First series 10 actors, director and writers announced

The series 10 of  Doctor Who begins filming next week in Cardiff (Monday 20 June).  The opening episode, written by Steven Moffat, introduces new companion Bill, played by Pearl Mackie.  The BBC has announced guest stars for the opener and writers for upcoming episodes.

Following his appearance in The Husbands of River Song, comedy actor Matt Lucas returns as a guest star in the opening episode, again playing the character of Nardole.   

Alongside, Lucas will be Stephanie Hyam who has previously appeared in Jekyll & Hyde. Peaky Blinders, and Sherlock.  Hyam played John's maid Jane in the Victorian set sequences of The Abominable Bride.

The episode is directed by Lawrence Gough who has previous experience in fantasy TV with The Aliens, Atlantis and Misfits. 

The second episode has been written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who wrote series 8's In the Forest of the Night.  Another returning writer is Sarah Dollard (last year's Face the Raven).  New writer Mike Bartlett (Doctor Foster) has also been announced.  Dollard and Bartlett's episodes will be shot in the second filming block.

Mark Gatiss has previously revealed that he is writing at least one episode for the series.  Gatiss has previously penned 8 Doctor Who episodes between 2005 and 2015.

New Doctor Who companion revealed

The BBC has announced that Pearl Mackie will join the Doctor Who cast as The Doctor’s new companion "Bill".

Pearl was exclusively revealed to audiences in a special scene with the Doctor and the Daleks shown on BBC One:

On joining the cast in her first major television role, Pearl said:

 “I'm incredibly excited to be joining the Doctor Who family. It's such an extraordinary British institution, I couldn't be prouder to call the TARDIS my home!

 Peter Capaldi is such a brilliant actor, and his Doctor is such a wacky and wonderful character, I can't wait to see what adventures are in store for him and Bill throughout time and space. Reading the script at the audition I thought Bill was wicked. Fantastically written, cool, strong, sharp, a little bit vulnerable with a bit of geekiness thrown in - I can't wait to bring her to life, and to see how she develops through the series.

I always loved stage combat at drama school so I can't wait to get on set and kick some evil monsters into the next dimension!"

She has also recorded a short interview for the Doctor Who website and YouTube channel:

It is not yet known if Bill will be introduced in this year's Christmas special or next year's series.

Sherlock series 4 begins filming

Filming for series four of Sherlock started last week.  The first of the three feature-length episodes will be directed by Rachel Talalay, who also worked on the last two series of Doctor Who.  

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss introduce the series: 

"Sherlock series four - here we go again! Whatever else we do, wherever we all go, all roads lead back to Baker Street - and it always feels like coming home. Ghosts of the past are rising in the lives of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson bringing adventure, romance and terror in their wake. This is the story we’ve been telling from the beginning. A story about to reach its climax...”

BBC press release

Cast of Doctor Who spin-off Class revealed

BBC Three today announced the stars of the Doctor Who spin-off series Class.  Pictured from left to right below are Vivian Oparah, Greg Austin, Sophie Hopkins and Fady Elsayed, who play sixth formers at Coal Hill School, and Katherine Kelly who takes on the role of a teacher:

The premise of the show has also been described by the BBC:

"Like all sixth formers, these four Coal Hill School students have hidden secrets and desires. They are facing their own worst fears, navigating a life of friends, parents, school work, sex, sorrow - and possibly the end of existence.

Coal Hill School has been a part of the Doctor Who Universe since the very beginning, but that has come at a price. All the time travelling over the years has caused the very walls of space and time to become thin. There’s something pressing in on the other side, something waiting for its chance to kill everyone and everything, to bring us all into Shadow.

Fear is coming, tragedy is coming, war is coming. Prepare yourselves, Class is coming."

The series has now started filming and will premiere on BBC Three this year.

