New Dr Who Actor Named

gdav writes "Well, after all that talk about Bill Nighy, it's actually going to be Christopher Ecclestone. He was prominent in Cracker, Our Friends in the North, and more recently 28 Days Later."

Paul McGann

[Anonymous Coward]

It should have been Paul McGann. He did such a great job in the 1996 movie.

--
M

Re:Interesting, yet disappointing

[kamawell]

Richard E Grant would have done a fine job but he would have been almost too good a fit for the part - you get the impression he could do haughty but eccentric without having to think about about it.
Same with one of the other hotly tipped actors - Alan Davies - who could easily have done slightly shambolic and eccentric as he has done in several series of 'Jonathan Creek.'
And much as I love Eddie Izzard I'm kind of relieved it wasn't him in the end.

Re:Interesting, yet disappointing

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. It should have been Alan Davies of the BBC series Jonathan Creek. He would have been perfect for the role. Jonathan Creek was a lot like the Doctor:

1. He used his brain to solve mysteries/crimes instead of being an "ass kicking" idiot.
2. He lived in an unusual structure (windmill)
3. He had a mop of curly hair (a la Tom Baker)
4. He wore a long coat (a la Tom Baker)
5. He had companions who changed over time (OK, only two, but who knows if the series would continue?)
6. His companion Maddie carried around Jelly Babies
7. The show was written by a former Doctor Who writer

Need I say more?

If you're going to count movies...

[dpilot]

What about Peter Cushing in "Day of the Daleks"?

I suspect the can(n)on has to boom in a different direction for the movies, though I did like the touch of including Sylvester McCoy in the McGann movie, even if the movie itself wasn't generally well received. For all of the running through the Tardis in "Invasion of Time", we never saw such an essential and powerful piece of the Tardis as the Eye until 1996?

Re:Lets face it though....

[Richard_at_work]

Since they killed off the previous actor within the movie, and the creators have previously said that the movie was to be included, I would say that the BBC article is correctly worded as the 9th Time Lord. Its possible we wont see McGann being killed off, but we will pick back up with the Dr after a undetermined period of time in his life.

On a similiar note, can anyone tell me the title and writer of the book where the Dr met Hitler? From what I recall, it was written for an older audience than the normal books, and was very good.

He's got 'the look'

[jarich]

check him out Google images

http://images.google.com/images?q=%22Christopher+E ccleston%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

He just 'looks' like a Doctor Who to me.... maybe it's the nose?

Re:A good Docotor does not a good show make...

[That_Dan_Guy]

Yes he was a fabulous Doctor. Wish he had been interested in staying.

I can remember being so stunned the movie even existed (I was in Taiwan at the time I saw it, which was the first I had heard of it) that I never noticed how awful story was. For me, the fabulous job by Paul McGann made up for it all.

Ahh well, least we got a Flash Movie with his voice that was pretty good.

And yes, I secretly hope they make the Special Effects especially cheesey to make it funnier to watch. I doubt they will though. it is cheap enough to grab some Computer Graphics animators and make it all look super modern...

who will play the Master ?

[snot.dotted]

Arch villans. The Dr must be pitted against a worthy advisory, the Master. He really was very evil, in fact the Master invented evil. The chaps in the shiny suits and trash cans on wheels never really scared me at all, the Master on the other hand was equipped with a TARDIS that actually worked and all the knowledge of a time lord. The Master was Moriarty to The Doctors Sherlock Holmes, and or course he wanted to rule the known universe.

Re:Last Dr. Who?

[TomV]

Unless you buy the "Brain Of Morbius" version of Time Lord lifecycles, in which case there were eight other Doctors prior to William Hartnell (this was flatly contradicted in other scripts later in the series, but was very much the intention of the production team at the time) whose faces appear on the screen of the mind-wrestling machine.

SO looking forward to this new series. We have another tall, intense, slightly alien-looking insanely charismatic actor in the role, the best Drama writer in the UK, a budget reported in today's press as around a million pounds per episode, scripts by not only Russell T Davis but also Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Steve Moffat and Rob Shearman, each of whom has a fine professional track record, and the show still has the charisma to get immediate coverage across the UK national media.

Non-lameness does not a good Doctor make.

[fm6]

Lame as it was, the movie doesn't begin to compare with most of the BBC scripts. Tom Baker once told an interviewer that his famous puzzled expression was not acting -- he often had no idea what was supposed to be going on, the script usually not being finished until shooting was well underway!

I wonder if the Beeb will just pretend the movie never happened? They certainly can't afford to reproduce Hollywood's version of the Tardis.

Re:Last Dr. Who?

[mark-t]

For someone who has seen enough Doctor Who to have such an accurate count of the number of incarnations the Doctor has had so far, it is suprising that you don't know that the number of regenerations that a timelord has is twelve, not nine.

Also, that's only by default... in "The 5 Doctors", it was alluded to that it was possible for a Timelord to get a completely new life cycle, which could apparently be granted by the high council. It wasn't explicitly stated in that story, but the implication was that this life cycle carried another 12 regenerations with it. What it would require for this to happen was not elaborated on either, but my guess was always that it requires some number of Timelords to voluntarily offer their final regeneration (twelve Timelords, in the case of a completely new life cycle).

Not just a phone box...

[logpoacher]

> Basically a big blue phone box so police officers
> could contact their station before the advent of
> portable radios, they also had a phone on the
> outside for the use of the public in emergencies
>(behind the panel with text on it.)

I made a discovery recently... I always thought that the real Police Boxes were rather like normal telephone boxes: simple, light, wooden.

But most of them were actually serious concrete affairs, weighing over two tons (which became somewhat of a problem when they were decommissioned). They worked as miniature police stations, where an officer could imprison a suspect until help arrived. Here's a short history [police.uk], and more details [strath.ac.uk] (PDF, sorry).

Was I the only person not to know this? Oh, ok.