(via Doug)

Saturday night’s Doctor Who is a scary one for kids — The Unquiet Dead — which the BBC got some flak over, and seemingly prompted them to set up a panel of four children of varying ages to watch with their parents and rate the “Fear Factor” for later episodes. Have a hiding place behind the sofa standing by.

But it’s great stuff. The writing, acting and production values of this new series are, with a contribution from the passing of time, putting increasing numbers of the old stories to shame.

And just who or what is “Bad wolf“?

Update Sunday: badwolf.org.uk is live.

You can now watch BBC1 and BBC2 live, online. Pretty cool huh. Assuming they re-broadcast everything on it, they must have done some homework on rights clearances. I know the Beeb have a deliberate programme of making material available on the net to UK residents but not to the rest of the world (the UK pays their way, after all), so I wonder if they’ll zap the overseas transmission at some stage.

The new Doctor Who series is confirmed on the ABC for Saturdays at 7:30, from 21st of May.

PS Monday 8:45pm. The BBC1 link is gone. Evidently they’re just trialling it. More details here.

(From next week’s Aliens of London)

Another weekend gone. In summary:

Helping with painting, which given it involved a liberal application of Lean Lemon, has left a certain U2 song revolving in my brain.

Absolute shocker in the footy tipping — 3 out of 8. Bah.

Inadvertently left a spot of honey on the kitchen counter. It took about 30 hours, but the ants found it and swarmed around. When I discovered them, I committed anti-cide on them.

Watched the third new Doctor Who episode, “The Unquiet Dead.” Series writer Steve Moffat commented last year that fantasy TV makers are now in the post-Buffy era, and you can see the Buffy influences in this episode. Great stuff, very enjoyable. After all these years, it’s rapidly becoming my favourite TV show again.

The ABC has finally announced it will show Doctor Who, starting in May (I’m betting 7:30pm on Saturday or Sunday nights). Meanwhile a new study has shown Australians increasingly downloading TV programmes via the Net, and I think it correctly identifies the cause: viewer frustration with the time the networks take to broadcast overseas programs.

Spot on.

In the case of Doctor Who, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed the first episode only about a week after its British premiere. Likewise, Channel 10 is showing new Simpsons episodes shortly after their US premiere. There is no good reason Australians to have to wait weeks or even months.

I don’t think we’re yet at the stage where downloads are in the mainstream, threatening TV ratings (and therefore risking shows never being funded to be made). It’s mostly geeks and hard-core fans (or both) who have taken the trouble to figure out how to use BitTorrent and find the downloads. And the hard-core fans will tune in when it airs on TV anyway.

But as the technology improves and broadband spreads, it’s only a matter of time. Broadcasters need to realise consumers don’t want to wait. We’re in the global village now, and if our neighbours are seeing new episodes of our favourite shows, and the worldwide media are buzzing about it, then we want to tune in too.

It’s said that kids used to watch Doctor Who from behind the sofa. Well in our house, it’s not possible to get behind the sofa, so we have to make do.

Jeremy watching the first of the new Doctor Who episodes.

We watched the first episode of the new series. The special effects were pretty good, the plot wasn’t deep but was worthy of what is essentially a pilot episode re-introducing people to the series, and there were some great quotes and humour. Good entertainment.

Some fans of the old series may claim not to like it, but it was a hit in our house. For such a show to succeed now, it was important not to dwell too much on the old show, to update it for 2005 (heh. Rose using a search engine to look for the Doctor), and to make it have mainstream family appeal. And I think they’ve succeeded.

Indeed, the premier on BBC1 pulled in more than 10 million viewers, which in the age of multitudes of pay TV channels is a huge number. And news of its early success made the Australian press, which just goes to show what idiots the ABC are for not sorting out broadcast rights quickly so they can jump on the publicity bandwagon.

PS. Thursday 7am: BBC announces second new series

PPS. Thursday 10pm: Aye carumba! Eccleston says he won’t do another series!

Okay, so you might expect me to say so in any case, but damn this trailer looks good…

Now… could our ABC people please pull their fingers out and buy this new Doctor Who series please?

• DIVX 4.5Mb
• MPEG 11.8Mb

(Special thanks to those brave souls who put this kind of stuff online for people in the deprived parts of the world to see.)

PS. 6pm: Speculation that the BBC leaked the first Doctor Who episode onto the net on purpose, as a viral marketing exercise.