Doctor Who Takes An Ethical Stance Towards Alien Life – So Why Isn't He Vegan?

'So, you’ve run out of lentils, eh?’ Ray Burmiston/BBC

Since the Doctor Who series was rebooted in 2005 the television show has consistently presented the Doctor as a moral leader, a key element of which is his respectful relationship with other species. The Doctor expresses admiration and wonder for others, even when they threaten him or his human companions. Christopher Eccleston, who played the first relaunched Doctor, told the BBC that the new show retained “the central message of love for life in all its forms”. If this is the case, we have wondered, why isn’t the Doctor a vegan?

Peter Capaldi, who plays the latest incarnation of the Doctor, has not eaten meat on screen. This is a nonhuman character who does not appear eat other nonhumans, and in this regard he differs from his previous three incarnations (Matt Smith, David Tennant, and Eccleston) who were often seen eating dead animals or wearing dead animals’ skins. This is a partial departure from the Doctor’s behaviour during the original series, which ran from 1962 to 1989. The sixth Doctor (played by Colin Baker) became a vegetarian in the 1985 episode The Two Doctors after his companions were almost killed by a species who viewed humans as food animals.

But the Doctor’s vegetarianism was expressly abandoned by head writer Russell T Davies when the show returned in 2005. Davies explained that he wrote the Doctor’s vegetarianism out of the series because he wanted to make the Doctor more relatable to the audience. But the result is that the Doctor now displays some very confused ethics.

In episode Boom Town from 2005, Eccleston’s Doctor discusses issues about death and mercy with a condemned alien. The scene is set in a restaurant, and the Doctor orders steak and chips. In the episode The Age of Steel from 2006, Tennant’s Doctor expresses how much he enjoys eating meat hotdogs while acknowledging their similarity to what Cybermen unjustly do to humans. In his first episode in 2010, Smith’s Doctor famously ate fish fingers and custard to recover from the regeneration process. Yet in the Christmas episode that year he reacts with wonder and compassion when encountering flying fishes, who he seeks to save.

The Eccleston, Tennant and Smith Doctors have all been shown as enthusiastic consumers of some nonhuman species while at the same time trying to protect others. When the earth is under threat of destruction, the Doctor only ever seems to care about the loss of human lives that might result, and not the many other species living on Earth. In the episode “Cold Earth” from 2010, Smith’s Doctor becomes involved in negotiations for humans to “share” the planet with Silurians, a species of “homo reptilians” who lived on Earth before humans evolved. In the debate over whether there is room for both species, there is no acknowledgement that any species other than humans already live on the planet, or that they are kept and killed for the convenience of humans.

Capaldi’s Doctor hasn’t yet been shown eating meat like his predecessors. In his first episode in 2014 he even gently chided his companion Clara’s hypocrisy when she was disgusted by the farming of human body parts by an alien, saying: “You weren’t a vegetarian the last time I looked.” There’s been no overt statement that the Doctor has returned to his vegetarianism, but by conspicuously not eating meat Capaldi’s Doctor has at least brought back the moral consistency of the earlier series’ vegetarian Doctor. Twelve years after Davies’ script decision, it seems the Doctor does not need to eat other species in order for us to relate to the character.

As a primetime show aimed at children and adults with a history stretching back more than 50 years, Doctor Who reflects contemporary cultural and ethical norms through the stories it tells. The post-2005 show has been rightly credited for the diversity of its human characters – the new series about to begin sees the introduction of the Doctor’s first openly gay companion, and tipsters feel that the next Doctor may be a woman, or black, or a black woman. However, the modern series has not been so progressive in dealing with our inconsistent ethical relationship with other species, even if the 12th Doctor has gone further than most of his predecessors to demonstrate that he does indeed “love life in all its forms”.

