Veteran costume designer Barbara Kidd returns to Doctor Who this year, when she takes over costume design duties on the Christmas Special and the 2011 series.

Barbara Kidd worked on the series at the start of her career, creating costumes as early as the 1973 Jon Pertwee story, Frontier in Space. She was a regular on the series throughout the mid seventies working on The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Monster of Peladon before moving on to a new Doctor in the guise of Tom Baker for The Ark in Space, The Sontaran Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars. Her final contribution was for the Peter Davison story Kinda.

Kidd is now one of the most respected costume designers working in British Television. She has won an Emmy for her work on Little Dorrit in 2008 and a BAFTA award for her work on Nicholas Nickleby in 2001. She has recently been working on Wallander.

Doctor Who will also have a new producer from the Christmas episode in the form of Sanne Wohlenberg. Wohlenberg has also recently worked on Wallander and has also produced The Whistleblowers and Murphy's Law.

Final ratings data for the BBC One showing of Doctor Who, Episode twelve The Pandorica Opens, has been delayed due to data processing problems at BARB. The final data is now not expected for several days, and will appear on the news page as soon as it is available.

However final data for BBC HD is available and it gives the HD showing of The Pandorica Opens a final rating of 635,000 viewers. This is the highest rating ever achieved by BBC HD.

The monsters appearing in the forthcoming Doctor Who Live stage show have now been revealed:


This topically football-themed "Monsters First 11" consist of monsters from various recent Doctor Who stories: Judoon, Winders, Clockwork Droids, Silurians, Weeping Angels, Ood, Cybermen, Saturnynes, Daleks, Scarecrows and Smilers.

For more details on the show visit the official Doctor Who Live site, and our previous news report from May.

The final evening of the Glastonbury Music Festival played host to music duo Orbital, and they finished their performance with a rendition of an old favourite, the Doctor Who Theme.

However, a special unexpected guest appeared on stage to introduce the last song of the evening - none other than current Doctor Matt Smith! With a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey arrival Matt roused the crowd and then joined the band for the performance.

Viewers in the UK can watch Matt's appearance and the performance on the BBC iplayer (from 1:50:22) for the next week.

A number of outlets have picked up on the story, including Gigwise, NME, Metro and the BBC.

And this article also mentions that Matt wasn't the only Doctor Who veteran to make a surprise appearance at this year's Glastonbury!

The 'fast-tracked' Doctor Who continues its excellent ratings in Australia. TV Tonight reports that The Lodger averaged 983,000 viewers in the five major capital cities, again despite stiff competition from the commercial networks. This was 88,000 more viewers than the previous week and the program's best overnight ratings since 1.033 million Australian viewers watched Matt Smith debut in The Eleventh Hour. Yet again it was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's top-rating program of the day, rating higher than its popular Sunday 7pm news and Little Dorrit, being the tenth highest rating program for the day overall. The corresponding Confidential Cutdown also rated an excellent 664,000 viewers in the five major capitals.

The Appreciation Index figure for Episode Thirteen of Doctor Who, The Big Bang, was 89, the highest score of the series and the highest score on any of the main four channels on Saturday.

The Appreciation Index or AI is a measure of how much the audience enjoyed the programme. Any score over 85 is considered excellent. Previous series climaxes have all scored high with series 1 and 2 also achieving scores of 89, series 3 scoring 88 and series 4 scoring 91.

The Sunday repeat on BBC Three was watched by 0.68 million viewers with a share of 3.8%. It convincingly won its timeslot amongst the multi-channel stations.

With Sunday's overnight figures now available, Doctor Who is currently 20th for the week. This should rise considerably when the final figure is released next week, with a top ten place achievable.

Doctor Who Confidential recieved an AI of 86.

Big Finish Productions is to hosting a one-day internet-based event on Saturday 3 July 2010, giving fans an opportunity to download a free episode of Doctor Who.

For one day only, episode one of Cobwebs will be available to download free of charge. The story is the start of the new trilogy that reunites the Fifth Doctor with Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa for the first time in 26 years.

Executive producer Nicholas Briggs said
Also during the day the first 50 Doctor Who main range titles will be available to buy for just £5 each, on CD or download.

Executive producer Jason Haigh-Ellery said
As well as additional sale items, the Big Finish website will be offering a selection of wallpapers for download, featuring some of Alex Mallinson’s most inspired artwork.

Big Finish Day is only at www.bigfinish.com.

The final episode in the current series of Doctor Who, The Big Bang, had an audience of 5.1 million viewers, according to unofficial overnight figures.

The programme had 4.6 million watching on BBC One, with and additional 0.5 million watching on BBC HD. The share of the audience was 31%. Despite the early start, and baking hot weather across the UK, it was the second highest rated programme of the day and the highest rated programme on BBC One, beating Casualty by over a million viewers. The winner of the night was World Cup Live: USA v Ghana on ITV1 which had 5.7 million viewers.

Doctor Who won its time slot, with BBC Two, showing British hope Andy Murray playing at Wimbledon, coming second. In Scotland the Murray match just out-rated Doctor Who for most of the episode. The Big Bang peaked with 5.1 million on BBC One and 0.5 million on BBC HD.

Doctor Who currently stands as the 17th most watched programme of the week. Final figures, released next week, should see the programme in a significantly higher place.

On BBC Three, Doctor Who Confidential had 0.59 million watching, a 3.6% share of the audience

There is a new interview with Steven Moffat on YouTube, with an unexpected interviewer: Moffat's son Joshua! As "armytedd", Joshua discusses the season's structure with his father. The interview also touches on critics' reactions, the importance of timeshifted viewing, and why Moffat no longer visits fan forums.



For more videos from the junior Moffat, see "armytedd"'s YouTube channel.

Press reaction to the 2010 series finale of Doctor Who, The Big Bang, has started to appear on the internet.

One of the most high-concept Doctor Who episodes ever, is how The Telegraph describes the episode, with its reviewer praising Matt Smith as superb.

The Guardian Blog calls this finale brilliant, a classic modern fairytale unfolding before our eyes and easily the most sentimentally charged finale we've had yet.

Metro goes trawling Twitter for fans reaction to the story and finds positive comments. It describes it a thrilling climax to the series which captivated and confused in equal measure.

Seenit.co.uk says it was an exhilarating Doctor Who finale after a somewhat mixed run, while Unreality Shout says the episode was stunning, and closes off an incredible series of Doctor Who. It praises Matt Smith as simply brilliant and says Karen Gillan and her little cousin Caitlin Blackwood were fantastic together.

Anglotopia says it was a whirlwind episode which didn't disappoint and Den of Geek loved the episode even though it made the reviewer's head hurt. They call Steven Moffat something of a genius as he "peppered his script with quotable quips and lines, and ended his maiden run in the showrunner chair with some marvellous work with Amy Pond."