Michael Moorcock appears to be writing a standalone Doctor Who novel, for publication next year:

http://www.multiverse.org/fora/showthread.php?t=12620

This Way Up boldly carries the banner of the fanzine forward into its twenty-fifth issue, downloadable from the Live from Mars website. Veteran zine editor John Connors announces that as from issue 26 This Way Up will become exclusively a Doctor Who fanzine, by popular demand; reversing the trend of the early 1990s fanzine movement from which This Way Up sprang, through earlier incarnations/predecessor titles Top and Faze.

( On why I just might see merit in multi-Doctor stories )

A kettle which I believe had accompanied me from Oxford to Newcastle to London and back to Oxford and various destinations around it for over twelve years was finally retired today, after it was shown to be leaking water at its base. This is probably a good lifespan for a plastic kettle. Its water gauge was long inaccurate, clogged with limescale, but it was well-travelled and had become a link with past epochs of my existence. It is now in a plastic bag awaiting its fate.

It's being taken seriously this year at least in one Northumberland town: it's an adult 'Spook Night' in Hexham, and the streets are full of women in short skirts and pointed hats. And men in white lab coats.

Anyway, on to the meme of the season:

( Probably rather obvious... )

Nothing at the End of the Lane are publishing, through Lulu, their edition of Moris Farhi's unproduced first Doctor scripts Farewell Great Macedon, submitted to the production office in 1964 when David Whitaker was story editor. Worth buying, I think, if you are at all interested in Doctor Who's treatment of history, and perhaps particularly interesting for classicists.

It's been reported within the last hour that Barry Letts has died. He was producer of Doctor Who from Jon Pertwee's second story, Doctor Who and the Silurians in 1970, to Tom Baker's first, Robot in 1974/5, and executive producer of the series for the eighteenth season, Tom Baker's last, in 1980/81. He also directed the Patrick Troughton story The Enemy of the World (1967/8) as well as several stories during his tenure as producer; his final story as director being The Android Invasion, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor. He co-wrote the final stories of all but the first Jon Pertwee seasons, The Daemons being credited to 'Guy Leopold', and the remainder being credited to his collaborator Robert Sloman. As the man who was running Doctor Who when I started watching, before I even started school, he has indirectly had a very great influence on my life.

He had been in remission from cancer.

GallifreyNewsBase report the story here:
http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com/2009/10/barry-letts-1925-2009.html

The David Tennant icon is utterly inappropriate here, but here goes... Not sure what to make of this concept; and depending on how the two versions are used, they could make each Saturday evening episode of Doctor Who seem more like a branding exercise than they do already. If you haven't seen it, the BBC's video introducing the new logo is ( behind the cut. )

ETA: Now edited with first attempt at a Matt and Karen userpic.

ETA2: Decided the one without the colour treatment and the lettering was better. The source is a picture by Alun Vega, location reporter extraordinaire.

ETA3: SFX have added a further variant of the logo:
http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=doctor_who_logo_update

Just watching 2.3, The Nightmare Begins, on iPlayer now. There seems to be a suggestion that Morgana will become a Galadriel as she might have been had she taken the One Ring: Merlin says that she has a "good heart" but the Dragon says it would be better if she remained ignorant of her powers - though given the Dragon's (former?) ambitions for Merlin, one wonders what this might mean.

Red Riding Hood is not the obvious outfit to wear when travelling in a forest so as not to be noticed by your stepfather's guards, though it helps the picture's colour composition and Katie McGrath does look good in it. The composition of the scenes where Merlin escapes from Arthur's forces are very Pre-Raphaelite, too, lacking only a fine-boned russet-haired heroine.

Merlin and Arthur are thoroughly well-established as the Bodie and Doyle of our times; Arthur really did want those flowers, you know.

Almost to my surprise, I find myself very, very pleased indeed that Primeval is coming back for two more series. Well done Impossible Pictures, BBC Worldwide and BBC America... and ITV1, of course, despite dropping it in the first place.

Benjamin Cook, Doctor Who Magazine scribe, is eBaying some of the scripts and props he's picked up over the past few years. His seller's page can be found here. I don't think I'll be taking part, for reasons of finance and flat space, but someone reading this might be interested...

Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters is revived for the second time at the National Theatre, still with its original principal cast - led by Ian Kelly (himself something of a Renaissance man, being an award-winning biographer as well as an actor and director) as art lecturer Robert Lyon, and Christopher Connel as the 'star' of the Ashington Group of painters, Oliver Kilbourn. My placing of the tutor before the student may be unintentionally revelatory, but inadequately represents how far the painters led their own development. Ideology is a theme - principally the inadequacy of any of the dogmas current in the 1930s to explain what the pitmen painters did, and the packaging of the mining painters as a 'group' by the art establishment of professionals and patrons, obscuring their varied talent as individuals. The first half is practically a play in itself; the second, a coda set during the Second World War and after on the eve of nationalization, dwells on the aspirations of the Attlee era, building up to the unfurling of Kilbourn's Ellington Colliery banner and its promise of mock Tudor houses and gardens for the workers, symbolizing in the play the storming of the bastions of cultural privilege by the working class. As a surtitle notes as the end, as Hetton Silver Band's recording of the mining composer Robert Saint's hymn tune Gresford, the miners' University of Ashington never arose, and there are today no working collieries in the area. Perhaps the most powerful scene for our times, though, shortly before the end, comes when Oliver Kilbourn visits Robert Lyon in his studio, relocated from Newcastle to Edinburgh after Lyon was appointed professor at Edinburgh College of Art largely (the play suggests) on the back of his self-promotion as tutor of the Ashington Group, and is rendered in chalk and charcoal by Lyon as a sentimentalized rustic labourer. The exchange on privilege, where it lies, who has it and what it means to use it is certainly one for today's cultural commentators to chew upon.

The Times reports the death of the actor Iain Cuthbertson. They emphasise his leading role in Sutherland's Law in the mid-1970s, and his portrayal of Charlie Endall in Budgie and Charles Endall Esquire, but (as well as being Father in the 1970 film The Railway Children) he is also remembered for telefantasy roles, such as the laird who is sceptical about the merits of the return of hydroelectric power in the final episode of Survivors, and Garron, the conman from Hackney Wick let loose on the galaxy, in Doctor Who's The Ribos Operation.

It's long been a point of fan conjecture, based on anecdotes and other hints, that Iain Cuthbertson was cast as Garron on the understanding that, if Tom Baker didn't turn up for work at the start of season 16, Cuthbertson would clear his schedule and take over as the Doctor.[1] I don't know what a Cuthbertson Doctor would have been like, but he had a certain screen presence which shows some promise.

[1]A similar arrangement might have been made with Geoffrey Bayldon, who played Organon in The Creature from the Pit, the first story of season 17 to be recorded, the next year.

ETA How could I forget his appearance in Children of the Stones?

I spent Saturday in Stourbridge Town Hall enjoying old television in the company of gervase_fen and assembled followers of Kaleidoscope, the Classic Television Organization. A great discovery was Chance in a Million, one or two episodes of which I caught when they first went out in the 1980s, and which I couldn't quite tune into; I think I was perhaps a bit too young. Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn turn Tom Chance - a man who is a focus of a series of bizarre coincidences - and Alison Little - a librarian lacking in self-confidence but capable of deep and unexpected resourcefulness - into extremely sympathetic characters. The episode shown at Stourbridge was the untransmitted pilot - the first half is as broadcast, but the second half, with Tom and Alison's dinner date, was rewritten, recast and reshot - but I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

I think I'd only seen Jennie Linden as Barbara in Doctor Who and the Daleks, but here I saw her as Penny, a receptionist whom we meet in bed with a philandering manager - Leslie Phillips - in Galton and Simpson's The Suit. This had a cameo from Bill Oddie as Penny's brother Jimmy, typecast as the anarchic representative of the younger generation, and a good twist at the end. Worth reviving for television or for stage, though Phillips's character, Howard, belongs to the world of I'm All Right, Jack which is more remote from British industrial relations than it was when The Suit was broadcast in 1969.

As for the episode of the Alan Coren-written sitcom The Losers, from 1978... this is a sitcom written by a critic, and it came over as a cut-and-paste job, with Leonard Rossiter's lodging-house based wrestling promoter Sydney Foskitt having too many echoes of Rising Damp's Rigsby, Alfred Molina a substitute Richard Beckinsale, the presentation of racist attitudes less deft than that demonstrated by Johnny Speight in Till Death..., and the whole degenerating into a sub-Goodies chase scene. A 1975 episode of Dixon of Dock Green, Baubles, Bangles and Beads, was remarkable for its consciously old-fashioned presentation of its villains (the one in the suit, the bald scruffy one and the one in the bomber jacket) and its perception of youth culture's fascination with eastern mysticism as a world made up of dupes and the duped, bound to lead to the reinforcement of societal norms sooner rather than later, a depiction designed to reassure middle-aged parents watching.

