 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 4 5 ] Next Last |
Doctor Who has appeared on stage numerous times, most significantly in a stage play titled, Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure where the role of the Doctor has been played by, among others, screen Doctors Colin Baker and Jon Pertwee. Other original plays have been staged as amateur productions, with other actors playing the Doctor.
The Doctor has also appeared in two movies: Dr. Who and the Daleks in 1965 and Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD in 1966. Both were essentially retellings of existing stories on the big screen, with a larger budget. In these films, as played by actor Peter Cushing, the Doctor introduces himself as "Dr. Who", and is apparently a human scientist who invented his time machine.
Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor and Julia Sawalha as Emma in The Curse of Fatal Death
The pilot episode for a potential spin-off series, K-9 and Company, was aired in 1981 with Elisabeth Sladen reprising her role as companion Sarah Jane Smith and John Leeson as the voice of K-9 , but was not picked up as a regular series.
In 1999 a special entitled " Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death" was made for Red Nose Day and later released on VHS. An affectionate parody of the television series, it was split into four segments, mimicking the traditional serial format, complete with cliffhangers. (The version released on video was split into only two episodes.) In the story, the Doctor ( Rowan Atkinson) encounters both the Master ( Jonathan Pryce) and the Daleks. During the special the Doctor is forced to regenerate several times, with his subsequent incarnations played by, in order, Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley. The script was written by comedy writer Steven Moffat.
The Doctor in his fourth incarnation has been represented on several episodes of The Simpsons, starting with the episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", which was broadcast the week of Doctor Whos 33rd anniversary. The Fourth Doctor is also frequently impersonated by Jon Culshaw in the Dead Ringers series. Culshaw's "Doctor" has telephoned two of the "real" Doctors - Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy - in character as the Fourth Doctor. This prompted the bemused (and confused) McCoy to ask the classic question, "Tom? Are you in the pub?". When Culshaw phoned Baker himself and stated that he "was The Doctor", a confused Baker replied, "But there must be some mistake...I'm The Doctor..."
The Doctor has also appeared in audio plays and webcasts. See Doctor Who spin-offs for more details.
Sometime between about 1967 and 1978 large amounts of older material stored in the BBC's video tape and film libraries were destroyed or wiped to make way for newer material. This happened for a number of reasons. Most episodes of Doctor Who were made on 2-inch quad video tape for initial broadcast, and telerecorded on to 16mm film by BBC Enterprises for further commercial exploitation. At this time the BBC had no central archive - the Film Library kept programmes which had been made on film while the Engineering Department was responsible for storing video tapes. BBC Enterprises sold the programme to overseas broadcasters (generally as 16mm telerecordings) and thus kept copies of programmes they deemed commercially exploitable. BBC Enterprises had little dedicated storage space and tended to keep piles of film canisters wherever they could find space for them, and, from around 1972 until 1978, Enterprises had a big clearout of older material, including many old episodes of Doctor Who.
In the meantime, as the Engineering Department library had no mandate to archive programmes, older tapes were regularly wiped for reuse and to free up space. The Film Library had no responsibility for storing programmes which had not been made on film, and there were conflicting views at the Film Library and Enterprises over whose responsibility it was to archive programmes. All of these processes combined to erase enormous quantities of older black and white programming from the BBC's various libraries - while thousands of other programmes have been destroyed in this way, the missing episodes of Doctor Who are probably the best known example of how this lack of a consistent programme archiving policy has caused lasting damage. Currently, 108 episodes of Doctor Who from the black and white era are missing from the BBC's archives despite ongoing attempts to recover them.
This phenomenon mostly affects the first two Doctors - William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Archival holdings are complete from the advent of the programme's move to colour television which coincided with the beginning of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor, though a few Pertwee episodes have required substantial restoration work due to loss or damage of the original 625-line PAL transmission masters and a few episodes are still only held as 16mm B/W TRs.
There have been some successes in the ongoing attempt to recover the missing episodes. A number of countries (notably Australia and Canada) bought rights to the series for broadcast abroad, and some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of those television companies ( The Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in this manner from Hong Kong). Still other episodes are rumoured to have been returned by ex-employees of the BBC who did not wish to see a part of their childhood destroyed and instead of destroying the tapes, hid them at home. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved. Whilst of poor quality, these have proved invaluable for restoring colour information to some of the black-and-white Pertwee telerecordings found in the archives. Finally, audio versions of all of the lost Doctor Who episodes exist from home viewers making tape recordings of the show.
The most sought after lost episode is Part Four of the last William Hartnell serial, The Tenth Planet , where at the end, the William Hartnell Doctor regenerates into the Patrick Troughton version. The only portion of this still in existence, bar a few poor quality silent 8mm clips, is the few seconds of the regeneration scene which had been rebroadcast as part of a 1973 episode of Blue Peter. In 1992, a fan named Roger Barrett claimed to have a videotape of the episode, and offered to sell it to some Doctor Who fans and the BBC. However, Barrett turned out to be an alias, and the existence of the episode a hoax. Unfortunately, hoaxes of this kind are not uncommon in Doctor Who fandom, with people willing to exploit the hope that copies of the missing episodes may still exist somewhere, waiting to be recovered.
With the approval of the BBC, efforts are now under way to restore as many of the episodes as possible from the extant material. Using modern digital image processing techniques, the Doctor Who Restoration Team is using available professional and amateur film and video recordings to generate digitally remastered versions of the early episodes. These techniques were first tried on The Dæmons, and have since been applied to many others.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|