Trailer for The Night Manager

Starting next month on BBC One, The Night Manager is a six-part adaptation of the 1993 John Le Carre thriller:

The drama follows a former British soldier Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) who goes undercover to infiltrate the criminal arms trade.  Hugh Laurie plays the arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper.  Olivia Coleman and Tom Hollander also play leading roles.

BREAKING NEWS: Steven Moffat to replaced by Chris Chibnall as Doctor Who showrunner

The Radio Times has broken the story that Steven Moffat will step aside as showrunner of Doctor Who after overseeing one more series.  His replacement will be Chris Chibnall who has prevously written five episodes for the show and has had great success as the creator of Broadchurch.

Moffat's final 12-part series will not air until spring 2017 and Chibnall’s debut series will launch in 2018.  This means there will be no new Doctor Who on TV this year apart from the Christmas special.

BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore explains:

 “I have decided to schedule Steven’s big finale series in Spring 2017 to bring the nation together for what will be a huge event on the channel.   2016 is spoilt with national moments including the Euros and Olympics and I want to hold something big back for 2017 - I promise it will be worth the wait!”

Steven Moffat says of his decision to leave:

 “Feels odd to be talking about leaving when I’m just starting work on the scripts for season 10, but the fact is my timey-wimey is running out. While Chris is doing his last run of Broadchurch, I’ll be finishing up on the best job in the universe and keeping the TARDIS warm for him. It took a lot of gin and tonic to talk him into this, but I am beyond delighted that one of the true stars of British Television drama will be taking the Time Lord even further into the future. At the start of season 11, Chris Chibnall will become the new showrunner of Doctor Who. And I will be thrown in a skip.”

Chris Chibnall, a lifelong fan of the show, expressed his excitement:

 "Doctor Who is the ultimate BBC programme: bold, unique, vastly entertaining, and adored all around the world.  So it's a privilege and a joy to be the next curator of this funny, scary and emotional family drama. I’ve loved Doctor Who since I was four years old, and I’m relishing the thought of working with the exceptional team at BBC Wales to create new characters, creatures and worlds for the Doctor to explore."

Chris Chibnall has extensive experience as a television writer and producer since 2002,  His TV career started as the creator the BBC drama Born and Bred.  In 2006, he was chosen by Russell T. Davies to be the lead writer for the first two series of Torchwood  and wrote eight episodes for the spin-off.  For Doctor Who, Chibnall wrote the episodes 42 (2008),  Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (2010), Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three (2012).  He then created Broadchurch for ITV which was a huge hit with audiences and critics, attracting a peak of  over 10 million UK viewers in 2013 and winning the BAFTA for Best Drama Series.  

Here is Chibnall talking about his career and favourite TV dramas in a video released last year on the BBC Writers Room YouTube channel: 

Sherlock review: The Abominable Bride

Guest writer Stephanie Atherton investigates the Sherlock special

        (beware the spoilers):

As someone new to everything Sherlock Holmes, the modern BBC adaptation immediately had me hooked; as I begin to indulge in the stories, I can see that the Sherlock of the first two series was definitely a modern reflection of the original character, with his staggering intelligence and quick-witted ripostes. The third series, however, had a much different feel. At times it bordered too close to light-hearted rom-com, rather than the genre of crime/mystery which is the bedrock of the entire franchise. I was excited then, as many viewers were, to see trailers for the Christmas special which:

a)      Seemed infinitely darker than the last few episodes (quite literally, with scenes of a smoke-drenched London and a dusky maze taking centre frame)

b)      Harked back to the traditional, Victorian Holmes

The episode starts off promisingly (after the rather out-of-place current series montage), and we’re treated to an exact mirroring of the beginning of Sherlock in true Victorian style. John – or rather, Watson – is narrating events, immediately setting the scene amongst the original stories, with lines copied almost verbatim from A Study in Scarlet. We soon meet Sherlock – Holmes – fervently whipping a corpse in a scene we now find oddly charming... His sharp, calculated deductions about Watson enthral us all over again; the accent Cumberbatch is assuming and the theatricality of his expressions are very Brett-esque, which definitely suggests this episode to be a stand-alone piece.