About Today's Contributors: 

Kate Stewart, Principal Lecturer in Sociology, Nottingham Trent University and Matthew Cole, Associate Lecturer, The Open University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

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• The Doctor Who TARDISblend 100: The Pilot
• Steven Moffat Explains The Return Of John Simm's Master On 'Doctor Who'
• Peter Capaldi Thinks Doctor Who 'Isn't Human... And Reads The Guardian'
• Make Your Own Doctor Who Adventure

Here's How Doctor Who's Time Machine Measures Up With Real Instruments Of Space And Time

The TARDIS. Babbel1996/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

By Martin Archer, Queen Mary University of London

There’s no denying that we’ve seen some absolutely staggering accomplishments in physics in the past year or so, particularly in our ability to measure space and time with unprecedented levels of detail. But being a lifelong “Whovian” excited about Doctor Who returning to our screens once again, I wondered how these accomplishments stacked up to those of the fictional Time Lords.

The crowning achievement of the Doctor has to be the TARDIS, the blue box from the show that’s bigger on the inside and allows the Doctor and his companions to travel “all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will” as Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor once put it. But throughout the history of the show, the Doctor’s TARDIS has shown itself to be rather unreliable, regularly turning up at the wrong place or time. Given these faults we might think that the TARDIS isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.

While the show has featured many, often conflicting, descriptions of how the TARDIS works, the key to the Time Lords’ time travelling ability seems to be the “Eye of Harmony”, essentially a star in an eternal state of collapsing into a black hole. In terms of real science though, the same theory that predicted black holes – Einstein’s general relativity – has solutions which permit time travel (in fact one possible way of doing this has been given the name TARDIS).

Whether nature actually allows such solutions to exist is still an open debate among theoretical physicists, and even if time travel could happen we certainly don’t know how to build a time machine. So we’ll just have to compare the Doctor’s TARDIS with our best instruments of simply measuring time and space.

How good is the TARDIS?

What we really need to compare here are these instruments’ relative precision. A simple way of thinking of this is as the ratio of the smallest thing you can measure with an instrument to the largest. In the case of a metre ruler that would be 1 millimetre compared to 1,000 millimetres (a metre), or simply one in 1,000.

Measuring space
In terms of measuring space our best ruler by far is advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Gravitational waves are mysterious ripples in the fabric of space and time that travel across our universe at the speed of light – stretching space in one direction and shrinking it in the direction that is at right angles. LIGO was the experiment that last year directly detected the minute changes in distances travelled by light beams, caused by gravitational waves.

These changes in distance are some 1,000-10,000 times smaller than the size of the nucleus of an atom, and they’re detected over a four-kilometre distance. That’s a level of sensitivity that’s up to one part in 10²³ – a huge number consisting of a one with 23 zeros after it: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Now, considering the TARDIS’s playing field is “all of space”, it’s staggering that even when it turns up at the wrong place it simply manages to land on the right planet (usually Earth). The observable universe is some 10²⁷ metres in diameter while the Earth’s is a comparatively tiny 1.3m metres. So simply being able to find our planet within only the observable universe is a feat requiring some one in 10⁷⁰ relative precision. And that number only gets bigger when we consider how big the universe might extend beyond what’s actually visible.

Measuring time
When it comes to time, scientists have been developing new atomic clocks which are much better than the old Caesium ones that have been used to define what a second is. All these new clocks essentially count the number of waves of specific colours of visible light emitted by atoms – a unique property of each element. Our current best clock uses Ytterbium atoms and is stable enough to yield relative precision a little less than one in 10^18.

But how do you compare this to the TARDIS? As it covers everything that ever happened or ever will happen, we need to essentially find out when the universe will die to be able to make a comparison. It’s currently 13.8 billion-years-old, but that’s still a very long way ahead. Given our current understanding of the amount of matter and energy in the universe, it won’t be until some 10¹⁰⁰ years that all of the stars, planets and galaxies will have died, all protons and neutrons will have decayed and even all the supermassive black holes will have evaporated. This is what is known as the heat death of the universe.

