River Song will be returning to the Doctor Who universe next year when she stars in not one but two Big Finish audios.

First up, the popular character – who made her debut in the Series 4 two-parter Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead – will join forces with the Eighth Doctor in the second chapter of Doom Coalition which also features the voice of Hattie Morahan as companion Helen Sinclair. After that, she’ll reclaim the spotlight in her very own original adventure, The Diary of River Song, with Paul McGann reprising his role as the Time Lord for the fourth and final installment.

“The idea of River meeting previous Doctors was first put forward by Steven Moffat,” David Richardson, producer, said. “It was just irresistible. And yes, we’re still pinching ourselves!”

Meanwhile, Ian McNiece will K.B.O as he steps back into the shoes of Britain’s former Prime Minister in The Churchill Years, co-starring Danny Horn as Kazran Sardick from the 2010 seasonal special A Christmas Carol, and Doctors 5 through to 8 will battle a new generation of adversaries in ‘Classic Doctors, New Monsters‘, described as “the ultimate mash-up”.

The four boxsets will be released throughout 2016 and are now available to pre-order. Are you excited about this news, and which audio adventure are you most looking forward to?

Watch will be treating Doctor Who fans to a momentous marathon today (Monday), because how else would you spend a Bank Holiday?!

The timey-wimey festivities kick off at 10:40am with the 2009 Easter special, Planet of the Dead, culminating in the Eleventh Doctor’s final episode, The Time of the Doctor, at 5:20pm. Tissues at the ready for that one!

Check out the full schedule below and let us know if you’ll be tuning in. Watch is available on Channel 109 on Sky.

Watch Doctor Who Marathon Schedule – Bank Holiday Monday (4th May 2015)

10:40am: Planet of the Dead
12pm: The Waters of Mars
1:20pm: The Christmas Invasion
2:40pm: A Christmas Carol
4pm: The Snowmen
5:20pm: The Time of the Doctor

The Doctor continued his mission of world domination with yet more record-breaking ratings throughout 2014.

Not only did Peter Capaldi’s debut series at the helm of the TARDIS attract an average audience of 7.4 million at home in the UK (hailed as “outstanding” by the BBC’s Director of Television), it was also the highest rated season of Doctor Who ever on BBC America with an average of 2.035 million viewers. The Christmas Special, Last Christmas, was watched by 2.616 million which is double the audience of Matt Smith’s first festive outing, A Christmas Carol, in 2010.

The Twelfth Doctor’s first yuletide adventure was also a hit on Space in Canada on which it was watched by 792,000 viewers, making it the channel’s highest rated broadcast of 2014.

“It’s a long story.” Click here to discuss this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special!

The final UK rating for last year’s Christmas Special, Last Christmas, has been revealed.

The seasonal episode – Peter Capaldi’s first in his role as the Twelfth Doctor – was watched by an official audience of 8.28 million viewers in the UK making it the show’s least watched festive offering to date.

Saying that, it’s a considerable rise from its initial overnight of 6.3 million which shows that many of its viewers opt to record it and watch it within the first 7 days of its broadcast.

Doctor Who Christmas Specials Ratings 2005-2014

1. Voyage of the Damned (2007) – 13.31 million
2. The Next Doctor (2008) – 13.1 million
3. A Christmas Carol (2010) – 12.11 million
4. The End of Time, Part One (2009) – 12.04 million
5. The Time of the Doctor (2013) – 11.14 million
6. The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe (2011) – 10.77 million
7. The Snowmen (2012) – 9.87 million
8. The Runaway Bride (2006) – 9.35 million
9. The Christmas Invasion (2005) – 9.84 million
10. Last Christmas (2014) –  8.28 million

“It’s a long story.” Click here to discuss this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special!

All this month you’ve been voting for your favourite Doctor Who Christmas Special and the results are now in!

With 23.6% of the final vote, you have named the Doctor’s 2010 yuletude outing, A Christmas Carol, as the greatest of them all, and it’s not surprising really seeing as it’s pretty much the epitome of everything that Christmas stands for. It features snow, crackers, a timey-wimey take on the Charles Dicken classic and even Katherine Jenkins thrown in with a heartwarming festive song for good measure. What more could you possibly want!?

It was also special because it was Matt Smith’s debut seasonal adventure as the Eleventh Doctor and he spent it teaching lonely old miser Kazran Sardick – played by Professor Dumbledore himself Michael Gambon - how to love again. Thanks to everyone who voted!

Which has been your favourite Doctor Who Christmas Special to date?

