Today marks the 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who News

It was on the 30th of May 1996 when Canadian fan Shannon Patrick Sullivan made the following announcement on the rec.arts.drwho newsgroup:

Sullivan remained editor of the page until late 1999 when due to constraints on his time he passed the page on to Mark Phippen of Logopolis.com. The following year, the page merged with the news coverage on another popular fansite – Outpost Gallifrey, edited by Shaun Lyon

Outpost Gallifrey was then the home of The Doctor Who News Page for most of the following decade, through some of the most extraordinary times in the show’s history as it returned to television and became an enormous international success.

Since 2009, when Lyon decided to close Outpost Gallifrey, the News Page has continued as an independent venture, retitled Doctor Who News and run by some of the team who’d assisted Lyon in the site’s later years on his website.

We hope that we have always done our best to maintain the high editorial standards of factual and reliable reporting set by Sullivan, Phippen, Lyon and everybody else who has contributed over the past quarter of a century.

Thank you to you all – and here’s to the next 25 years!

As part of this month's learning resouces from the BBC, CBBC have broadcast a series on classic music for schools over the past week: Ten Pieces have focussed on a number of works based around a theme, and Friday's episode, Back in Time, included a section on the groundbreaking work of Delia Derbyshire in creating the Doctor Who theme, presented by currrent series composer Segun Akinola.

The feature can be viewed via the Ten Pieces Orchestral Films page, and the full programme is currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer until 27th June, with the Doctor Who theme segment starting from about six minutes.

Supporting material is available from the BBC Teach site, which includes downloadable scores for music showcased within the programmes. For Derbyshire, the Doctor Who theme tune has been published for performance by schools, arranged by Iain Farrington, and features arrangements for beginners, intermediate and grade 4/5 musicians.

(The site also features an item on Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, introduced by Christopher Eccleston)

The Arena docudrama, Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, remains available to watch on the BBC iPlayer for the next eleven months. Its director, Caroline Catz, can be heard discussing Derbyshire on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone from BBC Radio 6, and her BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme on the composer ifrom January is still available to listen to on BBC Sounds. 

Also launched recently is a new film, Sisters with Transistors, described as "the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today." The documentary looks at the careers of notable visionaries, including Delia Derbyshire and one of the founding figures of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram.

The film was disussed on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in April, and works from both composers can still be heard in the recentl repeat of the 2018 BBC Prom Pioneers of Sound.

Sisters with Transistors - Trailer

This month's Doctor Who Magazine unveils the secrets of the Seventh Doctor

Highlights of this issue include

• The story behind the discovery of Season 24’s previously unseen footage.
• An interview with 1980s production secretary Kate Easteal, who shares her memories of producer John Nathan-Turner.
• Margaret Toley describes her role as secretary to Doctor Who’s story editors in the 1960s and early 70s.
• An in-depth preview of the new Season 24 Blu-ray box set
• Inside the comic-book sequel to the Season 24 story Paradise Towers, with comments from the original story's writer, Stephen Wyatt.
• Some of Doctor Who’s key visual effects designers reflect on their time working on the show in the mid-1980s.
• Collectivity explores the miniature world of Dapol, the company that launched the first range of Doctor Who action figures.
• A tribute to the late Frank Cox, one of Doctor Who’s first directors.
• Apocrypha looks back at the 1989 comic strip Who’s That Girl!
• The Fact of Fiction continues its analysis of 1970s The Ambassadors of Death.
• Sufficient Data crunches Doctor Who’s numbers.
• Previews, reviews, news, prize-winning competitions, Time and Space Visualiser and more.

Doctor Who Magazine Issue 565 is on sale from panini.co.uk and WH Smith from Thursday 27 May priced £5.99 (UK).

Also available as a digital edition from pocketmags.com priced £4.99.