Given that in the show, the TARDIS tends to turn up only a few years or a decade or so off the intended target, a ballpark figure for the TARDIS’s precision in time is around one in 10^100. So despite it seemingly looking a bit rubbish in the show from time to time, we’ve still got a long way to go before we can match it. This is certainly something I’ll be keeping in mind when watching the show.

About Today's Contributor:
Martin Archer, Space Plasma Physicist, Queen Mary University of London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

The Violent, Post-Truth 2017 Predicted In The Running Man? We're Living In It

‘It’s showtime!’ Movies in LA, CC BY-SA

By David Bishop, Edinburgh Napier University

Welcome to a world where fake news stories are used to manipulate public opinion. Dissent is no longer tolerated and all your communications are monitored; the economy is not functioning and reality TV is used to distract you from harsher realities. Welcome to 2017.

I don’t mean our 2017 but an imagined one from 30 years ago. This was the setting for 1987 movie The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bad news? Much of this action-adventure slugfest looks eerily prophetic now that we’re here for real.

In the film, Schwarzenegger plays police helicopter pilot Ben Richards in a 2017 when many people are living on the streets and food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. The movie begins with him refusing to fire on a food riot from his helicopter because the people are unarmed, with women and children caught up in the protest. He gets overpowered by colleagues and the rioters are massacred, with footage of the incident edited to make him the perpetrator – and a useful scapegoat.

The original.

Imprisoned for life, Richards is offered the chance to win his freedom by competing in the most popular TV programme in history, Running Man. This state-sponsored show pits contestants against high-profile hunters with extreme weaponry. It’s a Schwarzenegger vehicle from his 1980s heyday, so you can probably guess who wins.

The script by Steven E de Souza loosely adapts a 1982 novel of the same name by Richard Bachman, the pseudonym of horror author Stephen King. The source material is set in 2025 and far less heroic. It ends with Richards hijacking an aeroplane and flying it into the television company’s skyscraper headquarters – stop me if this is sounding in any way familiar.

The film adaptation is a product of its time, with 1980s props that look out of place in the fictional 2017 setting. People carry clipboards instead of tablet computers, use analogue phones rather than mobiles, and store their music on cassette. The Running Man does feature smart home technology, like voice-controlled coffee makers, but the computers are primitive. It’s the satirical touches that stand out most in this film, such as the president of the United States having his own theatrical agent.

When in Rome …
The central conceit of both novel and film – that those in power use mass entertainment to distract the population from reality – is part of a long tradition. It dates all the way back to the Roman empire when the masses were appeased with free wheat and arena spectacles, a tactic described as panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

One of the first writers to transplant this notion to television was Quartermass creator Nigel Kneale in his 1968 play for BBC Two, The Year of the Sex Olympics. It envisaged a dystopian future where the elite maintains control over the people by broadcasting a constant stream of pornography and trash television.

Kneale effectively predicted the rise of reality TV programmes like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here; and much other science fiction has drawn on the same theme. It appears, for example, in Doctor Who in the 1985 adventure Vengeance on Varos – set in a totalitarian world where torture and executions are televised to amuse and divert the masses – and more recently in The Hunger Games trilogy.

The additional element that makes The Running Man even more resonant right now is fake news. The fake footage of Richards’ helicopter massacre is replayed to the live audience in the game show studio to coerce them into believing Schwarzenegger’s character is a liar, a murderer and a threat to everyone. The programmers then do the same thing to his sidekick, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), before later faking their televised deaths during the game itself.

It’s not unlike how social media and even some broadcasters have been guilty of distributing and promoting fake news in recent months, especially during the US presidential election. When psychotic Running Man host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) interviews studio audience members in the movie, their simple-minded responses echo footage of real American voters dismissing reality for what they’ve been told on TV or via alt-right news sites.

Muscular politics
Meanwhile, The Running Man cast included not one but two men who would improbably become governors of American states. Jesse Ventura, then best known as a professional wrestler, appears as gameshow veteran Captain Freedom. In 1999, Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota, serving a full four-year term.

