I’d heard all the hype about the new Doctor Who series … pretty much an unknown for us US fans. I’d seen some of the early 70s Tom Baker episodes on PBS in the mid 80s, but the BBC ended the show in 1989, and, other than a weird Fox TV broadcast of a Dr Who movie that didn’t go anywhere, I hadn’t heard much since then. (See
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/SciFi/DrWho/episodes.html).
Until this year …
My friend Grant down in Georgia had been talking about a new Dr Who series that the Beeb was working on, so I kept an eye out and found a “leaked” internet version of the first new episode (aka 27×01 – as its the 1st episode of the 27th season of the show, which originally started back in 1963) .
Well, that Internet teaser, called “Rose” was quite good, if a bit frantic – so this week, knowing that a episoide 2 would air at 7PM Saturday night in the UK, I looked around late Saturday night (US Eastern time is 5 hours behind GMT) and I found episode 2. When I got up on Sunday I started to watch it on the Mac. Emma asked if we could watch it on the TV – I didn’t think so, but I burned the AVI file to a CD and took it downstairs and popped it into my cheapo JVC DVD player. Amazingly … it popped up a directory list, and when I clicked the Play button … zoom! Widescreen and all – very nice! (tho there is a shade of pinkish-red that looks … funky on screen- sort of like an old VGA monitor).
Now the hard part will be waiting each week for the new episode! In the 80s we got Dr Who a few episodes a night on PBS, but it was old cheesey episodes. Now I can watch current episodes in nearly realtime … thats VERY cool!
Mar 26 – 1. Rose
April 02 – 2. The End Of The World
April 09 – 3. The Unquiet Dead
April 16 – 4. Aliens Of London
April 23 – 5. World War Three
April 30 – 6. Dalek
May 07 – 7. The Long Game
May 14 – 8. Father’s Day
May 21 – 9. The Empty Child
May 28 – 10. The Doctor Dances
June 04 – 11. Boom Town
June 11 – 12. Bad Wolf
June 18 – 13. The Parting Of The Ways
Grant recommended the forums at Outpost Gallifrey as a great place to find out more – and – he\’s right again!