV adventure is narrated by William Russell, who also plays Ian Chesterton. The supporting cast includes Jacqueline Hill as Barbara and Carole Ann Ford as Susan, with Stephen Dartnell, Ilona Rodgers and Lorne Cossette.

Incidental music is composed by Norman Kay, and the familiar strains of the Doctor Who theme are courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

.An embossed, frameable art print accompanies the coloured vinyl LPs, presented in individual pockets which, when placed in order, reveal a double-sided composite illustration.

An accompanying booklet supplies cast and credits, and inner bags featuring complete episode billings. 

The discs will be released on 22 July 2022 and are available for pre-order from Amazon

BBC Studios have announced that the first Doctor story Galaxy 4 will be released as an animated reconstruction later this year. 

Galaxy 4 was the first story of Season 3 of Doctor Who and was originally shown on BBC 1 in September 1965. It starred William Hartnell as The Doctor, with Maureen O'Brien playing Vicki and Peter Purves playing Steven. The story was wiped after transmission and most of the story is missing from the archives. 

The animated version of the story will be released in the UK on the 15th November 2021 and BBC Studios have today released a sneak peek of what’s included in the release.

The release follows the success of the existing animations, which are filling a gap in the missing Doctor Who archive. Thanks to fans who recorded the audio on domestic machines at the time of broadcast, audio-only recordings of all four episodes have survived and have been used here to create a brand new fully animated presentation of the entirety of this lost classic.

This will be presented alongside the original Episode 3, which was recovered from a collector in 2011 and over five minutes of original footage from the otherwise lost Episode 1.

The two-disc release gives fans the opportunity to enjoy the four new animated episodes of Galaxy 4, in either colour or black and white. The release will also include:

• Remastered Surviving Original Episode 3
• ​Remastered Surviving Clip from Episode 1
• Telesnap Reconstructions of Episodes 1,2 and 4.
• Audio Commentaries 
• Making Of Documentary
• Finding Galaxy 4 Documentary
• Photo Gallery
• Production Subtitles 

Gary Russell, Executive Producer from Big Finish  said

BFI Southbank will host a special screening of all 4 episodes of the newly animated story Galaxy 4 on 7th November 2021; tickets go on sale on 16th September at 11:30 to BFI Champions and Patrons, at 12:30 to BFI Members and at 16:00 to the general public.

The new animated release will be available online and in-store as is available to pre-order on DVD, Blu-ray, and as a Limited Edition Blu-ray Steelbook   

 

  

Doctor Who: Chronicles is a new series of bookazines from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine.

Examining the landmark years of the show’s history in unprecedented detail, the first issue looks at 1965, when the most popular episodes of Doctor Who attracted more than 13 million viewers and Dalekmania reached its peak with the release of the first feature film based on the series.

This 116-page bookazine features newly discovered images and all-new features, including a summary of the year’s most significant events in the Doctor Who universe (both on and off-screen); the rarest items of Dalek memorabilia; designs for Galaxy 4 toys that never went on sale; the untold story behind a Dalek-voiced TV commercial; how Doctor Who was reported in the popular press; insights into the BBC’s Audience Research Reports; a look at the first Doctor Who annual, a tribute to The Daleks comic-strip artist Richard Jennings; The Curse of the Daleks, the first theatre production based on the series; special effects and production techniques; overviews of The Rescue, The Romans, The Web Planet, The Crusade, The Space Museum, The Chase, The Time Meddler, Galaxy 4, Mission to the Unknown, The Myth Makers and The Daleks’ Master Plan – and much more.

Doctor Who: Chronicles – 1965 is on sale from 24 February, RRP just £9.99 from store.panini.co.uk and selected branches of WH Smith. It’s also available digitally from pocketmags.com priced £8.99.

David Bradley, Jemma Powell, Jamie Glover and Claudia Grant return as the original, yet slightly different, TARDIS team in the fourth volume of audio drama series, The First Doctor Adventures, due for release in March 2020.

And this time they’ll be facing the Doctor’s greatest foe – the Daleks.

Doctor Who – The First Doctor Adventures Volume Four is available for pre-order now at £24.99 on collector’s edition CD or £19.99 on download.

Actor David Bradley expressed his delight at battling the Daleks Script Editor John Dorney adds The First Doctor Adventures Volume Four contains two stories – one historical and one set in the future:

• Return to Skaro by Andrew Smith
A new plan to return to Earth actually returns the TARDIS to another place its crew have recently visited - Skaro, home world of the Daleks. But it is some time after their previous visit. The Thals have moved on with developing their species... Yet the shadow of the Dalek city always looms large over them. Venturing into the abandoned metropolis, the Doctor and his friends discover the Daleks aren’t as dead as they might have thought... and it isn’t only their enemies who have secrets.
• Last of the Romanovs by Jonathan Barnes
The TARDIS lands on Earth near to an eerie and familiar house... with the only witness a regal man watching from inside through a broken window. Leaving the ship the crew immediately find themselves in trouble - because they have landed in Ekaterinburg early in the twentieth century. The man inside the house is Nicholas, the last Tsar of Russia, imprisoned with his family... and one of the most notorious crimes in history is just about to happen.

Doctor Who – The First Doctor Adventures Volume Four is available for pre-order now at £24.99 on collector’s edition CD or £19.99 on download.

The reconstruction of the lost Dalek episode of Doctor Who, Mission to the Unknown is now available on Youtube.

A recreation of a long lost Doctor Who episode is to be released on the official Doctor Who YouTube channel, exactly 54 years after it was first screened in the UK.