The Governator. EPA

Schwarzenegger, a former bodybuilder, was then elected governor of California in 2003 and re-elected in 2006. And having starred in a movie about the potential dangers of reality TV, on January 2 he will become host of Celebrity Apprentice in the US. The person he replaces? A real estate tycoon called Donald Trump who will become the president of the United States in the coming days, despite losing the popular vote.

Trump has appointed as his chief strategist and senior counsellor Stephen Bannon. Until recently, Bannon was executive chair of Breitbart News, a right-wing website accused of massaging facts to promote its agenda and win the election for his new boss. And lest we forget, one key part of Trump’s mandate is to revive an economy that has never recovered from the financial crisis of 2007-08.

Put it all together and the 2017 of The Running Man doesn’t look very far away.


About Today's Contributor:
David Bishop, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Edinburgh Napier University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Is The End Of Time In Sight For Doctor Who?

Image via BBC

By Ivan Phillips, University of Hertfordshire

When this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, airs on BBC One on December 25, fans of a certain age will be watching with some trepidation. This is not just because their hero, a stranger to latex and six-packs, will team up with a Superman-style character called The Ghost. It is also because there are whispers of crisis around the 53-year-old series.

In a recent visit to a well-known toy store, this particular middle-aged child was struck by the absence from the shelves of any Doctor Who merchandise. No action figures, no lunch boxes, no sonic screwdrivers. Star Wars was everywhere. Like the recent announcement that the Cardiff-based Doctor Who Experience will close next year, this seemed ominous. It felt like 1985 all over again.

In 1985, the original Doctor Who Exhibition closed its doors on Blackpool’s Golden Mile. This was also the year when, following the first season of Colin Baker’s Doctor, the show was put “on hold” for 18 months. When it returned with the gloomily-titled 14-part portmanteau tale The Trial of a Time Lord, the programme’s days were numbered. Within three years, despite the efforts of a new Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and an ambitious team of fresh writers, it would fade from production again. No announcement, no ceremony: it simply disappeared. Apart from the curate’s egg of the 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann, it remained off-screen for 16 years.

A new broom?
Christmas specials aside, Doctor Who has been on hold again. When it returns in spring 2017, it will have been 16 months since the last season. There have been downbeat rumblings during the hiatus, most recently when it was claimed that the BBC has instructed Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall to be the new broom that sweeps clean the decks when he takes over from Steven Moffat as showrunner next year. The talk is of “a brand new show”, with Peter Capaldi destined for rapid regeneration and new companion Bill (Pearl Mackie) being allowed only the briefest of journeys on board the TARDIS.

The BBC is said to be frustrated by the decline in ratings over recent seasons and a concurrent collapse in merchandise sales. If reports are accurate, Chibnall is tasked with putting a more youthful, “dashing” actor into the role alongside a young female companion.

The ideal is a version of the David Tennant-Billie Piper coupling of 2005-6, which would seem to preclude the oft-discussed possibilities of a black, Asian and/or female Doctor. There are also suggestions that Chibnall is being directed to simplify the storytelling in the series, moving away from the elaborate narrative convolutions that some have attributed to Moffat.

Bill (Pearl Mackie), the Doctor’s new companion. BBC

The implications are that Capaldi, undoubtedly a fine actor, is too old for a modern Who audience, and that Moffat is too baroque a tale-teller for tea-time family viewing. If nothing else, this points to a perceived staleness in the franchise. But the state of decay has undoubtedly been exaggerated.

Under Russell T Davies, Doctor Who reinvented the cross-generational television audience when it returned in 2005 and, by any standard of 21st century broadcasting, it continues to gain impressive ratings on a global scale. Moffat has noted that overnight figures for television audiences are misleading in the digital age, with consolidated data (after catch-up, repeats, and so on) telling a more positive tale. He has also, with Capaldi, lamented the BBC’s scheduling of Doctor Who to a later, family-unfriendly, autumnal slot during recent seasons, nudged to 8.25pm to make room for Strictly Come Dancing.