A Christmas Carol (2010) (23.6%)
The Christmas Invasion (2005) (20.8%)
The Time of the Doctor (2013) (12.5%)
The End of Time, Part One (2009) (9.7%)
The Runaway Bride (2006) (9.7%)
The Snowmen (2012) (8.3%)
Voyage of the Damned (2007) (8.3%)
The Next Doctor (2008) (5.6%)
The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (2011) (1.4%)

The festive adventure continues tomorrow night in Last Christmas at 6:15pm on BBC One.

This is a very exciting Christmas episode for me this year as it is my first Christmas since I became officially canon. My debut into the Whoniverse was in my beloved Doctor, Peter Capaldi’s first comic in Doctor Who Magazine. Thanks to pencil artist Martin Geraghty, in issue 479 I appear all superheroed up with a swish utility belt and my ubiquitous iPad in part three of The Eye of Torment. In Part four it may seem like I’ve become an alien but really I did a very clever thing with my well hidden Vortex Manipulator and deftly escaped to continue my exciting adventures as Madame H.

I shall be slightly off screen on Christmas Day but if you look very carefully in the corner of the TV you might just spot me eating a tangerine or two. I have rewatched all of the Christmas specials so I can write this article, I am able to be strong for Rose this time and not blub all over the place and I’m a lot more accepting of Donna but I did love the Doctor remembering Rose at the party.

*Twiddles with my Vortex Manipulator* Let’s take a trip together back through the vortex to the Christmas Invasion and my excitedness for A Song For Ten which is barn storming!!

To be totally honest I have post MOOC brain so my essay writing capabilities have gone on holiday as I used them all on my literature course.

(From this point on read my words as fast as you can for the full effect of a Tiggery me) So I am flying by the seat of my Christmas pants and jumping into Jackie Tyler’s front room with my love for David Tennant’s brilliant entrance and his beautiful sexy wink to darling Rose. Then I am jumping onto the roof of the taxi containing a runaway bride and hitching a lift on a spare Segway into an adventure with the very hissy spider lady with an extremely cool live action costume. Ooooh floating about in midair being half a spider.

Whoo it’s snowing and look it’s a woven and inflatable TARDIS, I saw how the basket part was made on How It’s Made, a very stylish programme. Having a Frozen sing song with the two Doctors, weellll one Doctor and someone who thinks he’s a Doctor. Well hello there hoody Master, I love your hoody and red dog collar combo and all these clone Masters in everybody else’s clothes. Nice bit of flirting between the Master and the Doctor and Wilf is way cool. But oh no here come the tears, awwww I don’t want you to go either Mr Tennant.

It’s Matt Smithmas!! Time for Carolly warollies and naughty and nice Amy and Rory having fun with their costumes and a Star Wars/Trekky typical scifi spaceship. AAAAwwwwweeesooommme Shark!! A fabulously acted performance of young Kazran and an unusual story of locking up a woman and only letting her out for you to play with but it’s twisted into some sort of romantic fairytale.

Where’s Aslan? Oh Aslan’s not in this one and the wardrobe’s a TARDIS and there is a cute little boy with adorable bottle top glasses and his pretty sister and a wonderful enchanted bedroom with the most best toys. A floating parcel in the snow looks so magical and it’s all enchanted and fairytale but then it’s a bit Stiltony with all the mum saves the day but squee it’s Xander as the Dad.

Ooooh now it’s Jenna and Victorian Clara who I wish we could have had more of. I love her most as the barmaid with her beautiful red outfit and she cheered up the Doctor. Heelarious Strax is Heelarious with the memory worm encounter and Punch snogged the Doctor. I adore Jenny and all the Paternoster Gang.

Now it’s time to say goodbye to Matt Smith as the Doctor but not before he gets a few more hundred years in with plenty of room for extra stories hiding in books and fanfics. Tasha Lem a very stylish lady with cool eye makeup and lovely sparkly purplyness and oh what a woman our beloved Clara is, persuading the Time Lords to continue the legend therefore enabling us to unwrap a brand new Doctor in the fantastic form of Peter Capaldi.

(Aaaaannnd breath!) When you have certain monsters in your head it can be hard to keep the door shut on the cynical creeptures but I am trying my very best to let my inner child escape and bounce round the house and flap my hands and enjoy the search for the best brand of mince pies. Since we got the Christmas Doctor Who tradition it makes Christmas extra special and I’m very exciting to see wonderful Mr Capaldi in his most sexy hoody and I adore dreams and anything about the psychology of dreams and Santa’s here and slimey wimey monster creatures. Exciting!!