However, I welcomed nods to the series. Mrs Hudson is her usual feisty, funny character, rather than the literary portrayal of herself that she is protesting against. A joke about Watson’s moustache goes without saying, really. And there is an echoing of the ‘bachelor pad’– a personal highlight being the stag head with ear trumpet accessory. Over all this Watson is narrating (his introduction reminiscent of original story The Five Orange Pips, which becomes relevant later), presenting the case of The Abominable Bride. The richly-coloured fireplace setting of 221B is transposed into the scene as Holmes observes it unfolding, with fantastic camerawork which inclines towards the updated series. Enter deranged bride Emilia Ricoletti terrorising a London street before shooting herself. Later, her husband is intercepted by none other than his recently deceased wife, singing a chilling ditty before placing two shots in him too. She turns for us to see the gaping wound in the back of her head, before disappearing mysteriously into the fog. Naturally, we’re hooked.

(So, she shot herself in the head and didn’t die – sounding familiar? Just in case you missed that, Holmes helps us out a little later in the morgue: “How could he survive?”)

Time for a little light relief, then, with a visit to someone “cleverer than Sherlock”. Mycroft Holmes was omitted from the trailer; the reason for this becomes apparent and is a bit groan-inducing. Whilst Conan Doyle describes the elder brother as having “a gross body”, he did not describe him as being ‘permanently surrounded by a cartoonishly large amount of food’. Still, if Doctor Who is anything to go by, a Moffat Christmas special is expected to have its silly moments. And younger viewers will have doubtlessly enjoyed Watson’s sign language mishap… Mycroft leaves Sherlock with a request to accept a case, and The Five Orange Pips comes back into play. After receiving pips in the post, a Sir Eustace Carmichael receives a visitation from ‘The Bride’. The scene is set perfectly as we follow Lady Carmichael into the maze, with dense, ominous fog and claustrophobically high hedges. Yet again there is that haunting, musical murmur, and the petrifying apparition of Emilia Ricoletti tells Sir Carmichael that he will die tonight.

Moffat and Gatiss again seem to think we’ve coped with enough for now; and so begins yet another forgivable-only-because-it-is-in-the-Christmas-special scene. I have enjoyed the ongoing references to Irene Adler throughout the series; whilst only appearing in A Scandal in Bohemia, literary Holmes muses about her beyond this in similar ways: “A formidable opponent, a remarkable adventure”. This scene becomes laboured, though – too much like an adult trying to have ‘the talk’ with their pubescent son. I do quite like the idea that Holmes as a heartless, calculating machine is only the character Watson presents, and this of course relates to his modern depiction; still, they could have cut out the cringeworthy euphemisms to get this point across (I, too, have never been more impatient for them to be attacked by a murderous ghost!).Thankfully, Emilia Ricoletti returns to distract them, and Sir Carmichael is found impaled through the heart. Holmes is visibly agitated – as he is in The Five Orange Pips when his client is found dead – and we are reminded of The Hounds of Baskerville as he chastises Watson; “You saw what you were supposed to see!”

And now, the twist; a note is found on the body with those two horrifying words: ‘Miss me?’. Holmes returns to 221B in waiting, and we see him produce a needle. Soon after, our favourite psychotic villain enters, preceded by a deathly shadow. This is where things start to go odd, as often happens around Moriarty. Their first exchanges are taken from The Great Game, and everything seems entirely too modern given the setting. Scott in particular is not at all in-keeping – he’s still pulling faces and acting the fool. Yet again, if we needed reminding, Moriarty poses the question: how could Emilia Ricoletti return after shooting the back of her head off? Suddenly, the rattling room transforms into a jet bumping its way down a landing strip, and the episode itself begins its descent into a confusing mess. Present day Sherlock comes round where we left him in His Last Vow. Lady Carmichael is not his client, but his pilot, and he seems to have dreamt the whole thing.