Regeneration
It is undeniable that Doctor Who has benefited from change. Change is at the heart of its story, embodied (literally) in the character of its hero. But it is equally arguable that the BBC has never quite learned to love its most unlikely success story, that it has always seemed slightly embarrassed by the popularity of this eccentric myth concocted by committee in 1963.

Any of the corporation’s executives who have forgotten this will perhaps also have forgotten that doubts about the age of the leading actor are a recurrent theme (Peter Davison was “too young”, as was Matt Smith). They might also have forgotten that one of the most popular companions remains Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate, who was approaching 40 when she first took the role, and that another, Sarah Jane Smith, won over a whole new generation of children when the actress who portrayed her, the late Elisabeth Sladen, was already in her 60s. Doctor Who audiences are not as shallow as some people seem to believe.

The Doctor Who Christmas Special. BBC

Despite much criticism, the Moffat era has featured some of the finest writing in the show’s long history (not least the 50th Anniversary Special, The Day of the Doctor) and Capaldi’s Doctor has appeared in some remarkable and edgy stories (Heaven Sent, for instance). Both Moffat and Capaldi have a lot to deliver before the new regime takes over, and the actor could do so much more in the role if given the opportunity. Meanwhile, the continuing vitality of the extended Doctor Who narrative has been demonstrated by the critical and popular success of Class, the Patrick Ness-created spin-off drama for teens that premiered recently on BBC3. It is a peculiar staleness that produces work like this.

Anyone hoping for a revolution in Doctor Who will not be disappointed. The series has been in a condition of permanent revolution since the moment its first producer, Verity Lambert, chose to ignore the strictures of her boss Sydney Newman against “bug-eyed monsters” and allowed the Daleks to trundle into view. As John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado noted over 30 years ago, the series discovered “television’s recipe for success” very early: “something different but something the same”.

Chibnall, like Moffat, like Davies, like Capaldi, Tennant, and many others involved in the triumphant reboot, is a lifelong Doctor Who fan. His arrival should remind us of the full version of the old adage: a new broom sweeps clean but an old broom knows all the corners. There are lives in the old Doctor yet.

About Today's Contributor:

Ivan Phillips, Associate Dean of School (Learning and Teaching), University of Hertfordshire

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

What Superheroes Looked Like In 2015

The ubiquitous superhero finally seems to be growing up and moving on. Eneas De Troya

By Liam Burke, Swinburne University of Technology

The Golden Age of Comic Book Filmmaking began in 2000 when Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) dragged superheroes to the centre of popular culture. Today superpowered protagonists are as familiar to cinemagoers as sticky floors and popcorn.

Such awareness saw studios in 2015 going bigger (Avengers: Age of Ultron), smaller (Ant-Man), or back to the beginning (the erroneously-titled Fantastic Four) to reinvigorate the genre.

Somewhere between the mash-ups and redundant reboots, more interesting work has started to emerge. The comic book adaptation, like all good teenagers, is demonstrating new-found maturity. So let us take a look back at the trends and triumphs of this year in superheroes.

Happy New Year To All!

Happy New Year to all our readers and friends from Twitter, this blog's Facebook Page, the Bonehill Zone's FB Page, Google Plus, Triberr, Scoop.it, and every other social media sites I'm a member of... 

Without your support and encouragement, this blog would probably still not be around anymore, so a big thank you to all of you and a very happy, productive, out of this world, and fascists/Nazis/Joshua Bonehill/ Donald Trump/Katie Hopkins free, year 2016 to everyone!

Happy New Year To All!

I would like to wish a very happy new year to all our readers and friends from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Triberr, Scoop.it, and every other social media sites I'm a member of... 

Without your support and encouragement, this blog would probably still not be around anymore, so a big thank you to all of you and a very happy, productive, fascist free, and out of this world year 2015 to everyone!

