TARDIS Report: Friday

Many websites are reporting on the casting of Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper in the new "Torchwood" spinoff series (reported yesterday); among the sites featuring stories about this are icWales, Brand Republic, WaveGuide,The Great Link. Also, the BBC Press Office has also posted the press release (with identical wording to what's on the official Doctor Who site)here.

Radio Times has put up a gallery of cover party shots that the magazine didn't have room for here, the first and last being Doctor Who related.

The latest issue of Forbidden Planet international home shopping (the quarterly mail order catelogue run by the large Forbidden Planet chain of UK Sci-fi shops) have a number of new Doctor Who products listed that we haven't previously mentioned, including a TARDIS Zipperobe (a wire frame wardrobe with cloth robe print of TARDIS to cover, making it appear that there is a TARDIS in the corner of your room, due out in August); aSonic screwdriver LED torch (replica model torch, release date TBA);Dalek-shaped moneybox; Whographs, an autograph book with 80 blank pages; aDalek shaped electronic alarm clock, a sculpted Dalek wall clock, a Dalek shaped webcam and a chrome wallclock with an image of the TARDIS in the vortex.

The Evening Standard has some feedback on the new film "Kidulthood" written by series star Noel Clarke. "Kidulthood is designed to lure a youthful audience. There's a soundtrack by cool British artists, and a young and attractive cast whose performances have the tang of authenticity. It shows how city teenagers today divide along issues of power - sexual, physical and economic - rather than of ethnicity, and how they are united in pursuit of kicks and 'respect'. There have already been calls for Kidulthood to be banned. Others have dismissed it as mere voyeurism. Director Menhaj Huda and the film's screenwriter-star, Noel Clarke, say Kidulthood is 'on the pulse' and 'real'. But is it? And if it is, doesn't putting such subject matter on screen automatically glamorise it?" Reactions include the wife of slain headmaster Philip Lawrence, who was killed by one of his pupils in west London: "I think I was expected to dislike this film, to be shocked at the violence, the sex, the 'bad language'. I think I was expected to protest that it should not be shown to young people because they might emulate the (undoubtedly) atrocious actions. Perhaps I would even call for it to be banned. But I didn't dislike it. I'm not shocked by it (I should as soon be shocked by scenes in EastEnders or Coronation Street). I'm not protesting at it. And rather than calling for its censure, I'm more inclined to think it should be compulsory viewing. I don't imagine that Noel Clarke, the writer and lead actor, was attempting to say that all young people live like this. He was showing us what it is like for some young people at a particular time, in a particular place. The subject matter may be unpalatable but there are moments of supreme tenderness. If there is a message, then it is a moral one; what goes around, comes around. The bullies become the losers. Even the vicious drug baron is shown as a vacuous, pathetic bully whose life has no semblance of warmth or happiness. It does not justify, and is no more likely to promote, a life of impersonal sex and drugs and happy-slapping than, for instance, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Indeed the ending, perhaps unconsciously, parallels that play. A young boy lies dying, having discovered for a few sweet moments that love is what matters. In the pleas of his pregnant girlfriend it is impossible not to also hear the cries of other young people who wake every morning to a dark and brutal dawn. Who can pretend that these things don't happen? If we turn away, aren't we are as bad as the oh-so-liberal mother who calls through her daughter's bedroom door, 'Use a condom, sweetheart' -- oblivious to the fact that her daughter is not making love but is being abused. It's about time a film like this was made. As Clarke says: 'You can wear all the blue wristbands you like, but unless we bring it to people's attention, right in their faces, I don't think enough is gonna get done.'"

Also, MTV.co.uk is giving away tickets for the film.

Tom Baker was on this afternoon's BBC Radio 1 Colin and Edith Show, and the interview can now be heard again from this page.

The official Doctor Who website notes that "the Cardiff Doctor Who Exhibition stays open. Originally due to close at the end of February, the Doctor Who Exhibition in Cardiff's Red Dragon Centre will now be extended through March at least. The Exhibition, which is currently free, will start charging from 1 March 2006. It'll stay open as long as the demand is there. 1 March will also see a new exhibit on display, the Sycorax Leader from The Christmas Invasion. More new exhibits are promised after the 2006 series starts airing."

IGN has a review of the First Series Boxed Set release for Canada.

(Thanks to Paul Engelberg, Steve Tribe, Peter Weaver, William Gallagher, Chris Carabott, Dan McGrath)