Thank You Santas Davies and Moffat for bringing us a marvellous present to enjoy each year. Merry Christmas Everyone and Lots of Love and Sparkles for a truly fantabulous 2015.

Written by Helen Beeston

There are a few things that I can declare my undying love for. One being Doctor Who, obviously, and the other is Christmas. I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time of the year because of family, cheerfulness, and fun. But most importantly, Doctor Who Christmas specials! A Doctor Who special on Christmas has become a recent yearly event for die hard fans but it has also solidified itself into many households’ holiday traditions. Even casual viewers of the show will tune in to see what The Doctor is up to on Christmas day. And with good reason too. The Christmas specials are unique in that we get a little story in-between series. It’s just enough for us to get our fix before launching a full, long winding adventure with The Doctor. And it’s a festive part of the day.

There have been many wonderful Christmas episodes to grace our screens over the past few years. But my favorite of them all has to be “A Christmas Carol” from 2010. A main reason is the fact that “A Christmas Carol” is one of the few specials without a lot of other important Doctor Who things occurring in the background. The episode doesn’t need to focus on introducing a new Doctor (“The Christmas Invasion”, 2005) or a new companion (“The Runaway Bride”, 2006, “The Snowmen”, 2012). It also doesn’t deal with the sadness of saying goodbye to a Doctor (“The End of Time”, 2009, “The Time of the Doctor”, 2013). “A Christmas Carol” allows the viewer to become engrossed in the story alone. And as enjoyable as these other specials are, the major changes in the show as a whole can be a bit distracting and take away from the episode.

But “A Christmas Carol” is ultimately my favorite Christmas special because of the story. It’s a clever spin on Charles Dickens’ classic tale accomplished in only the way Doctor Who can, with timey-wimey tricks and empathy. The Doctor must save Amy and Rory along with a ship full of innocent passengers by making a man a better person. Kazran is the sole savior of the doomed but is unwilling to help. He is an old, bitter man who has so much, yet he hasn’t had the easiest life. The Doctor realizes that the only way to save everyone is by saving Kazran, going backwards in his timeline to show him a better path. The story is captivating. Although viewers are familiar with the concept of going through his life and seeing how he has affected those around him, Kazran’s past is changed right before his eyes. It’s a bit extreme even for The Doctor, as he is usually pretty adamant about not interfering with one’s own timeline. But for the sake of Amy, Rory, their fellow passengers, and for the people on the planet below, the idea works. It’s touching to watch an older Kazran reflect on his memories with The Doctor and Abigail as it’s happening in his past. And it’s even sadder to see how the harsh realities of life can easily lead him down the darker path.

But Kazran isn’t used as a prop to be manipulated into simply getting what others want. It is all a learning experience. He is exposed to the wonder of meeting The Doctor as a child and grew up with him. He experienced love and loss. The Doctor not only gave him a chance to redeem himself in order to save the lives of those on the ship, he also presented a way for Kazran to deal with his demons. That is perhaps the happiest outcome of the story in the end. Everyone was given the chance to learn more about themselves and the meaning of humanity. It’s a true Christmas message.

In the end, “A Christmas Carol” is heartwarming. It is exactly what you want from a Christmas story for the devoted Whovian and casual viewers alike. It’s simple, yet interesting enough to keep your attention. It is a truly festive occasion with snowy scenery, Christmas dinners, sleigh rides, and cherished relationships. I’ll always look forward to watching this episode every Christmas and am glad to have Doctor Who as a part of my yuletide tradition.

Written by Beth Willicome

A Christmas Carol…no, stop singing. Please stop, it’s horrible; I meant the story. Is there any story more well-known than ‘A Christmas Carol’? Is there a story that has been updated and rejuvenated more than that beautiful tale by Charles Dickens? Probably not and Doctor Who’s version of A Christmas Carol might just be the best adaptation, in my opinion. So, without further ado, here is my review of ‘A Christmas Carol’ written by Steven Moffat (the episode was written by him, not my review. If he says any different, I’ll deny it!)

This story is my favourite Christmas Special solely because it is the most Christmassy. This story’s whole plot revolves around Christmas. With the other Christmas Specials, it seemed to me that they were just episodes that happened to be set around Christmas time. Their plots could have been easily taken from that setting and placed into a different one with just a few minor adjustments. If you tried to take this story out of its context, it would probably resemble a badly edited picture with all of the background still attached from the original…the point is, it’s Christmassy. Even ‘The Unquiet Dead’, which is not technically a Christmas Special but is set around Christmas and actually features Charles Dickens, has nothing on this episode in terms of Christmas spirit.