Loup Dargent

Doctor Who Quiz: How Well Do You Know The Tenth Doctor?

"Ten questions on Doctor number ten - oh yes!"

Perhaps, "How much do you remember about David Tennant's Tenth Doctor?" could have been a more appropriate title for that quiz as we're now pretty close to see the Twelfth Doctor in action, but it's still rather cool as a little trip down the Whovian memory lane... Oh, and, as a bonus, we learn (Unless you already knew it, obviously) the name David Tennant was born with.

Which New 'Doctor Who' Character Am I?

All of time and space await — find out which TARDIS occupant best fits your personality!

The Clock Has Struck Twelve... Happy Whovian Year!

"And now it's time for one last bow, like all your other selves.
Eleven's hour is over now, clock is striking Twelve's."
Extract from Thoughts on a Clock" by Eric Richie, Jr.

That's it, we are now in 2014!

It's a brand new year... with a brand new Doctor Who (with a brand new batch of regenerations and all). Not a bad start, is it?

So, we wish all this blog's readers, friends, supporters and contributors a very happy new year!

All the best for 2014!

Loup Dargent

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Holy Regeneration, Batman!

Wow! If you needed another good reason to visit the site DeviantArt.com, the comic we're showing in today's post is definitely the one that will convince you once and for all...

That mother of all 'what if' comics by Stjepan Sejic is not only hilarious, it also actually makes sense. How else would the Dark Knight be still looking so good considering he's been fighting crime since 1939? 

The utility belt part is sheer genius... Great Tardis reference! Love it!

Enjoy!

Loup Dargent

PS: Kudos to the peeps at GeekTyrant.com for the heads up...

Source: Deviantart

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Which New 'Doctor Who' Companion Am I? [Warning: I Might Have Had A Sex Change While Taking The Quiz!]

The full title should really have been "If I was not 'The Loupster' already (the Loupster is not one of the Doctors' companions and he's got companions himself), etc... etc... etc... which new 'Doctor' Who' companion would I be?", but... err... it would have been a tad too long, wouldn't it?

Anyway, this post is about the results I've got in the BuzzFeed's quiz "Which New 'Doctor Who' Companion Are You?". I'd already taken the "Which 'Doctor Who' Are You?" one, so I thought "why not take a quiz about the Doctor's companions as well?" After all, it was all in good fun and, let's face it, the chances of not being Captain Jack Harkness were rather tiny, weren't they? 

I mean, hey, I did make a point of answering all the questions in a manly manner, so what could go wrong?

Nothing much... except that, according to the quiz, I'm now one of the Doctor's female companions, d'oh!

The Fall of the Eleventh Doctor: 5 First Signs of Greatness

While the following syndicated article from www.throughacitygeekly.com was written before the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special was aired (on a global scale and all), I do believe that it is actually still a very timely (and interesting) written piece as it is about Matt Smith leaving the TV show and how the writer of this post warmed up to the Eleventh Doctor.

Enjoy!

Loup Dargent

The Fall of the Eleventh: 5 First Signs of Greatness (via www.throughacitygeekly.com)

This year, midnight will strike Eleven as we bid farewell to Matt Smith and welcome Peter Capaldi as the Doctor in TV’s timeless (sorry) Doctor Who. I’ve been through this before: the shock, the anger, the bargaining, more anger and tears, then…

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Doctor Who: The Many Loves Of The Doctor

Doctor Who: The many loves of The Doctor (via The Christian Science Monitor)

How many loves has The Doctor loved?(Adrian Rogers/BBC/AP) There’s a lot of hate in Doctor Who. The Daleks, un-anthropomorphic antagonists, feel nothing but it. There is also a frequent, terrible absence of any emotion at all. Cybermen – humans…

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"Doctor Who" Zips Around The Planet In 50th Anniversary TV Special

"Doctor Who" zips around the planet in 50th anniversary TV special (via AFP)

TV's most famous Time Lord popped up simultaneously in nearly 100 countries on Saturday -- in a special 50th anniversary episode of the BBC's cult sci-fi series "Doctor Who". Fittingly, for a two-hearted, time-travelling alien who reincarnates every…

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Celebrating 50 Years Of Doctor Who [Videos Included]

Celebrating 50 years of Dr. Who 
(via CNN Video)

Thousands of fans from around the world will help Doctor Who celebrate his 50th anniversary this weekend.

