Well, isn’t this odd. Matt Smith isn’t the only one getting a new coat this year – apparently the Eighth Doctor has a brand new costume. He’s got a big shiny naval jacket with brass buttons, and – er – a bag. Oh, and a new sonic screwdriver that’s sort of a bit like the Eleventh’s, but with more wood involved. Lookiesee:

There are two ways of looking at this, really. The first is that they’re finally tired of using all the fourteen-year-old publicity pictures of McGann for the Big Finish covers, and wanted to take some fresh ones to more accurately reflect how he looks now – and at the same time, he decided that he didn’t want to wear (or couldn’t fit into) the old costume, and if they were changing it anyway, they might as well take the chance to be a bit more drastic with it.

The second is that they’re finally tired of using all the fourteen-year-old publicity pictures of McGann for the Big Finish covers, and wanted to take some fresh ones to more accurately reflect how he looks now – and at the same time, he decided that he didn’t want to wear (or couldn’t fit into) the old costume, and if they were changing it anyway, they might as well take the chance to be a bit more drastic with it and also the Eighth Doctor is going to appear in New Who in a new costume at some point.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which you think is more likely.

In Between Men, her seminal study of homophobia in history and literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posited a phenomenon which she called ‘homosexual panic’. According to Sedgwick, homophobia is an offshoot of sexism, since keeping women subordinate means rigidly separating heterosexual marriage from the homosocial relationships (male friendships) required on a daily basis in the running of government, in gentleman’s clubs, in public schools and so forth – institutions from which women were omitted, to be confined to the home which is deemed their proper sphere. As long as men are defined in relation to women the power of the male hierarchy will always depend on women being defined as subordinate (and upon the perpetuation of the myth that their subordination is not a construction, but an innate feature of their biological nature). Such a system is totally upset when men are seen to be just as good as women for the purposes of certain social roles – such as love making, or life companions. Society is policed through the collective making a pariah of anything beyond the proper bounds of behaviour as collectively conceived. Hence, homophobia, which polices the proper parameters of what it means to have a relationship with a male or female acquaintance.

Remember Mario Paint, that basic drawing “game” for the SuperNES that came with a mouse? Remember that it had a simple little music-sequence tool built into it? Well a while back someone made a standalone Windows program based on that tool (albeit with a little more flexibility) and I recently found, via Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr, that someone’s used it to recreate the current version of the Doctor Who theme.

I can’t slap it up here – unfortunately my posting privileges here at URP! don’t allow me to embed YouTube videos – but you can click this link and check it out for yourself. It’s pretty bloody spectacular.

Be warned that this review contains SPOILERS after the jump – so if you’re planning to go and see the show, we recommend you don’t read it until afterwards!

Growing up as I did in the wilderness years there really wasn’t a lot going for a seven year old with an interest in Doctor Who. With the likes of the New Adventures being aimed at an older audience and a lot of other media catering to those with a prior knowledge of the series it was hard to find an entry to the show outside of working one’s way through the UK Gold repeats. Oh to be seven now. Fundamentally, at its heart, Doctor Who Live is a show for the kids. This is not to say that there isn’t something for everyone within it, but the structure and presentation of the show are essentially accessible to even the most casual of young fans. And frankly, quite right too.

There were rumours that they’d be filming bits of series six in the US, and now there aren’t. This is largely because the rumours have been replaced with cold, hard FACT. The official BBC America Twitter wossname tweeted about it three hours ago, then they posted a news article about it with quotes from the Moff and Piers Wenger.

The first two episodes will be filmed in part in Utah, forming two parts of a single story (opening the series with a two-parter, eh? A bit cheeky, that). Oh, and Alex Kingston is in ‘em as River Song. Lovely.