That Doctor Who Calendar 2019 - continued...

Well, as is always the case, I got carried away and did the rest of the calendar. 

Had to get it out of my system... 


The rest of the calendar is here.

That Doctor Who Calendar 2019...

There's some images going round at the moment apparently taken from the officially licenced Doctor Who calendar. 

One shows a cover featuring the last four Doctors - Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi - but no Jodie Whittaker (despite her debuting last Christmas and being the incumbent Doctor for the duration of the said calendar's use). 

The other shows an image for January (possibly from a different calendar featuring ALL of the Doctors) showing an odd image of the first Doctor together with that peculiar hybrid Cyberman from a 1970 photoshoot for the Radio Times. 

I'm normally not a person to go off on one... but... 

...they are pretty shit. 

The Jodie Whittaker omission feels like a Justice League product that doesn't mention Wonder Woman. Whilst the inclusion of THAT Cyberman as part of a first Doctor design is just plain shoddy. 

I've done my best. I've knocked these up pretty quick with some available cut-outs I already had on the mac and using similar design elements as the actual calendars. They didn't take me too long and I've kept them simple. 

But, though I say so myself, they are 100% more in keeping with the series and the efforts to create a quality product that Doctor Who fans will want to buy as opposed to 'will' buy just to keep the collection complete.  

06.07.2018 - Added some later Doctor designs. 
 

EastEnders: The Walford Dead...

EastEnders is going through a bit of a bad patch at the moment so I thought about a bit of re-tooling for it... a new direction...

The 2017 TV Annuals - now available!

It's that time of the year where the shelves of WHSmith become cluttered with collections of kids books with large print, colourful pictures, desperately unchallenging puzzles and enough content to fill a medium-sized thimble,

Yes, it's the annual "Annual" season!

Here's this year's choice selection from the House of Andydrewz! 

You can get all these titles from your local Poundland or charity shop from January 2017.

Rubbish Publicity Shots Used On Doctor Who Book Covers...

The title of this post says it all really - though it's a bit clunky. 

During JNT's time on Doctor Who, there was a rash of these sort of publicity stills - usually the Doctor, his companion and a guest star doing high kicks with a prop (a birthday cake?). Unsurprisingly, none of these tended to go much further than the following day's newspaper or the front cover of a 90s Official Doctor Who Magazine cover. 

Over the past few months, I've filled in time using some of them to create some ghastly book covers that - for me - sum up the ever-so-slightly camp Art of the Doctor Who Publicity Stunt! 

(You've probably seen the Silver Nemesis one before... but what the heck..)

Revised Cover for Destiny of the Doctors PC Computer Game

Dug out my copy of the 'Destiny of the Doctors' PC game earlier today. It's nearly twenty years old which I suppose makes it over 50,000 years old in computer years. 

It really struck me that the cover is an absolute shower. An out-of-focus Dalek, a Cyberman with part of his handles missing and one of the crap Silurians from Warriors of the Deep. 

I thought I could make a better one but I couldn't... 






The back has a picture of each of the Doctors except for Paul McGann - who had starred the year previous to the game's release in a big budget TV movie version of the show. A deliberate omission? 

I tried to correct it with an official BBC publicity still... 




There's also a little instruction booklet with all the usual technical stuff in it together with a page - well, half a page - of KEY FACTS about TV's Doctor Who. I include it here as the information contained within these three bullet points offers a rare and thought-provoking insight into the series and the high esteem it was held in by BBC Worldwide at the time... 

(Please note that I haven't tampered with the final image whatsoever.)

Some Doctor Who Jigsaws c1984

When Colin Baker took over TV's Dr Who back in 1984, he appeared in a complete story at the end of the 21st season. 

In their haste to produce some up-to-date new merchandise, the BBC Enterprise licenced a jigsaw company to produce a set of five jigsaws - such had been the success of some that were produced featuring a cardboard cut-out of Peter Davison being menaced by his enemies a few years earlier...

Sadly, their lack of available visual material was quite apparent when the samples turned up on producer John Nathan Turner's. 

The jigsaws remained boxed and unmade...

