Doctor Who spoiler warning – don’t read if you don’t want to know anything at all about what happens in the next series!




I realised yesterday that I could quite easily solve the problem of having lost the cable to connect my digital camera to the computer by taking out the memory card and put it in my old camera, which I do have the cable for. Very simple, but if only I’d realised that when I was writing the Doctor Who article for Gair Rhydd. Anyway, here are the pictures, and a description of what I saw will follow soon…

Update:
Well, here’s what I saw during filming a couple of weeks ago.

I arrived on the Tuesday morning, having been tipped off by Vicky, a friend from the university Christian Union, that Doctor Who was filming around the corner from Highfields Church on Tuesday through Thursday. My housemates had been puzzled why Florentina Street had bunting up, but as I arrived, the Union Jacks and posters made it clear that it was being used to represent a street at the time of the 1953 coronation (see picture 1).

Although I was initially shooed away by a security guard when I approached from one direction, coming round from another angle, I was able to walk right up to where they were filming, and watch from just a few feet from behind where the director, Euros Lyn, was sitting at a bank of controls and tv screens which showed what was being caught on camera. Just across the road, they were filming the Doctor and Rose coming out of the TARDIS at the start of the episode. Billie Piper was wearing a pink dress, and the shot they were filming panned up from the ground to her face as she stepped out the TARDIS. She had a few lines of dialogue, and the David Tennant shouted something from inside the TARDIS. There was a noise, and Billie turned round. And cut! (see picture 2)

There were various people hanging around watching, including a post-graduate journalism student, who tried to talk to David Tennant and Billie. I regret not taking the opportunity to try and grab a quick word, since the security guards had become a lot more zealous in keeping people away when I came back later. I managed to get a picture of the TARDIS during the lunch break, but the security guard wouldn’t let my friends and I have our pictures taken by it, which I thought was a bit mean. What they did and didn’t let you do seemed to vary depending on who was on duty and how good a mood they were in, or so it seemed!

Over the next couple of days, I made frequent visits to see what they were filming. One of the more exciting bits that I saw involved a woman being dragged out of a house, shouting for help. The Doctor and Rose ran up, but she was bundled into a black car, which then drove away. Peter, a friend of mine from Mack and fellow fan of Doctor Who, also went along, and said that he saw the filming of an exchange between the Doctor and Rose where she was asking him “Are you sure this is New York, Doctor?” It looks like it will be a fun episode, and what I saw was enough to intrigue me without giving anything major away.

I wrote up an article on the filming for the student newspaper, gair rhydd. The paper had just reprinted one of the Mohammed cartoons, somehow having failed to realise just how much that would offend Muslims and how much trouble they’d get into, and so was rather preoccupied at the time. I tried contacting the BBC to get permission for the paper’s photographers to get some decent shots of the filming, but was politely told to go away and leave them alone, but I could glean enough from fan sites like Outpost Gallifrey to write the article. Unfortunately, I’d lost my camera cable, and wasn’t able to transfer the above pictures onto a computer before the paper’s deadline.

A friend of mine from Navigators said that he’s friends with a couple of people who live on Florentia Street, and their house was used for some filming! They got Billie’s autograph and filmed the BBC crew filming around their house, and got paid for the use of their home. I’m going to have to try and speak to these people, to hear all about it…

Anyway, watch out for The Idiot’s Lantern as part of the second series of the revived Doctor Who, which is due to start sometime in April on BBC1.