Will Seb and Cappsy kick me thoroughly in the balls for posting fan-art? I bloody hope not, because this is stunning. A Gallifrey Base member has posted his schematics for what the exterior of the TARDIS might look like in its pure form. No Chameleon Circuit, no transcendental dimensions. Just the TARDIS.

And my word, is it impressive.

I’d love to embed the images here but DeviantArt is being shit, so instead allow me to link you to the top elevation view and the bottom elevation view.

Do you know about Insomniac Whovian? It’s rather brilliant: They throw on a Doctor Who story old or new at midnight UK time (occasionally an hour or so later) and watch it, live-tweeting together as they go. Isn’t that lovely?

They’re doing a Dalek themed week in the lead-up to this Saturday’s “Victory of the Daleks”. In fact they’re watching “Day of the Daleks” right now. Tomorrow they’ll be watching “Genesis”, then “Resurrection” on Wednesday, “Revelation” on Thursday, and “Remembrance” on Friday. Which is nice. You can join in, provided you have the story they’re watching and you press “Play” at the same time they do.

I don’t usually get to join in with this, what with living eight hours in the past and everything, but assuming I’m not working on Friday I should be able to join in for “Remembrance”, which is inexplicably my favourite classic series Dalek story.

If the Radio Times had their way, we really wouldn’t ever see anything for the first time upon its actual broadcast, would we? I’m honestly surprised they don’t just print a full synopsis of each episode in Alison Graham’s infantilised drawl each week.

Anyway, if you want to see something extremely big and important and relevant to this coming week’s episode, then follow the jump. And if you don’t want to see it, then for god’s sake don’t go into a newsagent before 6.15 on Saturday.

As you may have noticed, it takes us a few days or so to actually get round to writing up our episode reviews – but we also clocked last week that plenty of you were chomping at the bit to discuss “The Eleventh Hour” the moment the credits rolled, and did so accordingly on whatever post you happened to stumble across. So in the interests of keeping things nice and simple, we’ll be doing these posts each Saturday afternoon for the next twelve weeks, enabling you to hop on here straight away and start talking about what you’ve just seen – before we then follow up with a review (some time between the Wednesday and Friday of the following week) that galvanises our own thoughts somewhat.

So : “The Beast Below”. Smilers, floating UK, Amy in her nightie. Can it possibly improve on “The Eleventh Hour”?

For those of you with a passing interest in The Beautiful Game will know that today’s FA Cup semi final between Aston Villa and Chelsea is kicking off at the odd time of 5pm.  So, just late enough to cross into Doctor Who‘s territory, then.  Shamefully, I’ll be chosing the football over Who (I’M GOING TO WEMBLEY, actually) but I suspect anyone in the same position as me will be time-shifting Who, so the overall ratings should take no major hit.

This weeks episode certainly looks like a cracker, and if you want to whet your stupid appetite then you could do much worse than having a look at these preview clips.  The words “feel”, “like”, “McCoy” and “era” leap instantly to mind, which certainly bodes well for our Scouse in Chief.  Be sure to talk incessantly about what you thought of the episode in the comments, and we’ll have a review up for you at some point during the week.

By the way, by reading this post you have automatically agreed to its Terms & Conditions, stating that Chealsea are cunts and Aston Villa are the greatest football team the world has ever seen.  Just so you know, like.

In 2007, Seb and I hosted a gathering round at our flat to watch Utopia. We all knew that some shit was going to go down, but we weren’t entirely sure of the details, so when Derek Jacobi awoke as The Master we all went a little bit nuts. It’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve seen on TV in my adult life and a large part of that was down to the fact we’d made it an event by all gathering together to watch it. However, in the cold light of day, and even three years after the original transmission my opinion of the episode remains the same. All this is basically a roundabout way of saying that I’m fairly sure my opinion of something isn’t swayed by external influences. If it’s brilliant, then it’s brilliant, no matter what surroundings it’s witnessed in. Despite the fact that The Eleventh Hour was once again an event and opinions of it could easily be swayed for that reason, it’s still brilliant and it always will be.  Long, long after Moffat is succeeded by Chris Chibnal or some such prick.

This is just absolutely bloody wonderful and phenomenal.

Doctor Who and video games have never got on all that well. The canon basically consists of Dalek Attack (a lovely little PC/Amiga/Speccy/C64 platformer that unfortunately had very little to do with the style or aesthetic of Who itself) and Destiny of the Doctors (an “interactive” CD-ROM adventure that was a nice idea but hampered by frankly woeful execution). Last time it was announced that there was to be a new series tie-in game, we briefly built up hope that we’d finally get the time-travelling point-and-click adventure game that the show so badly deserves, but it ended up being some cheap reprehensible Top Trumps bollocks for the PS2. Indeed, the best that Who has managed in the gaming field have been those free BBC flash games that showed up on the official site during the Eccleston series – of which the best by a considerable margin was that terrifically fun Last Dalek thinger, which saw you playing as a single Dalek wandering around exterminating Van Staten’s minions.

Finally, though, Doctor Who is getting a “proper” computer game. Okay, so it’s not a full-on, commercially-released enterprise, but it’s nevertheless exciting for a number of highly significant reasons:

1. It’s written by Steven Moffat and Phil Ford
2. It ties directly into the series (with the first three of four episodes being released while Series Fnarg is broadcasting)
3. It’s being developed by the people what did Broken Sword
4. It’s FREE.
5. It’s got Amy’s legs in it.

CAN’T. WAIT. Check out the new issue of PC Gamer for more info and screenshots.

The Doctor Who News Page just posted this video about the making of the new Eleventh Doctor action figure. That’s all well and good, but check out this shot from about fifty-six seconds into the video:

The Eighth Doctor. Right there. Right fucking there. Look at him. Just you bloody look. I’ve not seen any pictures of the Eighth Doctor figure yet. This is like putting your hand in your pocket and finding a tenner you forgot you had.

… or is the confusion over dates the whole point, considering the “crack in time” thing that seems to be the series’ ongoing arc?
The popular assumption is that the Amy that goes off with the Doctor at the end of the episode is either from 2012 (with the “main” story thus taking place in 2010) or 2010 (with the story being set in 2008), the latter seeming to me the most likely due to Rory owning a phone that came out in that year (although the former is possibly suggested by reference to Twitter, which was nowhere near as widespread in ’08).
But having watched the ep a few times now, I can’t believe I still didn’t spot this, during the slightly rubbish time-lapse photo “Doctor’s memory” sequence. Guaranteed to blow your mind:

WHY ARE THE CUPS WOBBLING, WHAT’S GOING ON?

…did anybody actually bother watching K9 on Disney XD? I would’ve watched it but I wasn’t, er… that is to say I couldn’t, um…

…yeah. So. Did anybody see it?