DenOfGeek.us – 10th September, 2013

By Mike Cecchini.

Doctor Who: The Scream of the Shalka was a flash-animation webcast from 2003 that featured Richard E. Grant as The Doctor and Derek Jacobi as The Master.

A scene from “Scream Of The Shalka”.

While there’s plenty of fanfare surrounding the Doctor’s fiftieth anniversary, there was little surrounding the fortieth. If you thought things looked grim for Doctor Who around the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary, that was nothing! In fact, at the time, it was doubtful that the Doctor would ever return to TV. “Scream of the Shalka” was a six part webcast intended to mark the fortieth anniversary, and hopefully kick off a series of web-based Doctor Who animated adventures. While the animated series was not to be (and was soon supplanted by the Doctor Who revival we’ve come to know and love), “Scream of the Shalka” is a remarkably fun and appropriate Doctor Who adventure, despite it’s rather limited production values.

Why? Well, you can’t go wrong with a good cast. Richard E. Grant voices this incarnation of the Doctor (The 8.5th Doctor?) and does a marvelous job. Really, Grant would have been a fine choice for a live-action Doctor, and still would be (although we’ve recently seen him on the show as The Great Intelligence/Walter Simeon). Visually, this Doctor looks a bit like Neal Adams’ classic representations of Batman villain, Ra’s Al Ghul, and Grant plays him as both gruff and haughty and, at times, strangely ebullient (when he starts singing tunes from Cabaret, things get wacky…but it serves the story!).

The real hidden gem here is Derek Jacobi as The Master, who is actually the Doctor’s “companion” in this. Wait…what? Don’t worry, all will be made clear if you watch this adventure. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s a good time. Of course, we later got to see Jacobi as The Master in the “proper” Doctor Who episode, “Utopia.” Interestingly enough, while most of these animated characters are relatively faithful representations of their voice actor’s faces, The Master is a little closer to his iconic “Roger Delgado” look. Not complaining…merely an observation. The story also serves as the origin story for how Alison Cheney, voiced by Sophie Okonedo, becomes the Doctor’s more traditional companion, so those who are concerned about some insane shift in the usual Doctor Who dynamic shouldn’t worry!

“Scream of the Shalka” is written by Paul Cornell, author of several Doctor Who novels and comic books (not to mention that he’s the current writer of Marvel Comics’ ongoing Wolverine series, was the writer of the criminally underrated and short-lived Saucer Country series for Vertigo, and has written a stack of other cool series for Marvel, DC, and others). “Scream” plays like “proper Doctor Who” for the most part, and it’s kind of a shame that Grant’s Doctor isn’t recognized as canon. If you can look past the rather stark production values of the flash animation (and they do an admirable job of using these limitations to their advantage), you’re in for a treat!

The DVD is chock full of extras and mini-documentaries, and considering what strange little bits of Doctor Who history these are, they’re really worth a look. “Carry on Screaming” is all about the making of the show, and is full of self-deprecating humor by all involved, as they recount the difficulties of bringing Doctor Who to animation at a time when the character was experiencing a serious lull in popularity. Even “Interweb of Fear,” a look at the BBC’s evolution with the internet (and Doctor Who’s presence on it) is remarkably entertaining and amusing.

The DVD will see release on September 17th. While certainly not essential for casual fans of the show, it will appeal to more than just the completists. Modern fans looking to broaden their historical perspective on the Doctor and friends would do well to check it out, and hardcore fans should absolutely devour the DVD within hours of release!

Mike Cecchini – DenOfGeek.us

sfx.co.uk – 9th September, 2013

Doctor Who “Blood Of The Robots”.

By Ian Berriman

An animated Richard E Grant from “Scream Of The Shalka”.

Author Simon Clark has given SFX more details of a Doctor Who story he was commissioned to write a decade ago.

Back in July 2003, the news broke that finally, the BBC were making new Doctor Who, with the casting of an official Ninth Doctor announced… no, not Christopher Eccleston, but Richard E Grant.

Created to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary, “Scream Of The Shalka” (which is getting a DVD release on 16 September) was a Flash animation (six episodes, each of 15 minutes), hosted on the Beeb’s Doctor Who website. By the time the first instalment went live in November, it had been rather undercut by the announcement, in September, of the series’ imminent return to our TV screens.

Further animations were being planned, and since it took a while for the producers of the television version to put the kibosh on all that, for a while work continued on a second story: “Blood Of The Robots”, another six-parter, written by horror novelist Simon Clark. It was a dream job for the author, who’s a life-long fan of the series.

“Doctor Who has been the video track of my life,” Clarke explains. “I was five when the first episode aired and I’ve seen every episode since. Somewhere emblazoned on my neurons must be memories of all those mythic lost episodes. When I was five or six I wrote to the BBC asking them to send me a Dalek. They didn’t, but they did send me a signed photograph of Bill Hartnell, which I still have on my shelf beside me.”

Clark suspects that he was approached back in 2003 because around that time he was writing The Dalek Factor, a Doctor Who novella for Telos Publishing.

“Perhaps the producers got wind of this. I was told about the animated Doctor Who, and asked to submit a very brief outline. They liked what they saw and I was then asked to submit a more detailed synopsis. On the basis of this I was given a contract to write the scripts.”