Doctor Who Turns 50

(via AP Video)

To celebrate the 50th birthday of "Doctor Who," the current doctor Matt Smith met fans and talked about his final series. 

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Google Celebrates Doctor Who 50th Anniversary With A Doodle And A Game

Google celebrates Doctor Who 50th anniversary (via The Inquirer)

IT PROBABLY hasn't escaped anyone's notice in Britain that Doctor Who will reach its half century anniversary on Saturday. As well as a feature length telly episode featuring at least three Doctors Who, there has been no shortage of fans waiting to…

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Which 'Doctor Who' Are You?

It was time, really, for a more updated test, as the "What Doctor Who Character Are You?" one we've posted in 2009 was starting to be a bit redundant. Okay, I was pleased with the results at the time (I was the 4th Doctor after all!), but as the test was not including the 11th one, I was wondering how different the results would be if he had been included... and, thanks to the BBC America site, I now have the answer.

Nine Long-Lost 'Doctor Who' Episodes Found... In Nigeria

Doctor Who - Patrick Troughton as The Doctor

Nine missing episodes of the cult BBC science-fiction drama "Doctor Who" have been found in a television station storeroom in Nigeria, nearly half a century after they were last seen, the broadcaster said Friday.

Among the recovered 1960s footages are most of the classic story "The Web of Fear," a black and white adventure in which the Time Lord, then played by Patrick Troughton, battles a robot yeti in London's underground train system.

The tapes were found gathering dust in a television station in the turbulent Nigerian city of Jos, a flashpoint of Islamist violence.

The trove, described by the BBC as the "largest haul of missing episodes recovered in the last 3 decades," also includes the 6-part story, "The Enemy of the World."

"It's thrilling," said Mark Gatiss, author of recent "Doctor Who" episodes.

"Every single avenue seemed to have been exhausted, every now and then something turns up -- but to have two virtually complete stories out of the blue is absolutely incredible."

The BBC destroyed many of the drama's original tapes in the 1960s and 1970s but some were copied for sale to foreign broadcasters.

⏩ Despite the find, 97 episodes remain lost

The episodes were uncovered by Phillip Morris, director of Television International Enterprises Archive.

"The tapes had been left gathering dust in a storeroom at a television relay station in Nigeria," he told the BBC, adding that they were "just sitting on the shelf."

"I remember wiping the dust off the masking tape on the canisters and my heart missed a beat as I saw the words, 'Doctor Who.' When I read the story code, I realized I'd found something pretty special," Morris said.

The tapes originally went from Britain to Hong Kong and then on to a series of television stations in Nigeria as part of the distribution systems that operated at the time.

Morris said he had been "lucky" to find the tapes intact given the high temperatures in Nigeria.

"Fortunately in this case they had been kept in the optimum condition," said Morris.

Morris added that it was "probably the largest haul of missing episodes recovered in the last 25, 30 years."

The new programmes will be available on iTunes from today and will be released on DVD later.

Fiona Eastwood, director of consumer products, BBC Worldwide, said: "We are thrilled with the recent discovery of The Web Of Fear and The Enemy Of The World and we're very happy to be launching re-mastered versions of these treasured episodes to fans as we celebrate the 50th year of Doctor Who."

The adventures of Doctor Who -- a time travelling, humanoid alien who traverses the universe in Tardis spacecraft -- have maintained a loyal following since they were first aired in 1963.

⏩ Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, best known as the abusive spin doctor in the political satire "The Thick of It", was named in August as the 12th actor to play the role.

SOURCE: Agence France-Presse

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