Doctor Who has risen to the top as fans catch up and re-watch episodes in anticipation of season 10, which recently started filming. Mozart in the Jungle also increased in popularity after season three’s release date was announced at the TCAs.
Insights from Jumpshot:
These top 10 shows accounted for 35% of all the TV shows viewed on Amazon Prime this past week.
Waiting for the Doctor: Doctor Who from the BBC took the #1 position this week, driving a 19% share, as viewers wait anxiously for the Season 10 premiere. Season 9 is still not available to stream on Amazon Prime but is expected to be this fall.
Mozart’s Return: Amazon announced when season 3 for Mozart in the Jungle will debut during the Press Tour of the Television Critics Association on 8/7. This announcement helped that show crack the top 10, driving a 7% share.
Jumpshot is a marketing analytics company that helps marketers understand their customer’s entire online lives. From the key sources of traffic to a site, to the browsing, consuming, and buying behavior on a site, to where customers go once they’ve left a site, our platform reveal the entire customer journey. Jumpshot tracks more than 160-billion monthly actions from our 100-million customer panel’s clickstream activity. In short, we are able to see every single click that our user panel performs in the order that they do them from January 2014 through yesterday.
Its construction is a feat of structural engineering, as this incredible time-lapse video proves. A giant workshop, a team of dedicated Lego builders, glue, concept drawings, stepladders, scaffolding and a heck of a lot of bricks – and not a bit of wibbly wobbling.
75,000 bricks, 400 kilos, 300 hours… one #LEGOTARDIS!
Peter Capaldi outside the amazing LEGO TARDIS
Doctor Who to unveil series 10 and Christmas special secrets at New York Comic Con
We may not have exciting new details of Doctor Who series 10 for you today, but we now know when we will – because the BBC sci-fi series is set to unveil its secrets for fans in mid-October at New York Comic Con.
Alongside a separate panel on Young Adult spin-off Class (which is expected to air on BBC3 online and BBC1 this autumn), the Doctor Who event will see Peter Capaldi joined onstage by new companion Pearl Mackie, departing showrunner Steven Moffat and executive producer Brian Minchin, with fans promised a “sneak peek” of upcoming stories including this year’s Christmas special.
Convention-goers can also apparently expect some hints about what’s in store for the currently-filming series ten, which will be Moffat’s last season before departing as head writer.
The Class panel will include stars Greg Austin, Fady Elsayed, Sophie Hopkins and Vivian Oprah, joined by writer and creator Patrick Ness and executive producer Brian Minchin (again).
Doctor Who has been entered into the BBC Radio 1 Teen Awards in the “Best TV Show“ category (as if we didn’t already know that!). We would urge all our readers to vote and lets see our favourite time lord triumph once again. Compeition will be tough as The Doctor will be up against such heavy weights as: “Game of Thrones”, “EastEnders”, “Gogglebox” and “First Dates”.
Voting will be open until 7pm on Sunday 21st August 2016 – so please get voting – We have!
Radio Times Unearth Rare Images From Longleat 1996
It’s amazing what you can stumble upon in the darker recesses of the Radio Times Photo Archive. Recently I found a stash of Doctor Who images – a whole file of colour transparencies – and, to the best of my knowledge, they’ve never been published before.
They were taken 20 years ago on a hot weekend in August 1996 at Longleat House in Wiltshire.
The country house was a natural home for fans of the Time Lord. For almost 30 years from 1974 to 2003 it hosted a Doctor Who Exhibition of costumes and props from the series. In 1983, it staged the BBC’s 20th anniversary Doctor Who Celebration weekend, which brought the county to a standstill.
In 1996, however, the Doctor Who Appreciation Society was celebrating its own 20th anniversary and 30 years of the Cybermen, who had debuted in Doctor Who in 1966. And on Sunday 18th August 1996, Radio Times dispatched photographer Jamie Hughes to record the day’s events.
The wonderful Nicholas Courtney, who had played Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart in nearly 100 episodes since 1968, posed gamely with the Cybermen. They then participated in a mini-drama set within the grounds.
The sketch was written by John Nathan-Turner, the famous producer of Doctor Who throughout the 1980s. He larked about for our photographer with some items that were up for auction. Fans also gathered to display their memorabilia and original costumes from the series.
Topping the bill was Tom Baker. Looking relaxed and happy, and not sporting his fourth Doctor togs and scarf, he turned up in a 1930s Daimler and was soon giving autographs to a long queue of admirers.