The synopsis Clark used in his first script gives a good flavour of what the finished story would have been like:

“A blend of adventure, drama and humour. The Doctor arrives to find a world full of intelligent, sensitive robots that have been abandoned by their human owners, who are too squeamish to ‘kill’ them when they’re obsolete. Now ruthless salvage squads are hunting the robots in order to make room for human settlers forced to migrate from their dangerously over-crowded home planet.”

“There would have been some frightening elements, and a dash of gruesomeness too,” the writer explains. “I’d planned shocks for the viewer, too, as it struck me that, back then, people watching a drama on a computer would mean they were sitting much closer to the screen than a TV, so there could be exciting ways of creating a much more intense impact.”

“There was also scope to have things happen in the animated Doctor Who that couldn’t have been done in the classic TV episodes. For example, one of the robots dumped on the scrapyard planet was a Funeralbot. He’d been junked because his pneumatics were at fault and instead of gently lowering the coffin into the grave it always ended up flipping the coffin high into the air and out of the cemetery. My little homage to Robot Wars!”

Derek Jacobi voice The Master in “Scream Of The Shalka”.

Clark knew which actors had been cast in the lead roles, and was particularly excited to be writing for Derek Jacobi, who in “Scream Of The Shalka” played a version of the Master whose consciousness now resides in a robot body, confined to the TARDIS.

“I’ve been in awe of Jacobi since I saw him in I, Claudius,” Clark says. “He has such a wonderful melodic voice. Right from the start, I thought of having the Master talking about his favourite tipples, just so I could have the great actor voicing the words Merlot, Amontillado and so on in such a resonant way.”

Clark’s work was quite advanced by the time the axe finally fell.

“The entire storyline was complete, and I’d written three scripts and started on the fourth when I got the call that sent my heart dropping like a stone.”

So, is there any chance of the story emerging in some other form some day?

“I don’t know,” says Clark. “I guess that isn’t in my hands, but the detailed storyline and three scripts are complete. It would just be a case of blowing away an accumulation of interstellar dust and work could begin on completing ‘Blood Of The Robots.’”

Ian Berriman.

National Post – 9th September, 2013

ABOVE: Cast and crew of the film Dom Hemingway.
From left: Director Richard Shepard, actors Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demian Bichir, Emilia Clarke and Madalina Ghenea.
Picture – Galit Rodan/The Canadian Press

Five things we learned at the press conference for Dom Hemingway, starring Jude Law and Richard E. Grant.

By Nathalie Atkinson

1. Like Dickie, Richard E. Grant has at least one friend like Dom who is awful.
“The nature of friendship is such that even when they are intolerable, you love them,” he said by way of example about someone he has known for 25 years (we bet his friends are counting backwards …).

2. The opening scene was also the first one they shot.
“The first scene, that sort of took my breath away the most,” Law said. “I think that one of my requests to Richard was to do that scene first. It was just sort of to set the bar.”

3. They don’t hand out Oscars for comedy roles often, but maybe they should.
“I feel like it is one of the few, certainly not the first, comedies that I have ever done,” Law said. “You have to be more real in comedy than in drama or tragedy. The comedy comes out of the ridiculousness and awkwardness. It was a challenge because I had to really nurture and enjoy the rhythm of the script that Richard wrote.”

4. Less (time) is more.
“I wanted to shoot this movie quickly because I wanted the energy of Dom,” Shepard said. “We might have had more complex shots … but I think it wouldn’t have been the same scene.”

5. Bonus: Some stars don’t mind aging (i.e. the men)
A reporter tactfully asked Jude Law how it felt to be in the stage of his career playing a man of a certain age (old enough to have not only an adult daughter but a grandchild). Law, just as tactfully, said that he relished it, particularly when it’s Emilia Clarke playing his first daughter. “Parts can get more and more interesting and challenging.”

Dom Hemingway stars Richard E. Grant, Jude Law, Demian Bichir, Emilia Clarke, and Madalina Ghenea. Directed by Richard Shepard.

Below is the TIFF Press Conference for Dom Hemingway. Please note that it’s a 45 minute video so the file size is fairly large at just under 150 MB.

Below is the Q&A session following the World Premiere of Dom Hemingway at TIFF. Again its a fairly large file at around 82 MB.

…And Richard signing autographs at the event.

After finishing filming in Berlin for the latest series of Hotel Secrets, REG has posted another cool picture of himself via his Twitter feed:

“Final day in Berlin and leaning on the remnants if that historic wall.”

DigitalSpy.co.uk – 28th August, 2013

By Morgan Jeffery

Robbie Williams was briefly considered to play the Doctor in a Doctor Who online episode.

Prior to the sci-fi drama’s return to BBC One in 2005, Richard E Grant voiced the Time Lord in animated series ‘Scream of the Shalka’, which was released via the show’s official website.

However, a documentary on the animation’s DVD release reveals that ‘Candy’ singer Williams was considered for the lead role, claims Blogtor Who.

“Because we were reaching for the mainstream, I actually thought, ‘He’s one of the most famous people in Britain’ – it would actually get us an enormous kick of attention,” writer Paul Cornell explained.

Producer James Goss added: “Think about it – if you really wanted to bring Doctor Who to a whole new audience, it would have been the most popular, talked-about thing the BBC website ever did.”

Richard E Grant	Robbie Williams
© PA Images John Phillips/EMPICS Entertainment	© PA Images Ian West/PA Wire

Williams was ultimately unable to meet the production’s schedule, with Grant ultimately taking the role of the Doctor.

Doctor Who will return to BBC One on Saturday, November 23 for its 50th anniversary special.