The Guardian has video from the Edinburgh International Television Festival where Doctor Who’s Grande Fromage Steven Moffat revealed that the 2011 season of the show will be split to effectively create two seasons from one, with the new season beginning at Easter as before, building over seven episodes to a crescendo then after the cliffhanger returning in the autumn for the remaining slice of the usual 13 episodes. Moffat explained that this allows them to do a really big cliffhanger in the first half of the sort they normally couldn’t end a season on because it would leave the viewers hanging for far too long for the conclusion, but as the gap now would only be a few months to autumn they feel they can have it now (which sounds pretty good!). And as Moffat acknowledges, it also gives them a double in terms of marketing the new season – two ‘first’ night launches and up the hype, spreading the show out more over the year meaning that there isn’t such a huge, single gap between the end of a season and the start of the next, it’s all sounding like 2011 Doctor Who is going to be a serious blast.
(Karen Gillan in a screengrab from one of the other Guardian videos from the Edinburgh TV Fest)
Also on the Guardian’s Edinburgh TV Festival coverage there are more Who related videos (sadly not embeddable, so best I can do is point you to the links), including Karen Gillan and Steven Moffat answering questions such as why does the Doctor have a sexy companion (tradition, as Moffat points out) and Moffat discussing how he found Karen and Matt for their roles, with Moffat commenting that they actually had in mind to have an actor a bit older than Tennant originally, but that Matt was “like a young man built by old men from memory.” (tip of the fez to Richard Nelson for the original link)
August 29th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Oh hell yes!
Now to making the BBC sell their DVDs in Denmark. :3
August 29th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
On one hand, yay, that’s kinda great. Two blocks of Who, structured as to (hopefully) avoid the midseries drag. On the other hand, boo hiss, surely? I mean, it sounds like a surefire way to reach Timelord Burnout, right? For us, for the production staff, for the lead actors?
Worse, one can’t help but wonder if it’s a case of the BBC giving up on finding anything else – anything new – to occupy that primetime Saturday teatime slot. I mean, why risk an untested concept (or even a hoary old retread, like Hood/Merlin) in these austere economic times, right?
Only, what happens when Doctor Who goes away again?
//\Oo/\\