The Cybermen apprehend the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney)Two Cybermen plottingHands up, Brig!John Nathan-Turner, the 1980s Doctor Who producer, larks about with some items up for auctionFans gather at the entrance to the Doctor Who ExperienceTom Baker arrives at Longleat in a DaimlerTom Baker in his full glory
The BBC has announced that the stars of Doctor Who will be attending this year’s Comic Con in New York
BBC Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi will make his New York Comic Con debut along with the first ever fan appearance by new co-star Pearl Mackie, who joins the series as Bill, the Doctor’s new companion. When Pearl joined the cast, Emmy-winning lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat teased “a new voyage is about to to begin” and “this is where the story really starts.” Fans will get a sneak peek of what’s ahead including the upcoming Christmas Special this December on BBC AMERICA and the epic plans for Steven Moffat’s final season as showrunner. The panel includes stars Peter Capaldi (The Thick of It) and Pearl Mackie (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), as well as Steven Moffat (Sherlock) and executive producer Brian Minchin (Class, Torchwood). Doctor Who is a BBC Cymru Wales production for BBC One and a BBC AMERICA co-production.
EXCLUSIVE cover for Doctor Who Magazine subscribers!
Issue 503, out on August 25, 2016, will feature a limited edition variant cover, just for subscribers. The limited cover will be a souvenir variation of the main cover – which will be revealed on August 22.
Editor Tom Spilsbury says:
“We’ve decided to try this idea out as a test, to see if fans like the idea of variant covers with less text and/or a different image to the main cover, on sale in shops.”
Fans will have to make sure that they’ve subscribed by August 19 to make sure they can get hold of the limited-edition cover.
We know the TARDIS has a pretty spacious interior, and plenty of rooms we’ve never seen (according to the Doctor, it even has a swimming pool). So perhaps it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that it also contains a Pokemon Go gym.
The blue box is currently materialised on a street in west London and is a Level 3 gym defended, obviously, by the blue Pokemon Go team (Mystic) – specifically, by a Lapras (also blue). That puts us in mind of the Skarasen (AKA the Loch Ness Monster), which the Doctor faced during an adventure back in 1975.
Come to think of it, it would be just like the Doctor to tame a prehistoric alien robot and train it as a guard dog… Or perhaps we’re reading too much into this.
Either way, you can find the TARDIS outside Earl’s Court Underground station at the WGS co-ordinates 51.4913°N 0.1947°W – well, for as long as it stays put, that is…
The women who invented electro: Inside the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
For decades women were systematically sidelined at the BBC. The female voice was thought to lack the necessary gravitas for newsreading – being a discreet and efficient PA to a busy male director or producer was the best that could be hoped for.
Nowhere was this exclusion more rigidly enforced than in the technical aspects of programme-making where the hands-on world of studios, microphones and cameras was believed to be a man’s domain. Yet from an unexpected corner came a quiet revolution. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a pioneering studio for electronic music which flourished from 1958 until 1998. Its function was to provide incidental music and soundtracks for television and radio drama and documentaries. Despite its rigidly utilitarian brief it produced music of astonishing originality.
The soundtracks the Workshop produced became part of the soundtrack of people’s lives in the Fifties and Sixties. Who could forget the uncanny electronic score of the classic sci-fi series Quatermass and the Pit, or the stomach gurglings of Major Bloodnok, a stock character in the comedy series The Goon Show?
Among the composer/technicians working there was a remarkable visionary woman, Daphne Oram. In her childhood she showed a flair for inventing ingenious mechanical devices, and was also fascinated by electronic sound and by the microphone, which she declared had vast potential as a musical instrument.
These two passions came together in Still Point, scored for “Double Orchestra and five microphones”, which Oram composed in the late Forties. This has gone down in history as the first piece ever to combine live orchestral musicians with electronic transformations of the orchestral sound, recorded on to disc to be played live during performances. It was, however, never performed, and only a fragmentary score survives. The composer and “turntablist” Shiva Feshareki has fashioned it into a performing version, which receives its premiere as part of the Southbank Centre’s Deep Minimalism series this month.
