Doctor Who

Doctor Who

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You may wish to consult Doctor Who (disambiguation) for other, similarly-named pages.

Doctor Who is both a television show and a multimedia franchise created and controlled by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

It centres on a time traveller called "the Doctor", who comes from a race of beings known as Time Lords. He travels through space and time in a time machine he calls the TARDIS. This ship — which looks like a small, London police box on the outside — has nearly infinite dimensions on the inside. It has become such an iconic shapes in British culture that it is currently the intellectual property of the BBC rather than its actual makers, the Metropolitan Police Service.

In order to accommodate cast changes, the narrative allows the Doctor to regenerate into an essentially new person on occasion. The cast is rounded out by one or more "companions", often females. On average, the main cast completely changes once every three or four years — a significant factor in the longevity of the programme.

It has had two — some argue three — major production periods. The original run of the programme was from 1963 to 1989, and is often called the "classic series" or "classic Doctor Who". A failed revival, in the form of a Universal-BBC co-production, came in 1996 — but the resulting one-off tele movie is often considered a part of the classic series. The current form of the programme — sometimes called the "new series" — has been produced by BBC Wales and aired on BBC One since 2005. It is currently the more popular iteration.

Though the classic series is fondly remembered by fans of a certain age, the new series has been far more consistently popular with the British public, and is usually the highest-rated scripted drama — outside of perennially popular soap operas — in the weeks that it is on the air.

The franchise spawned by the main television programmes includes dozens of distinct ranges of spinoffs in televised, audio and print media.

Feature films

To build upon the success of Dalekmania the series had created in Britain in the 1960's, two feature films were produced, Dr. Who and the Daleks, and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., and released world-wide. Although both were adapted from the William Hartnell television stories The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth respectively, they feature Peter Cushing as a Human scientist named Dr. Who who invents a Tardis, and as such are not considered to be canonical.

In 2011 it was announced that a new feature film would be released, to be directed by Harry Potter director David Yates. Although initial news reports suggested that the film would "start from scratch" in terms of continuity, Steven Moffat subsequently clarified that "any Doctor Who movie would be made by the BBC team, star the current TV Doctor and would certainly not be a Hollywood reboot." He later reiterated, "There will not come a time when there's a separate kind of Doctor Who. What was talked about there was that there would be a separate Doctor and a different continuity. Of course it won't. That would be silly. Everyone knows that's silly. The BBC knows that's silly, and is not going to do that."

Other media

Although Doctor Who originated as a television programme, it has become much more than that. Starting with "Dalekmania" in the 1960s, a great deal of merchandise has sprung out of Doctor Who. Some of that merchandise has continued the story of the Doctor's adventures. Over the decades, Doctor Who has appeared on stage, screen, and radio, and in a variety of novels, comics, full-cast audio adventures and webcasts. Beginning in the late 1980s, independent production companies such as BBV Productions and Reeltime Pictures took advantage of a loophole in the BBC's ownership of Doctor Who to licence individual characters and monsters from the series directly from their creators and build original film and audio dramas around them; this reached its height after the original series ended in 1989. Many of these productions involved original cast members from the series. Meanwhile, since 1991, a prolific series of original novels rivalled only by the Star Trek franchise in terms of quantity have been published. Many of these productions and novels are highly regarded by some Doctor Who fans. Several of the writers of the 2005 series previously wrote or scripted adventures for the Doctor in other media.

In terms of non-fiction works, Doctor Who ranks among the most intensely chronicled entertainment franchises in history. Since the publication of The Making of Doctor Who in the early 1970s, the number of books detailing the production, personnel, and even philosophy behind Doctor Who has numbered well into three figures. In addition, a growing number of actors connected to the series have published autobiographies (in several cases more than one volume of memoirs), ranging from 1960s-era co-stars such as Anneke Wills and Deborah Watling through to more recent actors such as Billie Piper and John Barrowman.

External links

• Official site for the Australian broadcaster, ABC
• Official site for the Brazilian broadcaster, TV Cultura
• Official site for the BBC
• Official site for English-language Canadian broadcaster, Space
• Official site for the Croatian broadcaster, HRT
• Official site for French broadcaster, France 4
• Official site for Italian broadcaster, Rai 4
• Official site for New Zealand broadcaster, Prime
• Official site for US broadcaster, BBCA