Doctor Who desktop by the Iconfactory

No fan's computer (Mac or PC) would be complete without this awesome Cyberman desktop wallpaper by the Iconfactory.

Be sure to grab some Doctor Who icon goodness, too.

Doctor Who's 'The Brig' dies at 81

Late last night I was on Twitter when @sizemore tweeted that Nicholas Courtney had died! Only a few weeks ago I was discussing his last appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures with @seethree; hoping for an onscreen meeting with Matt Smith's Doctor, too.

Best known to generations of Doctor Who fans as Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart AKA The Brig! A stoic character, battling alongside the Doctor (in various regenerations) against Yeti, Cybermen and Axons, whom you instinctually knew would make the heroic choice...

It goes without saying that Nicholas Courtney will be missed, and Doctor Who Magazine has confirmed that it's publishing a tribute issue, which was never in doubt. Although I only met him once at the Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Celebration, Longleat, it's forever preserved as a treasured childhood memory.

Among those to pay tribute today were actor and Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss who said he was "desperately sad" to hear of the death.

"A childhood hero and the sweetest of gentlemen. Splendid chap. All of him," he said.

Read the BBC obituary here.

Whovians on Facebook

A few months ago Facebook introduced Groups. So, I decided to setup Whovians: an open group for fans of the eponymous Time Lord, associated spin-offs and more.

Please join and recommend to fellow fans, too.

The Sontaran Experiment action figure set

The Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan arrive on a desolate and apparently deserted Earth to discover that a group of shipwrecked astronauts from a human colony, GalSec, have been lured there by a fake distress call. One of their number, Roth, tells Sarah Jane of an alien conducting gruesome experiments on him and his crewmates. The alien turns out to be a Sontaran, Field-Major Styre, who is compiling a report on human physical and mental capabilities as a prelude to an invasion of Earth.

The Doctor challenges Styre to unarmed combat. The Sontaran agrees but is quickly weakened in Earth's unfamiliar gravity. Harry meanwhile enters Styre's ship and uses the Doctor's sonic screwdriver to remove the vital terullian diode bypass transformer, so that when the alien returns there to revitalise himself he is drained of all his energy and destroyed. The Doctor sends a message to the Sontaran fleet, warning them that without Styre's report they cannot invade.

In this great gift set is the Classic Sontaran: Field-Major Styre and his iconic Sontaran space ship along with the Fourth Doctor in duffle coat and hat.

Contents:
1 x Fourth Doctor in duffle coat and hat action figure with Sonic Screwdriver.
1 x Sontaran Field-Major Styre action figure with helmet and gun.
1 x Sontaran Ship.

Pre-order from Forbidden Planet International.

Doctor Who is Character Building!

Ever since LEGO started licensing popular IPs such as Batman, Star Wars and Harry Potter, I've longed for LEGO Doctor Who (truth be told since I was a child, myself)! It would appear that the BBC has, too!

BBC Worldwide has announced the splendidly entitled Character Building in conjunction with licensee Character Options.

Fans will be able to build their own Doctor Who world with all their favourite characters including the Doctor and Amy Pond with their infamous foes the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels.

The minifigs are worth the admission price alone. However, is it churlish to suggest that I'd prefer a LEGO license; if only to play a video game tie-in on par with Batman and Harry Potter: Years 1-4?

Who's your Who?

Guest post written by Andrew Lewin

For British males, there are two sure-fire ways of striking up a conversation: ask who is the best James Bond, or else who your favourite Doctor Who is? It never fails to get two strangers talking like old friends in the space of 30 seconds (or if it does fail, you probably won't have anything in common ever with that person, so best to find out right at the start.)

My earliest memories of watching Doctor Who were with Jon Pertwee in the lead role. For me, he simply WAS the Doctor, no question. I loved the earth-bound stories, the UNIT family, everything about the show. I had no idea about the past of the series until I got a Radio Times special magazine celebrating the tenth anniversary, which printed an episode guide of all the stories to date. Oh, how I longed to see those serials - but of course, back in those days there were no videos or DVDs, and such shows were never repeated on the network. Thank goodness, then, for the Target novelisations of these stories, where I could immerse myself in the eras of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton and find delights such as the Yeti and the Zarbi waiting for me. Truly, I owe my present literacy and love of books to the voracious reading of those adaptations. Such a shame that these days, children will just buy the DVDs and never turn a page of a book or need to engage their imaginations to bring the written word to life. They are truly missing out.

And then suddenly Pertwee was gone. The Doctor was dead! Oh, how I resented the Doctor who replaced him, this grinning buffoon with the stupid hair. I vowed I would never like him, and - after sticking with the show for the year of Robot/Ark in Space/Sontaran Experiment/Genesis of the Daleks/Revenge of the Cybermen - I duly stopped watching. Other more adult delights such as Space: 1999 and Blakes' Seven came along, and I put away childish things. When I did dip back into the show it was to the horrors of serials such as Horns of Nimon which only seemed to confirm how awful the show had become. But the following year a strange thing happened - the show was reinvented. It looked better and took things seriously, even started to have decent effects (for the age) and boasted interesting scripts. I finally started to concede that Tom Baker was actually rather wonderful in the role - when sure enough, suddenly he was gone too and it was Peter Davison's turn to took up residency in the Tardis. It turned out that I liked Davison immediately, him and his surrogate family of Adric, Nyssa and the mouthy Aussie air hostess Tegan. It was a second golden age of the show for me, without which I might have written off the show for all time and missed out on the show's triumphant 2005 reinvention.

Personally I see the 21st century version of Who as a completely new creature, totally distinct from the original and yet sharing its DNA. I love them both, in entirely different ways. I was not, I confess, a huge fan of Christopher Eccleston's Doctor: he was great as the dark, angst-ridden war survivor, but he always seemed to be straining when required to do the goofy, alien wackiness which is such an important aspect to the character of the Doctor. But without an actor of Eccleston's calibre redefining the job requirement of the role, we'd never have had David Tennant signing up to take on the role, and Tennant when all is said and done is the best actor bar none to have taken the role. Even a die hard Pertwee fan such as myself will now concede that David Tennant is the best Doctor of all time. It helped that he's had the biggest budget and the best, most consistent set of scripts as well. But perhaps most of all, Tennant is raised so high because he stands on the shoulders of the great performances of other wonderful actors - Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker (times two), Davison, McCoy, McGann and Eccleston. The Doctor is all of them, and now they are all in Doctor XI helping raise Matt Smith to new heights in 2010 and beyond.

Long may Who continue, so that many more generations of children can have the wonderful delight of arguing about who the best Doctor is.

Andrew Lewin works for COI, a central government department, as a web developer/project manager/social media advisor and technical consultant. He was creating e-zines before anyone started calling it "blogging", and was setting up Fantasy Formula 1 sites by twisting blogging software such as Movable Type and Wordpress into being content management systems before it became all the rage and standard operating procedure. Andrew can bore for England on all aspects of online accessibility, usability and interface design, and has worked in and around the media for twenty years since starting in production and IT support at the magazine publishers H Bauer. That started a lifelong love affair with Mac-products, with a proudly PC-free computer purchasing history that started with a Mac IIsi in the dark days of Apple without Steve Jobs. Andrew now lives in south west London with a thoroughly modern iFamily of Apple products - iMac, iPhone, iPod and of course iPad: all of whom get on very well together, keep Andrew in line and tell him what to do. Andrew blogs at "Let me think about that..." (where this post originally appeared) and at "motorsport.ind".

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