Another thing I liked about this episode was the acknowledgment by The Doctor that he was using the plot of A Christmas Carol to aid him in his plan. There have been so many adaptations that just use the plot without a character even mentioning the similarities but in this story, the Doctor has a wonderful epiphany moment and realises that’s how he’ll get Kazran to turn nice.

Aesthetically, the story was beautiful. Sardick Town seemed to have a Terry Pratchett flair to it. The sort-of-almost-steampunk-ish buildings and costumes were brilliant and worked well with the story. They really seemed to say ‘A Christmas Carol in Space’. The special effects were stunning as well. The opening shot of Sardick’s house and the clouds swirling around the top of it was absolutely gorgeous and the way the hologram of Amy and Rory and the rest of the passengers looked was quite eerie which worked well in this story.

Speaking of the story, I was so glad that Steven Moffat utilised time travel for this story in an interesting way. He could have just had the Doctor go backwards and forwards in time and show Kazran his life but he was creative with it. The manipulation of the whole ‘fixed points can’t be changed but everything else is in flux’ idea in order to in turn manipulate Kazran’s life was ingenious and having the present Kazran as the Ghost of Christmas Future was a very Doctor Who and indeed Steven Moffat way of interpreting the story. Michael Gambon was detestable as both of his characters (and I mean that in the best way possible. The way he played both Kazran and Elliot Sardick was fantastic. They were so horrible.) And I think it goes without saying that Katherine Jenkins did wonderfully in the episode both on the acting and singing fronts. While I loved Amy and Rory, I thought the decision to use them sparsely in this episode was a good one. It allowed for more time to focus on Kazran and Abigail’s relationship and gave Amy more gravitas when she appeared as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

If there was one word I would use to describe this episode, it would be ‘beautiful’. It was visually stunning and the plot was wonderfully optimistic and full of Christmas cheer. In my opinion, this is the best Christmas Special that Doctor Who has ever produced (although, with Santa in ‘Last Christmas’, I don’t know how I’ll feel come Boxing Day). I believe this episode is worthy of a 10/10.

Thank you for reading, and Merry Christmas!

Written by Joshua Gardiner

If you spend more than ten minutes on any Doctor Who forum (or the comments section of any Whovian’s facebook status) it usually degenerates—like the age-old ‘that’s what Hitler did’ devolution—to a slanging match about the merits of Steven Moffat. The basic opinion being that he’s not much good, and bring back Russell T. Davies before the whole show goes down the toilet.

Firstly, arguments like that are usually exceptionally whiney, being mostly perpetrated by the guys who made it through the wilderness years with no show at all, but now seem to be arguing they’d rather now watch every week than have the show as Moffat is running it. Which it patently totally rubbish. It’s just that Who fans like to argue.

The basic firing line up against Moffat is a combination of over-complicated plots, ‘clever-clever’ dialogue, thinly written supporting characters, misogyny and turning the Doctor into a giggling child. Go through those one by one, and you might have an example for each, but that doesn’t really mean that it’s a statement that can be made about the whole of Moffat’s era at once.

I’m a huge prior fan of both Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. Queer as Folk was a defining part of my TV adolescence, and Davies’ The Writer’s Tale is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. As it happens, I saw him in the crowd at a very large public event this weekend and experienced a ridiculous burst of hero worship, and am kicking myself for not having the nerve to approach him. What Davies brought to Doctor Who was the same thing he’s brought to everything else he’s written—a human connection that completely refuses to deal in archetypes. Only Davies would ever have though to slam Doctor Who into the genre of British council estate soap so thoroughly as to create something like Rose and her family, but its undoubtedly that aspect of the rebooted Who that bought it the love it achieved from the mainstream and turned it back into an unassailable institution. Davies’ stories were powered by sentiment and emotion, and it’s never cleared in the finales of his era’s various major characters: Nine’s jubilant regeneration, Rose’s tearful departure, Ten’s sorrowful tour of those he loved.

And in the middle of Davies’ series of human ties and the rise of the underdogs, Stephen Moffat turned up to give us four gems of twisty-turny plotting, slick scares and iconic soundbites. The episodes were uniformly considered highlights of their series, and given his success with previous shows Coupling and Jekyll I couldn’t have been more excited that he was taking over. He was the natural choice.

The problem comes with an audience that seemed to expect that Moffat was going to carry on the series in exactly the way that Davies has. Which ignores a few patently obvious facts: firstly, that any showrunner is naturally going to make their mark on the show, and secondly that Classic Who itself was a show defined by very obvious eras of storytelling. Is it any surprise that Moffat turned out as series that turns on his original calling cards?