It soon transpires that he wasn’t ‘dreaming’ as such, and has in fact taken what we can assume from John’s reaction to be a lethal cocktail of drugs. There is a brief flashback to Mycroft in his mid-20s tending to Sherlock in a doss house, giving us another small taste of the brotherly backstory which is being gradually eked out to us. There is the very obvious criticism to be made that, in the space of five minutes, Sherlock has gone from speaking with incredible coherence on the phone to Mycroft to falling into some sort of drug-induced hallucinatory coma, despite being “high before he got on the plane”. Sherlock insists he’s been in his mind palace, but this can’t really be the case, given that he hasn’t always been the focal point of this narrative as he is in other palace processes (thinking particularly about the fantastic sequence from His Last Vow).

                                             

Then we flip back to Victorian times, in a way that is altogether too Doctor Whoish, for the conclusion of the case. It was women all along! There has been a lot of backlash regarding the ‘mansplaining’ of feminism in this scene, comments on which can be read elsewhere, and it does damage the conclusion. However, I would argue that the suffragettes being dressed in pointed hoods is not Moftiss insinuating that this movement was an extremist hate group, but is only intended to be a throwback to The Five Orange Pips, where Holmes correctly deduces the perpetrators of the crime to be the KKK. Sherlock’s subconscious continues to scold him for ‘lying to’ Janine and ‘ignoring’ Molly – the latter of which has seemingly been an important character in the sidelines of this story, proficient as she is in the provision of decoy corpses.

But we aren’t finished there. Cue more flipping backwards and forwards in time that becomes even messier – the less said about the re-animated skeleton of Emilia Ricoletti, the better. Eventually Victorian Holmes wakes up at the edge of the Reichenbach falls where, in the stories, he falls to his supposed death with Moriarty. Presumably the unconscious Sherlock dreaming all this has made the connection with Turner’s art piece which he returned at the start of The Reichenbach Fall, else Moftiss have imbued him with the qualities of his fictional counterpart – definitely too much like a Doctor Who plot (Robot of Sherwood, anyone?). Either way, good old John Watson arrives to save the day, as he ever does, kicking Moriarty to his death in a display of the friendship and affection the detective has for his companion. Watching the episode again with the knowledge that it is all set in Sherlock’s head, his silent appreciation of John’s true intelligence and worth shines through throughout the episode, particularly in helping Sherlock to interpret emotion (e.g. Lestrade and the decanter) and thus humanise him.

Sherlock wakes up for the final time back on the plane. So, the last twenty minutes has been some sort of Inception-like transition between dream stages?... After an insolent spat with a concerned Mycroft, he concludes after all that Moriarty is definitely dead, with the teaser: “I know exactly what he’s going to do next”. Naturally, we are all left scratching our heads wondering what he’s referring to. There is a last cosy piece with Holmes and Watson besides the fireplace before the credits, which definitely confirmed for me what I thought all along: this should have just been a Victorian special, separate to the modern storyline. I was enjoying it up until the transition to modern day. And as truly wonderful as Scott is, he didn’t need to be here. The mirroring between Ricoletti and Moriarty’s deaths needn’t have been so overtly hammered home to the audience, and for me at least a little more subtlety would have been appreciated. Holmes could have solved the case, and we could have been left on the same agonising cliffhanger that would keep us going until 2017 – did Moriarty survive or not?

But, it happened. We must move on. And after the special, there are two features of interest which must be considered (sorry – couldn’t resist):

1)                   Moriarty - is Sherlock right in categorically stating that he is dead? And if so, who is using his image to terrorise London? Perhaps it is finally time to put a modern face to “the second most dangerous man in London”, Sebastian Moran…?

2)                   Redbeard – despite the fact that we have seen Sherlock’s faithful childhood pet in His Last Vow’s Mind Palace sequence, the name has come up again in the special, and is clearly written in Mycroft’s notebook. Are we to conclude there’s more to learn…?