Tag Archives: television

Wait, is this actually 1984?

I ask, not because of “my” government’s embarrassingly crazy surveillance obsession, but because this Guardian headline seems to have been beamed up from a quarter century ago:

Will 3D television be a hit?

Apparently BSkyB plans to launch a 3D TV network in Europe next year, for which you’ll need a special display set and glasses (and, no doubt, a hefty subscriber fee). That’s gonna claw viewers back fro the temptations of the intertubes, for sure!

TV science-fiction: The origin of ‘Doctor Who’

For those of us who like to know where things came from, the BBC Archive Project has posted some amazing memos and reports revealing the thought processes that led to Doctor Who. Typewritten pages with skeptical scrawls reveal conversations with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis. (Imagine such a consultation today.) Wondering if sf could work on tv at all, the network looked at stories like Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time and C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” as possible projects. They almost went with “The Troubleshooters,” about a consulting firm that dealt with otherworldly events. The archive also includes the initial proposal for the series, as well as the (mixed) audience reaction for the first episode of the series that (some of us) know and love.

[Story tip: SF Signal; William Hartnell as the first Doctor, BBC]