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Saturday, November 30, 2013

50 Years in Space & Time (Part 4)

In my last post, I discussed the Doctor Who contents of the 50th Anniversary editions of both the Radio Times and the TV Times, and both magazines have pulled out all the stops for the 50th Anniversary. But when it comes to the magazines, nothing beats Doctor Who Magazine.

The November 50th Anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine is an extra-special bumper 116-page souvenir special issue, and comes inside a lovely hard-card "envelope", with lots of nice stuff both on back and front. The magazine itself is full of tasty anniversary articles and interviews, including:

  • A massive preview of the 50th Anniversary Special, The Day of the Doctor
  • Ghosts in the Machine, a behind the scenes feature on the prestigious An Adventure in Space and Time drama
  • An Unearthly Beginning, featuring never-before-seen drafts of An Unearthly Child
  • The Wonder of Who - what is the secret of Doctor Who's appeal?
  • Who Was Anthony Coburn? Part 1
  • The Fact of Fiction - The Five Doctors a detailed examination of the 20th Anniversary adventure
  • The Watcher's Guide to Anniversaries
  • The Watcher's 50th Anniversary Quiz
  • Interviews with Matt Smith and David Tennant, Jenna-Louise Coleman (on how Clara coped with three Doctors) and Mary Peach (Enemy of the World)
  • Reviews of Enemy of the World, The Web of Fear, The Complete Seventh Series, and various new releases on the books and audio drama front
  • A nice comic strip John Smith and the Common Men
  • Plus all the usual regular stuff that DWM gives us each and every month.

There are also some nice extras inside, in addition to the magazine. There's a very nice twelve-card series of collectable art cards featuring all twelve Doctors (Peter Capaldi is in there as well). And we've also got a special mini-magazine, a gorgeous little A5 1960s-themed "mini issue" of Doctor Who Magazine (dated November 1964. Only 2d!), with a really nice "Dalek on Westminster Bridge" cover.

This November 50th Anniversary issue of DWM is a real cracker, one of the best, ever. I'd advise all Doctor Who fans to snap up a copy while they still can.

To Be Continued...

Friday, November 29, 2013

50 Years in Space & Time (Part 3)

With the Radio Times celebrating Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary, with no less than TWELVE variant covers, the TV Times also got in on the act with their own 50 Years of Doctor Who Anniversary edition for the week of 23rd-29th November, with four variant Doctor Who covers. I have the 1963-1969 Cover #1, featuring Hartnell and Troughton, plus companions Jamie, Zoe, Steven and Dodo, and a selection of the favourite b&w era monsters. A very nice cover, although it's strange that all the background companions and monsters are Troughton-era. There's nothing from the Hartnell era, except the First Doctor himself, and maybe the Daleks, as they were from both eras.

Inside the magazine, we have:

  • A mini-review of The Day of the Doctor
  • A five-page 50 Years of Doctor Who Special celebration, A Very Special Birthday. This is a nice one, and includes an interview with David Tennant and Matt Smith, and interviews with Tom Baker (the 1970s) and Peter Davison (the 1980s)
  • There's also a Classic Companions piece, featuring interviews with Peter Purves (Steven) and Frazer Hines (Jamie)
  • And to crown it all, there's A Brief History of Time (Lords), a very nice timeline running along the bottom of the entire five-page feature, starting with An Unearthly Child in 1963, and taking us right up to the 2012 Christmas TV Special, in which the Matt Smith Doctor faces off against the Great Intelligence, in the shape of Richard E. Grant

Overall, a pretty good Doctor Who 50th Anniversary edition. It's well worth grabbing at least one copy of this one.

To Be Continued...

Thursday, November 28, 2013

50 Years in Space & Time (Part 2)

Last time out, I talked about what TV has been dishing up for us to celebrate our favourite Time Lord's 50th birthday. This time, I'm having a look at what's been happening on the magazine front. In this first part, I'll be looking at the Radio Times.

The November 23rd-29th edition of the Radio Times is a Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, with no less than twelve variant covers, each one featuring a different Doctor (including the "War Doctor" John Hurt, which is why there are twelve covers, not eleven). So far, I've got the Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee and Tom Baker covers, and to be honest, that's enough.

I honestly think it's going a bit overboard trying to collect all twelve covers, unless you're a reseller wanting to make a big profit, or a hardcore, dedicated fan or collector, who simply has to have every cover. I've always been a huge fan of the first four Doctors, so I've decided just to collect only the magazines with the covers of those four Doctors.

Inside the magazine itself, we've got:

  • A golden celebration of Radio Times Doctor Who covers, with fifty covers for all fifty years
  • A Steven Moffat article You Can't Destroy the Doctor
  • On set with the Three Doctors (Smith, Tennant and Hurt)
  • A detailed overview of all eleven Doctors
  • And, finally, a competition to win the Doctor's bow tie

Oh, yeah, and don't forget that this issue is also interactive, if you happen to have an Apple or Android smartphone. Which I don't. Life is so unfair! :(

This one is worth grabbing at least one copy of.

To Be Continued...