Oram had to pursue her passion for electronic music late at night and at weekends, when the BBC studios were not in use. Thanks in large part to her tireless campaigning, the Radiophonic Workshop was finally set up in 1958, in the teeth of much scepticism from the BBC management. Oram was appointed co-director, but she soon lost patience with the studio’s limited brief, and the patronising attitude of the male managers. “They wanted my ideas,” she recalled later, “they didn’t want me.” She took herself off in disgust to create her own studio in a remote village in Kent. For decades she worked on her own system of sound-synthesis called Oramics, lectured on the joys of electronic music in schools and colleges, and wrote visionary essays about the nature of sound, and its potential to lead to higher states of consciousness. Were it not for Oram, there would arguably be no Human League or Aphex Twin.
Oram wasn’t the only creative woman working in the Radiophonic Workshop. There was also Maddalena Fagandini, who joined in 1960 and stayed for around 10 years. In her score for a radio version of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée she came up with some remarkably ingenious effects, such as brushed piano strings for the sound of the Princess, and the sound of smashing glass played backwards for the moment when characters pass through the mirror. This was typical of the suck-it-and-see methods of the Workshop. Fagandini once had to roll around in a gravel bath to create the sounds of a fight – much to the amusement of her male colleagues.
Fagandini and Oram were optimists, consumed by their enthusiasms, for whom male disparagement was a spur to go further rather than give up in despair. Delia Derbyshire, the third of the Radiophonic Workshop’s remarkable women, was a more troubled soul. A Cambridge graduate, she joined the workshop having been rejected from record companies such as Decca because of her gender. She applied her mathematical knowledge to analysing real sounds and reconstituting them with sine wave generators, in a way that would have won the admiration of avant-garde electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, if they had heard of her – which they hadn’t, because Workshop composers, male or female, toiled away in complete anonymity.
Delia Derbyshire: creator of the Doctor Who theme tune. (CREDIT: BBC)
It was Derbyshire who actually created the most famous piece that ever emerged from the Workshop, the theme tune to Doctor Who. She did it by taking a simple score by Ron Grainer and transforming it into the uncanny electronic masterpiece we know, using methods that she took care never to reveal. Yet it was Grainer who got the credit and 100 per cent of the royalties – much to his own embarrassment. It was no surprise that Derbyshire became restless at the BBC, a sign of the depression that dogged her life. She left in 1973, and after a spell in a private studio worked in a bookshop in Cumbria and later for British Gas. Only at the end of her life did she return to electronic music, encouraged by the enthusiasm for her work shown by young musicians such as Sonic Boom.
By any standards these three women were extraordinary creative spirits. So why are their names not saluted in histories of modern music? The institutional sexism of the BBC in the Fifties and Sixties is only part of the explanation. The deeper reason is that the story of modernism was always rendered as a tale of heroic males, venturing forth into strange seas of artistic expression. In electronic music it was always Stockhausen or Pierre Schaeffer who were placed in the spotlight. Now at last the three women of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop are emerging from the shadows.
Bill’s teaser scene causes continuity problems for Steven Moffat
AN INTRODUCTION clip released in April has caused potential issues for Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat, due to its involving new character Bill running from Daleks.
The BBC used the two minute teaser as a way of unveiling the identity of Doctor Who’s newest companion (Bill, played by Pearl Mackie), and saw her and The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) fleeing from the infamous Daleks.
Fans were thrilled to learn about Pearl, and to be treated to a glimpse at what’s in store for series 10, but it seems that this scene may purely be for publicity purposes and might very well be ignored in the forthcoming plots of the tenth series.
“Knowing how pedantic I am, I’ll probably work [the intro scene] in somewhere,” he told Doctor Who Magazine. “But there is also an absolute possibility that I just won’t bother.”
Some fans have expressed concerns about this, arguing that continuity might suffer if there were a Dalek episode in the next season, as Bill states to never have seen one before in this clip.
Moffat didn’t seem fussed, adding: “I mean, so what? In a show that embraces alternate universes and changed timelines, how can you go wrong? I don’t know we might do it.”
The clip features Bill asking The Doctor what a Dalek is, to which he replies: “It’s the deadliest alien war machine ever devised.”
She doesn’t appear too worried by this, as she is seen quipping about how the Dalek is “too fat” to get through the door to them and that its “sucker” weaponry doesn’t seem very threatening.
The Doctor then tells her they “need to get back to the future” before finding themselves face-to-face with one of the Daleks.
Moffat has occasionally led Doctor Who fans up the garden path with regards to potential storylines in the past. Is he doing this again with this scene?
Season 10 of Doctor Who starts in 2017, but a Christmas special will air in December on BBC One.