"And you can see the next episode of Doctor Who..."

...at the slightly earlier time of 8.15 next Saturday evening. 

"Next tonight - more medical mayhem in Casualty."

Doctor Who - The Familiar Magician's Apprentice Witches - now on VHS!

The BBC have decided to release a special VHS compilation of the Doctor Who series nine opening episodes - The Magician's Apprentice and The Witch's Familiar. 

This is a special hour long spoiler-free edit - as demanded by fans of the series in countries other than the UK. Hopefully this will prevent key plot elements being discussed and spoilered on the world wide interweb. 

I was asked to produce the cover for this bold new piece of official merchandise and put my skills to heavily researching and sourcing images and information from the aforementioned cyberspace community. 

I hope it captures the intense drama of the final product! 

Happy viewering! 

Doctor Who - The Magician's Apprentice - Target book cover

Click for larger

Well Doctor Who is back!

And so are my retro Target book covers. 

Again, I make no apology for altering the titles of some of the stories. Target did this a few times back in the early days - usually to make the title more dynamic.

Me, I tend to change the title willy-nilly, just for the fun of it. For The Magician's Apprentice, I felt I had to change it just so that it actually had something to do with the story... 

Come Back Mrs Noah on BBC DVD (and VHS!)

There are some TV shows that are still crying out for a DVD release. One of these is the sadly maligned 70s sitcom 'Come Back Mrs Noah'.

From the writers of 'Are You being Served?' - Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft - the show was a starring vehicle for Mollie Sugden. She played an ordinary British housewife who - after winning a national cookery competition - finds herself trapped on a British space station as it blasts off into Earth orbit. It also featured Donald Hewlett and Michael Knowles from 'It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum' and Ian Lavender from 'Dad's Army'. There was also early roles for 'Allo Allo's Gordon Kaye (as a newsreader) and Vicki Michelle. 

It's never been released commercially or, indeed, been repeated. This is probably because it was a huge flop at the time of its original broadcast - garnering poor ratings and reviews. Clips appear with alarming regularity on TV shows about the worst TV ever - often out of context so the viewer is given little opportunity to make their own mind up. 

During the halcyon days of the BBC releasing everything and its aunty on VHS and DVD, I had hoped it might slip through - on the heels of its illustrious predecessors like 'Are You Being Served?' and 'Dad's Army'. Sadly this was not the case. 

So this little DVD sleeve here is a little taste of what could've been...





(As a footnote, here's a rare VHS sleeve from the programme's US release back in the 1980s. As was the case with many 'foreign' films and TV shows, 'Come Back Mrs Noah' was heavily re-edited, re-formatted and re-titled into something the producers thought would be more palatable to the American market - a hard hitting sci-fi thriller...)

Even More Complete Doctor Who Target Book Covers...

Although I've created covers for every new Doctor Who adventure - from Rose to Last Christmas - I've only done the fronts so far. 

A month or so back, I picked out a few and produced the back covers as well. You can see them here.

I've now got four more to add to the collection which may or not amuse you. 

The Official Doctor Who Garden Fete is Go!

Seems that BBC cutbacks have affected the forthcoming official Doctor Who Festival planned for this November....


Oh..... and NO autographs!!!

BBC Worldwide's Plans for Doctor Who on DVD in 2015

If you want to own the complete series of Classic Doctor Who on DVD then you're pretty much living in cloud cuckoo land. At least, that's the opinion of BBC Worldwide. They have confirmed that the DVD of The Underwater Menace has been officially cancelled. Citing the reasons for this, they stated that it was due to the fact that the company producing the animated versions of the two missing episodes has ceased trading and they do not want to release orphan episodes on their own. 

However, a recent tweet from BBC Worldwide suggested that they still planned to release more Classic Doctor Who in the future. 

???

What is happening? Has the work experience guy who handles their Twitter account noticed that there are still many Hartnell and Troughton stories that remain unreleased little realising that a quick check of the archives will confirm they are currently missing (or at least in the hands of a madman with a box of magnets)?

Anyhow, closer examination suggests that the new 'Classic' Doctor Who DVDs may be a little desperate to say the least. 