Mission to the Unknown was first screened on BBC One on Saturday 9th October 1965. Sometimes known as The Dalek Cutaway it was a prequel to the upcoming 12 part story The Dalek Masterplan and is the only Doctor Who episode in history in which neither The Doctor or any of his companions are featured.

The original episode was destroyed by the BBC many years ago, but the story has been faithfully recreated by a team of students, graduates and staff of the University of Central Lancashire.

The new production will be premiered on the Doctor Who YouTube channel at exactly 5.50pm BST on the 9th October to mark the anniversary of the original broadcast of the episode.

The project was masterminded by Andrew Ireland, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Digital and Creative Industries at the university, and brought together a dedicated group of students from a wide range of disciplines including film and television, acting, fashion, music, design and dance to recreate the episode from the original script as authentically as possible, carefully researching and reproducing as faithfully as possible the original 1960s production techniques to re-create the classic look of the series.

The recreation caught the imagination of several Doctor Who luminaries including Nicholas Briggs, who has provided the Dalek voices for the recreated episode, and stars including Peter Purves, who played 1960s companion Steven Taylor, and Edward de Souza, who played Marc Cory in the original episode, visiting the new set to lend their support.

The episode will be followed by a making-of documentary short created by YouTuber Josh Snares.

Luke Spillane, Digital Publishing Manager for Doctor Who at BBC Studios, said: Andrew Ireland, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Digital and Creative Industries at the University of Central Lancashire, said:

The latest editions from Obverse Books Black Archive looks at two very different stories from the First and Fourth Doctor

Black Archive #30: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Released 2 April 2019

Survivors of London, the Daleks are the masters of Earth. Surrender now and you will live.

The story of the Daleks’ return to Doctor Who in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) has been told in multiple media, but for this Black Archive, Jonathan Morris has had unparalleled access to the many variants of the scripts.

After 55 years, learn the identity of ‘The Waking Ally’, discover Milton Subotsky’s working draft of the second feature film, and find out why the iconic shot of the Daleks crossing Westminster Bridge doesn’t appear in the televised story… Author Jonathan Morris is one of the most prolific and long-standing contributors to Doctor Who Magazine, as well as writing five novels for BBC Books and over fifty stories for Big Finish.

RRP: £7.99 (£5.99 direct from Obverse)

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Black Archive #31: Warriors Gate

Released 2 May 2019

The shadow of my past and of your future.

Representative of Doctor Who at its most experimental, narratively and visually, Warriors’ Gate (1981) was the rich by-product of a producer seeking to modernise the series for the 1980s, a radio writer and novelist who had never written for television, and a film director with one television drama to his credit.

Examining television authorship in the 1980s, and using archive research and new interviews, this Black Archive traces the development of writer Stephen Gallagher’s scripts and their onscreen realisation by producer John Nathan-Turner, script editor Christopher Bidmead, and director Paul Joyce.

Similarly, it explores the story’s complex blend of absurd tragicomedy, quantum theory, randomness and entropy, within the context of British New Wave SF, the philosophy of science, modernist theatre, film and television, German Romantic painting, pop video, and the development of electronic video effects. Many ‘authors’ contributed to the transmitted version of Warriors’ Gate and the book also considers whether it can be claimed as the work of a single author given the collaborative nature of its troubled production.

RRP: £7.99 (£5.99 direct from Obverse)

Big Finish Productions are bringing back the First Doctor's Companion Katarina for a new set of Audio adventures

As well as the return of the companion, originally played in 1965 by the late Adrienne Hill, the Early Adventures stories this year will see classic Doctors colliding, quite literally.

Doctor Who – The Early Adventures, Series Six, will help celebrate 20 years of Doctor Who on audio, in association with BBC Studios.

Daughter of the Gods by David K Barnes is the first adventure in Series Six of Doctor Who – The Early Adventures to be released this year. This adventure will see the First Doctor and Second Doctor meeting, on a mission to alter the course of time forever. In Daughter of the Gods, Frazer Hines as the Second Doctor and Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe are reunited, continuing to travel the cosmos. But then they bump into someone they should really avoid.

Peter Purves returns as Steven Taylor and takes on the mantle of the First Doctor. Plus, joining him, in a Big Finish first, is Ajjaz Awad (Stones, Holby City), playing the lost companion Katarina.

Many may not recognise Katarina, as unfortunately, only one of the episodes which she starred in still exists, the rest having being lost to time over the last 50 years. However, the Trojan handmaiden Katarina makes a re-appearance, to celebrate Doctor Who on audio’s 20th anniversary.

David K Barnes tells us more about this unlikely resurrection, and how to write a story where Time Lords collide Big Finish Listeners may recognise David K Barnes from his other recent work in the Doctor Who Early Adventures range. Barnes wrote last year’s very popular story, The Dalek Occupation of Winter.

Also to be announced is the second story in Doctor Who - The Early Adventures Series Six. The Home Guard by Simon Guerrier features the Second Doctor and Jamie (both played by Frazer Hines) journeying together with Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben Jackson (Elliott Chapman) – but things are not all as they seem For the first time in Big Finish and Doctor Who history, the Second Doctor and his companions will be encountering the Master… Reprising his role as the first incarnation of the Master is James Dreyfus, who listeners will recognise from the December 2017 release, The First Doctor Adventures Volume One. He’s back, and more malevolent than ever.

Simon Guerrier told us more about this story These two adventures in the sixth series of Doctor Who – The Early Adventures will be released in November 2019, priced at £14.99 on CD or £10.99 on download individually. They are also available to purchase together in a bundle, priced at £26 on CD or £20 on download.