Doctor Who
Series Four
Preview

Rejoice! For another thirteen weeks of exciting telly brilliance is hitting our screens in the form of the fourth series of Russell T Davies’ revamped Doctor Who. Their travels through time and space in the Tardis take the Doctor and Donna to ancient Pompeii, the 1920’s, away to distant worlds, and inevitably right into peril at every turn. Our resident Doctor Who fanatic Ian Phillips grins like an idiot and gives us a quick run down of what’s in store over the coming weeks…

Episode 1
Partners In Crime
Little fat babies are flobbing off dieting humans left, right and centre. This nice opener to series four offers a jolly little adventure to kick things off with a new kind of CGI creature; the Adipose. Not only the start of another brilliant series of Doctor Who but also loads more of David Tennant dazzling on screen, Catherine Tate is back and reassuringly much less annoying, plus the brilliant Bernard Cribbins returns playing Donna’s granddad and also the surprise appearance of a certain blonde!

Episode 2
The Fires Of Pompeii
Pompeii… AD 79… Volcano Day!
Donna challenges the Doctor on his time-travelling morals offering a great chance for the show to really examine the central themes of the programme. Knowing the magnitude of the historical event that’s about to happen, should the citizens of Pompeii be warned of the eruption and their impending demise?
Beyond the brain churning complexities of Time Lord ethics there are Pyrovillian rock monsters, location filming in Rome, a bonkers crazy soothsayer lady and a cheery reference for anyone who’s ever encountered the Cambridge Latin course textbooks (Caecillius est pater… Metella est mater!).

Episode 3
Planet Of The Ood
The spag-bol tentacle faced subservients return in this prequel to 2006’s The Satan Pit two-parter showing us a little more of the history of these curiously servile aliens. Tim McInnerny (Blackadder) represents the morally dubious face of corporate humanity as events on the Ood-Sphere begin to go a little awry.
Also an opportunity for the special effects departments to shine (as if that doesn’t happen every week!) with a visit to an icy alien planet, the first of a number of planets visited this year, and a bit of quality quarry work.

Episode 4
The Sontaran Stratagem
Episode 5
The Poison Sky
Diminutive spud-faced warmongers the Sontarans step forward to join the growing list of sexed up classic baddies in modern Who. The Sontarans are a short, ugly and violent clone race. Rumours for these episodes suggest we’ll also see an evil Martha Jones clone as last year’s Tardis traveller makes a welcome return, and she’s now working as a medical officer for UNIT. UNIT has popped up in the peripheral a few times since Doctor Who’s comeback in 2005 but this time they take centre stage, they’re a military Earth defence group the Doctor has had a chequered past with so expect the him to have a few things to say about their methods. Helen Raynor puts the words on the page following on from the two-parter she wrote last year with the Daleks up the Empire State Building.
Guest starring Christopher Ryan (Mike from The Young Ones) as General Staal, one of the Sontarans.

Episode 6
The Doctor’s Daughter
As episode titles go you’ve got to try pretty damn hard to drop a bombshell as big as this one, but predictably enough, all is not as it seems about the Doctor’s daughter. There’s a special connection here as Georgia Moffett who’s playing the titular Jenny is actually the real life daughter of Fifth Doctor Peter Davison. Hold back on any accusations of nepotism though as Georgia didn’t just walk into the role, she’s auditioned for the show a couple of times before landing this part and was first considered for the part of Rose Tyler. The character of Jenny will ‘have a real impact on the Doctor’ says Russell T Davies, while producer Phil Collinson calls it ‘a role no-one will ever forget’.
One writer who’s had a sneak peak at the episode says we’ll see ‘one of the single most audacious moments in Doctor Who’s 45-year-history... cheeky, hilarious and brave’.
Joe Dempsie (Chris from Skins) also appears as the leader of a weary bunch of soldiers who don’t last long… plus we meet bubble blowing aliens, the Hath.