Special guest was veteran playwright Peter Terson... I didn't get to see any of his work, in the second viewing strand, as the miscellany in the main hall was more interesting, and my first choice, The Fishing Party, was scheduled opposite his talk. I'd not realised that he was from Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne. He spoke about being rescued from twelve years as a PE teacher (a job he'd taken because he didn't care for it) by Peter Cheeseman, who ran the Victoria Theatre, Stoke, in the 1960s, and writing plays for him before "the TV boys called". He was remarkably unpretentious, and one hopes his autobiography finds a publisher.

"The pliant Sir William Petre was succeeded by a son who, as a firm Catholic, lived in retirement, running a well-built house complete with a set of drains which remained in uninterrupted use until 1952, when the plumber repaired them to a plan of 1566, fetched from the Record Office for the occasion."

Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments (Oxford, 1971), 162-163

Somewhere in the imagination of those with a nostalgia for times before they were born, a man in an E-type Jaguar will forever be driving out of a multistorey car park. An attractive woman will jump into the passenger seat, and away they will go. Something in the camera angles will tell us that this image, grainy telerecording though it is, is meant to be impossibly glamorous, and even at this distance, it almost is. Such was fame in the days of the so-called "Icarus of broadcasting", star of Radio Caroline and BBC 1, whose media wings melted long ago, but who died yesterday.

Simon Dee (1935-2009)

Dee-Construction, from Channel 4, via YouTube

One of the most dedicated production-followers, Alun Vega, has made this recording available. Don't follow this if you are averse to knowing anything about the next series, as not only does it reveal the identity of a returning alien race, but also something of how Matt Smith will deliver his lines as the Doctor.

The Daily Telegraph reports on Star Trek aftershave.

Wondering what the healthcare reform debate in the United States is about? Here is an explanation in slides by Dan Roam. Thanks to nwhyte.

While Chocology in the Covered Market has long catered to a wide range of chocolate tastes and price ranges, Hotel Chocolat have now opened on High Street, in the shop that used to be Britannia Building Society. They are definitely on the expensive side, but as this is opening day tasters are ongoing. The white chocolate with vanilla was very well-judged, I thought. Were I to spend £2.95 on a 100g bar (£7.50 for three!) I might try one of the blueberry swirls.

( Spider photograph )

The Sunday Times is claiming that Guardian Media Group are considering closing The Observer. I'm surprised at the option of turning it into a weekly news magazine to be published on Thursdays, as I would have thought the markets were largely different, but think the continuing downsizing of the Sunday paper must be the more likely of the two; if, that is, this story has any more to it than one media group causing trouble for another in a light news week.

A non-LJ friend known on Twitter as tyger2000uk has pointed me towards a blog post celebrating the Ladybird 'Adventure in History', Oliver Cromwell. It reminds me of how I enjoyed the (already rather old-fashioned) series, particularly the L. du Garde Peach ones, even though there were oddities apparent even to a child - such as the statement in Warwick the Kingmaker that its subject was probably born in 'Wessex', a name long fallen from use in the fifteenth century.

Over at Teatime Brutality (and what a good name that can be for a blog discussing Doctor Who) there's a good essay about why the concept of the canon, at least in the way it has been used in fandom, doesn't apply in Doctor Who. Recommended by Paul Cornell on Twitter.

US cable channel AMC are maintaining a blog promoting their forthcoming remake of The Prisoner, in association with ITV, and have now posted a nine-minute preview video. I've not watched all of it yet, but thought it might be of interest to those passing by here...

http://blogs.amctv.com/the-prisoner/2009/07/video-trailer-comic-con.php

( Now behind a cut as some people might not want to know any more details about future story events... )

ETA2: Those who don't want to visit the Mail and Sun sites might find Cathode Ray Tube's posts here and here helpful. It's an insightful blog in general, too.

This looks almost like the sort of thing I might wear... might it be an incentive for me to finally learn to tie a bow tie? Not at all what was being leaked to the usual suspects in certain forums (there was talk of a hoodie, and a T-shirt which would show the name of a different band each story...)

Of course, five years ago when Christopher Eccleston's costume was revealed, an outraged fandom was incensed at its being contemporary. Now that we have something more Edwardian, or at least mid-twentieth century, a lot of people are incensed again. The rules of Doctor Who have changed once more - Steven Moffat is in charge, and is perhaps less in thrall to onetime ITV boss David Liddiment's comment to Russell T Davies after the 1996 TV movie: "If you ever bring him back, no more fancy dress."

There's only one photo so far, and it's best seen at BBC News.

ETA: SFX have put up a higher definition version.

ETA2: The Doctor Who Appreciation Society's reaction: "Matt looks like a cross between Troughton's Doctor and Indiana Jones in 'professor' mode." So I have changed my icon accordingly.

( Time Lords and missing nurses - thoughts following the commentary track and production subtitles )