Terry Nation's 'Blakes 7' Guide to Election '79

If there's one thing that comes across in the works of Terry Nation, it's his capacity for research. 

You only have to hear the legend of his finding of those curious artefacts in his garden and his tireless attempts to translate what eventually became the so-called 'Dalek Chronicles' from them to realise this. 

The BBC obviously understood his skill. In 1979, spurred on by the success of his sci-fi political thriller Blakes 7, they commissioned Terry to write a book that would explain the forthcoming British General Election to its listeners and viewers in words that even a sci-fi fan could understand.

Terry set to work. Using the same talent for coming up with startling facts about Daleks, he put together a short tome. 

The BBC decided not to publish it. 

More Doctor Who VHS Branding - full covers!

Prompted by the recent articles in TV's Doctor Who Magazine which chronicle the history of the series on VHS, I've returned to some old favourites and done some 'scans' of the full covers in all of their BBC Video branding glory...

Bank Holiday television isn't what it used to be...

Given it's a bank holiday and given that the weather is usually shit, you'd expect something a bit more special on telly. 

But these days, there's often very little if anything. 

The BBC still has its standard fare of Homes Under the Hammer and Bargain Hunt episodes that might as well be repeats for all the originality each 'new' edition contains.

ITV meanwhile has replaced This Morning with episodes of Murder She Wrote and Columbo in an effort to extend their 'classic' weekend scheduling. 

As for the other Freeview channels....

Whatever happened to Disney Time, Billy Smart's Circus and Holiday Star Trek??? 

Rant over...

Doctor Who Produced by the BBC Children's Department in 1970

Older Doctor Who fans were always quick to point out that their favourite television programme was not a childrens' series as it was not produced by the BBC Children's Department but by the Series & Serials department. 

This is true. I'm not disputing that particular claim.

Fact is, when Doctor Who first went into production in 1963 there was not a Childrens Department in existence at the BBC to make it. It had only recently been disbanded with the effect that all children's programming was to be made by the relevant 'adult' departments. 

For example, Crackerjack was made by the Light Entertainment department where it remained until it was axed by Michael Grade around the same time he put Doctor Who on hiatus in the mid-eighties. 

Around 1970, the Childrens Department was reformed. However, the likes of Sunday Afternoon Classics serials, Crackerjack and Doctor Who remained with their respective heads instead of being shifted to the new department. This is all chronicled in Biddy Baxter's seminal 'Blue Peter: The Inside Story'. 

It's interesting to think that there was a slim chance that Doctor Who COULD have ended up in the new children's department - home to such classics as Rentaghost, Jackanory, Blue Peter and The Magic Roundabout - for its first series in full colour!

What if....? 

The Totally Definitive and Complete Doctor Who Partwork!

We can't get enough of partworks or indeed definitive accounts of the making of Doctor Who... so here's the answer. 

You will need to buy no other! 

Indeed, you will not be able to afford any others... ever again!

(with thanks to @TygerWhoCame2T )

Target: Capaldi - part one

Yes, it's that time of the month where I post more Target book covers for the current series of Doctor Who. 

These are Peter Capaldi's first run as "Dr. Who" (his words!) and bring my little project up to date.

Sadly we are at that period where the bods at WHAllen are no longer able to use the likenesses of the current Doctor on the cover so have to make do with finding elements in the actual stories to sell their products. 

I've no idea why there's an issue with using the Doctor's face. Some suggest that the actor was unhappy with his artistic likeness being used whilst others suggest that the licencing fee for his image became too expensive. 

There are others that postulate the theory that the legal bods - having seen Peter Capaldi in 'The Thick of It' thought it was a real documentary and are too frightened to approach the actor for permission... 

Whatever the reason, a mock up of the twelfth Doctor's debut novel featuring his face was commissioned and proofed but, in the tradition of Target books, will not be revealed until a late date... possibly in some magazine article or lavish book about the history of these novelisations. 

UPDATE Target: Capaldi - part one (supplemental) - click here.

Doctor Who will return in "Doctor Who and the Magician's Familiar"