Episode 7
The Unicorn And The Wasp
This year’s celebrity historical focuses on Agatha Christie and is written by Gareth Roberts who penned last year’s Shakespeare adventure. For The Shakespeare Code Roberts zoned in on the bard’s famous lost play so it’s no surprise that for this year’s story he took advantage of Christie’s real life disappearance for the episode. In 1926 Agatha Christie mysteriously vanished, she was found ten days later with no recollection of what had occurred in the intervening days. You’d think a giant alien wasp would kind of stick in the memory a bit wouldn’t you!?!
Loads of classic murder mystery ingredients are thrown into the pot; a country house, a butler, vintage cars, a vicar, a body in the library and death by lead piping!
Fenella Woolgar stars as the mystery writer alongside Felicity Kendall as Lady Clemency Eddison.

Episode 8
Silence In The Library
Episode 9
Forest Of The Dead
Steven Moffatt is a bloody fantastic writer anyway but give him Doctor Who and he becomes a blindingly talented TV alchemist! The genius of Moffat has previously brought us the ‘are you my mummy?’ gas masked Empty Child, 2006’s delightful temporal flitting in The Girl In The Fireplace and the barnstorming brilliance of last year’s Weeping Angels in Blink. This year we are urged to ‘count the shadows’ if we want to live! The production team are tight-lipped and rather excited about these episodes so it’s sure to be another slice of award winning excellence from the only writer on the Doctor Who team whose scripts are never tampered with.
Alex Kingston (ER), Colin Salmon (Die Another Day), Talulah Riley (St. Trinians) and Steve Pemberton (The League of Gentlemen) are just some of the stars in this double episode story which revolves around a huge old abandoned library and the many mysteries within.

Episode 10
Midnight
Lesley Sharp lends her deft skills to the show as the Doctor and Donna land the Tardis on the leisure world of the planet Midnight. Sharp plays a holidaymaker that our heroes meet on the planet shortly after arrival and before the shit hits the fan as it inevitably will. Golden spas, diamond landscapes, anti-gravity restaurants... it all sounds lovely but the Doctor is left powerless and terrified as the knocking on the wall begins.
Lindsey Coulson (Carol Jackson from Eastenders) and Second Doctor’s son David Troughton also star.

Episode 11
Turn Left
Since Doctor Who started producing an annual Christmas special the production schedule got a little hectic, so each year we now traditionally get an episode where the Doctor appears only very briefly so that they can record two episodes simultaneously. Russell T Davies wrote Love and Monsters which was the first ‘Doctor-lite’ ‘double-banked’ episode in 2006 splitting fandom with its Blue Peter competition monster and hints of getting oral pleasure from a paving slab. Last year’s ‘double-banker’ episode produced arguably one of the best and most ingenious pieces of television drama ever made with Steven Moffatt’s Blink. This year writing duties go back to the boss, Russell T Davies, and this instalment sees the much hyped return of Billie Piper as Rose dashing between alternate dimensions. Also reappearing is Chipo Chung who played the cute, blue and beetley mandibled Chantho in 2007’s Utopia, this time she uses her own face.

Episode 12
TBA - episode title contains spoilers and is currently top secret!!
Episode 13
Journey’s End
‘A huge climax’, ‘absolutely massive’ and ‘a bit fanwanky’ are just a few of the comments from the production team about this year’s series finale. There’ll be companions aplenty as a gaggle of the Doctor’s friends join forces to fight the Daleks. Captain Jack, Rose, Martha, Jackie, Mickey, Pete and Sarah-Jane are all there with even ex-Prime Minister Harriet Jones putting in an appearance. The Daleks aren’t the only baddies to be worrying about as the fourth series comes to a close; whilst the production team bent over backwards with cloak and dagger filming and a ton of smoke and mirrors PR deflection to hide the identity of the season’s ‘big bad’, all clues point towards the reappearance of a certain shouty megalomaniac warlord with a black tongue and an eye in his forehead.