Thursday, November 21, 2013

50 Years in Space & Time (Part 1)

This coming Saturday (and I get a real thrill out of the fact that the 23rd November actually does fall on a Saturday this year) marks the 50th Anniversary of the very first episode of An Unearthly Child (aka The Tribe of Gum - I still refuse to refer to the overall story by that name), which first aired on BBC1 at 5.15pm on Saturday 23rd November, 1963.

I'll make sure to be sitting in front of the telly at 5.15pm on Saturday with my DVD box-set of The Beginning, plus a little drinkie or two, ready to mark the anniversary of the exact moment when the very first ever episode of Doctor Who exploded upon an unsuspecting world. Actually, it's more like "sneaked by unnoticed", due to the widespread furore surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy the day before, but "exploded upon" sounds much more dramatic, doesn't it?

There has obviously been quite a bit of activity on television to celebrate the lead-up to the anniversary. Aside from the almost compulsory annual Children in Need silliness, we've had, most notably: the fun The Science of Doctor Who special on BBC2 (Thursday 14th November, at 9.00pm), hosted by the seemingly ever-present and absolutely brilliant Professor Brian Cox (with a guest appearance by the Doctor himself, Matt Smith); Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited (Watch, Saturday 16th November at 2pm); a three-part Doctor Who: Monsters and Villains Weekend documentary (BBC3, Friday/Saturday 15th/16th November at 8pm, and Sunday 17th November at 7.30pm); and the bumper two-hour The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who (BBC3, Monday 18th November, 8pm-10pm).

That leaves the two biggies still to come. Every Doctor Who fan on Planet Earth is chomping at the bit, waiting for the 50th Anniversary Special, The Day of the Doctor (BBC1, Saturday 23rd November, 7.50pm). Obviously I'm as eager as anyone else to see The Day of the Doctor, but, as far as I'm concerned, the true highlight of the entire anniversary celebrations is An Adventure in Space and Time, which airs tonight on BBC2, from 9pm-10.30pm.

I've been waiting for months for this one, and I consider An Adventure in Space and Time to be potentially the most important Doctor Who production of recent years. It promises to be something truly special and unique, and I haven't been this excited about any Doctor Who-related programme since the unsurpassed Philip Hinchcliffe era of Tom Baker's run on the classic series.

And just for good measure, after An Adventure in Space and Time ends, you can hop channels over to BBC4 at 10.30pm, where they're airing all four episodes of An Unearthly Child. This is gonna be the best Thursday night's television viewing in years!

To Be Continued...

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

What's in a Name... ?

Welcome to the new and refocused Galaxy 4 blog. As this month marks the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, my all-time favourite telefantasy series, I reckon that now is the perfect time to relaunch this blog as a dedicated Doctor Who blog, rather than the more general telefantasy blog of its previous regeneration. From this point onwards it'll be quite different to the generic geek blog that it was before.

For the past year, I've been doing all of the more general sci-fi posting over on my main Tales of Time & Space blog on Wordpress.com. As I'm starting from scratch here with Doctor Who-only posts, I've cleared out all previous generic geek posts from this blog (which explains why all of the earlier posts prior to November 2013 are now gone), and transferred those over to Tales of Time & Space.

So, how did this blog get its name? Well, I've always found having to think up titles or names for things to be a royal pain in the ass, whether it be essays at college, blog postings, or indeed the names of the websites or blogs themselves. I invariably spend way too much time dithering over what to call something, rather than just getting down to the subject matter itself. Just pick a bloody name and get on with it, willya! Well, I've never really been able to do that, unfortunately. Shame on me.

Surprisingly, that wasn't the case with this blog, when I first created it way back at the start of November 2011. A name just popped into my head, or, rather, a name very close to what I ended up using as the blog title. Initially I intended to create a general geek blog based around (but not confined to) Doctor Who, and I wanted a title that sounded not only sci-fi-ish, but also had some connection to my favourite TV series. As I'd originally wanted something which would cover both Doctor Who and general sci-fi, for some reason the word "Galaxy" jumped out at me immediately. So right from the start the title was going to be Galaxy... something, most likely the "something" being a number.

Initially I wanted the blog title to be Galaxy 5, which fans will remember as the name of the bad guys in the classic 1974 story The Monster of Peladon. But that name wasn't available on Blogger. Neither were any of the other names in the range of Galaxy 1 through 10. So I tried going down the One through Ten route instead, and the only one that was available was Four. I ended up with "www.galaxyfour.blogspot.com" as my blog address, but I changed the title masthead in the blog from Galaxy Four to Galaxy 4, because the number "4" just has a more visual appeal to me than the word "Four".

The original Galaxy 4 sci-fi blog had been active from November 2011 until December 2012. After that, I lost interest, and switched to making all my generic sci-fi postings on my Tales of Time & Space blog. This blog has been inactive for almost a year now, hence the decision to start over again from scratch with a pure Doctor Who-only thingie. This new "introductory" post is a much revised version of the first half of the post that first appeared on the original Galaxy 4 blog back on Saturday, November 05, 2011.

All of which covers the convoluted birth and rebirth of the Galaxy 4 blog, and explains why the blog is named after a creaky old black & white William Hartnell story. More than you wanted to know, eh? Well, the title certainly fits this new and rejigged blog even better than it did before. :)