The new Doctor Who will be one of the BBC's flagship programmes The new Doctor Who will be one of the BBC's flagship programmes. "We don't care, do we?" declared Mark Gatiss, the League of Gentlemen star, as he compered one of the events. "It's coming back on the telly!"There'll be at least one important difference, though, between the programme's 20th and 21st-century incarnations. But canvassing opinion in the hall - and being very careful to avoid the man in the Colin Baker costume with a wig like an eviscerated shih-tzu - I discovered that their attitude to this birthday treat was one of indifference. If he gets it, he will be the first Doctor Who to have had a serious chance of a Christmas Number One.On the first weekend of this month, a convocation of 1,200 loyalists gathered to celebrate their idol's anniversary at a grandly anonymous central London hotel. Two months ago, the attendees anticipated that the main talking point would be something called The Scream of the Shalka, a six-part animated adventure starring Richard E Grant as the Doctor (officially his ninth incarnation) and Sir Derek Jacobi as the Master, currently being broadcast on the BBC website. The smart money is on Bill Nighy, the cadaverous, twitchy, tumbledown scene-stealer of State of Play and Love, Actually. For the first time since 1995, when an ill-fated TV movie with Paul McGann fulfilled the actor's gloomy prophecy that he would turn out to be "the George Lazenby of Doctor Whos," the papal process of choosing a new incumbent for the role has begun. Four decades have passed since an astrakhan-wrapped William Hartnell catapulted an audience still reeling from the previous day's assassination of JFK on a 26-year journey into the unknown. Since that inaugural Saturday teatime, three Doctors have gone to their graves and Tom Baker has become an old man with white hair - though his anecdotes, thankfully, all remain the same. Forget the ancient stereotypes about stale prawn crackers, kung fu, Chinese laundries and 19th-century opium dens.
The BBC is planning to emulate the success of the award-winning Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me with Britain's first ever all-Oriental comedy series. Working Title is now developing sequels to Johnny English, the James Bond spoof based on Rowan Atkinson's successful Barclaycard commercials, and next year will see a live action version of the puppet series Thunderbirds. But there will also be more rarefied Working Title films, such as a sequel to the idiosyncratic Oscar winner Elizabeth.James Morrison. They make a formidable double act, although they tend to produce films individually. Despite its frothy reputation, Working Title has since championed the work of some of the most individualistic British and American film-makers, among them Derek Jarman, Tim Robbins, Sally Potter and Neil LaBute.Of its transatlantic collaborations, perhaps the most successful have been its two films with the British director Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot (2000) and The Hours (2002), and the succession of movies it has made with indie auteurs the Coen Brothers, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998) and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). |
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