Sarah Jane: Series 2 News

Series 2 has finished filming and due to hit screens in the UK in “late September”. There are 12 episodes comprising of 6 two-parters; one of which is a sequel to an earlier SJA story and another a sequel to a DW story.

• Episode titles as follows:

The Last Sontaran by Phil Ford
Day Of the Clown by Phil Ford
Secrets Of The Stars by Gareth Roberts
The Mark Of The Berserker by Joseph Lidster
The Temptation Of Sarah Jane Smith by Gareth Roberts
Enemy Of The Bane by Phil Ford

Enter: The Swinging Sixties

Due out next week: The War Machines. I do have a soft spot for this story, particularly as it introduces Ben and Polly, two very underrated companions. As this was a rush release, no DVD has included a Coming Soon trailer for it. However, here it is. And its a belter!

Extras include:

• Commentary with actor Anneke Wills and director Michael Ferguson.

• Now & Then (dur. 6′ 39″ ) - the latest instalment of our irregular feature re-visits the London locations used in the story to compare them as they are now with how they were back in 1966. Produced by Richard Bignell and narrated by Simon Ockendon.

• Blue Peter (dur. 16′ 15″) - A compilation of related articles from the popular children’s magazine show. Valerie Singleton shows new stamps of the Post Office Tower. Christopher Trace goes to visit the tower and shows viewers how to build a model of it. A War Machine visits the Blue Peter studio. Schoolchildren bring in a Dalek they built at school.

• One Foot in the Past (dur. 7′ 36″) - Politician and ex-Postmaster General Tony Benn investigates the history of the Post Office Tower and is allowed up to the now-defunct revolving restaurant and onto the roof, in this extract from the BBC2 show.

• WOTAN Assembly (dur. 9′ 14″) - this featurette explains how the story was pieced back together from disparate sources for the DVD release, after falling victim to overseas censorship in the sixties. Produced by Steve Bagley and narrated by Anneke Wills. 

And as usual there’s the Photo Gallery, Coming Soon trailer,  Radio Times Billings PDF (plus a very nice pdf of the War Machine design drawings), Programme subtitles and Subtitle Production Notes, plus an Easter Egg.

Torchwood’s Lost Souls

A special radio episode of Torchwood is to be broadcast as part of BBC Radio 4’s Big Bang experiment.

Torchwood: Lost Souls will be broadcast at 2.15pm on Wednesday the 10th of September.

“Somewhere out there in that chaos of darkness and light, of science and protons, of gods and stars and death… somewhere there’s an answer.”

The Torchwood Institute was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879 to protect the British Empire against the threat of alien invasion. By 2008, all that remains of the organisation is a small team based in Cardiff. And now, following the tragic deaths of two of their colleagues, the remaining three – Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones – have to protect the human race against another unknown force from the darkness.

Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for a UN task force, has been called to CERN – the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva – where they’re about to activate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a particle accelerator which has been built deep underground in a 27km tunnel under Switzerland and France. Once activated, the collider will fire beams of protons together, recreating conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang – and potentially allowing the human race a greater insight into what the Universe is made of.

But so much could go wrong – it could open a gateway to a parallel dimension, or create a black hole – and now voices from the past are calling out to people and scientists have started to disappear…

Where have the missing scientists gone? What is the secret of the glowing man? What is lurking in the underground tunnel? And do the dead ever really stay dead?

Written by Joseph Lidster, the 45 minute episode stars John Barrowman, Freema Agyeman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd, Lucy Montgomery (of Tittybangbang) and Stephen Critchlow.