Cosmeston Mediaeval Village, Penarth, will be closed from tomorrow until May 15th because of location filming for the BBC sci-fi series “Dr Who” .

As far as the plot of this new Dr Who episode is concerned, inexplicably the BBC has not confided in PDN – but we wouldn’t have wanted to spoil the fun anyway.

The restored mediaeval village was being transformed today as scenic constructors and props teams began turning it into what a mediaeval village might have looked like in some sort of parallel universe maybe a “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” ..oops sorry – wrong franchise.

The familiar outlines of the barns and cottages at Cosmeston have been altered with the installation of a new “diagonal cross” cross motifs. And some entirely new buildings had been added.

Temporary closure for location shoots is a regular occurrence Cosmeston where productions ranging from Hollywood movie epics to the popular Sky sit-com Stella have also used the authentic thatched village as a backdrop.

News Source: Penarth Daily News

In a rare interview on BBC Radio 4, Christopher Eccleston has been discussing his time as the ninth Doctor.

Eccleston was interviewed by Emma Freud in a wide ranging talk about his career. When asked about Doctor Who, he told Freud how he had put himself forward for the role.

“I approached Russell T Davies and said I know you are going to do this and I think you should think about me…. I wanted to do something for children, I wanted to learn a lighter way of being”.

Freud asked him if he felt he had succeeded.
I think I over pitched the comedy. If I had my time again I would do the comedy very differently. But I think, where I possibly succeeded was in the tortured stuff.

So why did he leave?
“What’s interesting in this country is that wherever a story like this emerges they concentrate on the negative. I don’t think it’s important why I left, I think it’s important that I did it in the first place”.

Freud pushed the point saying it was a big shock to fans when he left, and he had been so successful in the role he could still be playing it now.
“Well I’m still there in spirit……. Myself and three individuals at the very top of the pyramid clashed, so off I went. But they are not here to say their side of it, so I’m not going to go into details”.

The full programme can be heard worldwide on the BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks

Plans for a Hollywood version of Doctor Who are part of the latest revelations from the Sony Pictures’ computer hack.

The BBC said there was “tremendous interest” in the idea during a meeting with Sony last year, although no plans were finalised.
The meeting was disclosed in a hacked email, made public on Wikileaks, six months after a cyber-attack on Sony.
Wikileaks has made the information stolen from Sony available in a searchable format for the first time.
Sony said it “strongly condemns” the release, which amounts to more than 170,000 emails and 30,000 documents.
The new documents reveal more about the internal wranglings at Sony’s film division but, so far, nothing is as embarrassing as the previously-released material.
Last year, Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin came under fire for a series of racially-insensitive emails about Barack Obama’s taste in films, which were among the first to be leaked.
Rudin was also exposed for calling Angelina Jolie “minimally talented” and a “spoiled brat”.

A Doctor Who film is on the way….

There is “tremendous interest” in a Doctor Who film, said the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, in a conversation reported by Sony’s international chief Andrea Wong.
The pair discussed the big-screen adaptation in January 2014, but Cohen warned that the programme’s show runners, including Steven Moffat, “don’t want to do one at this moment”.
“That said, over the course of the coming months, the show running team is coming up with an 8 year timeline for the brand – laying out all that will happen with it,” Ms Wong explained in an email to Michael Lynton, Sony Entertainment CEO.
“So the answer is that a film won’t happen in the next year to 18 months, but it is expected that it will happen after that within the 8 year horizon.”
Mr Lynton replied: “Sounds like we need to meet with the show runners”, but Ms Wong warned him off, saying that too much pressure “actually might hurt our cause”.
“The creative team on the show have been having the movie conversation with BBC Worldwide in recent weeks and are very hot-under-the-collar that their position on it is not being listened to or accepted,” she added.