Where Davies’ Doctor Who powered on humanity, Moffat’s powers on mythology, hanging itself on the feeling that the Doctor has lives for ages upon ages, seen many wonders, building every character into something significant: The Madmen with a Box, The Girl Who Waited, The Impossible Girl. With that kind of framework, he infused his iteration of the Doctor with the feeling of a dark fairytale, fed from the stories that infest our childhood. If you want to see it done well, look at A Christmas Carol. If you want to see it down half-well, look at The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.

And he did it really well, for the most part. Individually, on an episode by episode basis. The difference is, unlike Davies’ series which had Moffat’s clock-puzzle episodes to vary its tone, Moffat doesn’t swing some of his off-episodes into that sort of salt-of-the-earth drama that Davies’ excelled at. Instead we get weak episodes like The Rings of Akhaten and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. As Moffat said himself, they got really good at doing something at failed to notice we’ve got tired of it.

And he does seem to have learned from it, if our Capaldi Doctor and freshly-rewritten Clara seems to be anything to go by—shedding the trappings that were both his signature and a thorn in the side of fans, and moving into something a bit different. Of course, it’s Into The Dalek that’ll give us a sense of where the whole series is going, which by the time you read this, you’ll already have seen. Fingers crossed, eh?

Our beloved Doctor saves the universe on a regular basis and he does it with style but he doesn’t always leave with his morals intact? Everybody knows that the Doctor has committed some questionable acts, the Time War being the obvious one but he always find a way to fix what he has done, there are consequences or he shows remorse. There are some things, however, that The Doctor does that are incredibly questionable which have no consequences and he seems to have no qualms about perpetrating. So is the Doctor a person we should look up to or is he a ‘what not to do’ guide that we should heed the word of?

On the surface, the Doctor is a good, pure person who helps all those in need. He is the epitome of a dashing hero; he’s got the clothes, he’s got the hair, he’s got the attitude and he stumbles into a bad situation only to fix it. But he doesn’t fix it by pulling out a machine gun, he doesn’t blow things up or kill people unless completely necessary. He uses his mind. The Doctor manages to save the day by using his incredible smarts to stop a doomsday device, or an invasion and sometimes he even manages to save someone from themselves such as in the case of Kazran Sardick (‘A Christmas Carol’, 2010). The Doctor needed Kazran to help save his friends and everybody else on board the ship that was falling from the sky. The Doctor could have engineered a situation such as the one in ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ (2013) where he created a fake danger to motivate the Van Baalen brothers but he didn’t. The Doctor saw that Kazran wasn’t the villain he thought himself to be and then changed Kazran’s timeline to stop him turning into the person he hated: his father. The Doctor eventually succeeds in saving both his friends and a seemingly horrible man from different but equally painful dooms. ‘A Christmas Carol’ shows the Doctor’s innate capacity for compassion. He changed a complete stranger’s entire life because he saw a twinkle of light shining in the rest of the dark. The Doctor’s compassion is often his main motivator in saving people. He feels empathetic towards people who have had hard lives or people he can see the good in. This is a good trait for the protagonist to have as it can teach the audience to sympathise and empathise with other people and understand what they have gone through.

As mentioned before, the Doctor is a genius and he regularly uses his brains to help people. He is probably one of the most intelligent if not the most intelligent person in the universe. Most heroes in television series or movies are essentially jocks-they are muscly, conventionally good looking and they generally shoot first and ask questions later. The smarter people are relegated to secondary or background characters and they are often made fun of. This presents a bad image that being smart isn’t ‘cool’; that smart people aren’t the heroes, they help the heroes. The Doctor is a completely different hero. He is intelligent, goofy but he has a certain degree of ‘cool’ that doesn’t come with the smart characters in other television series. He shows the audience that it’s alright to know what happens when you know the laws of physics back to front and to speak a different language or in the Doctor’s case, every single language known to the universe. The Doctor gives nerds like myself and many other people someone to rally behind, someone to look up to and to model ourselves after.

However, for the many good traits the Doctor possesses, he also has many shortcomings. As mentioned before, the Doctor’s compassion is given to anyone who will accept it but it seems that his compassion is only triggered in the beginning while he is with his companions. As exemplified by many episodes such as ‘The Waters of Mars’, ‘A Town Called Mercy’ and ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ (the killing of Solomon was quite a dark turn in an otherwise reasonably silly and jovial episode) and of course the cataclysmic moral minefield of the Time War, the Doctor can sometimes sacrifice compassion for an extra dollop of anger and a smattering of vengeance. It’s almost as if the companions are the Doctor’s carers, he needs them to keep him in line or he’ll become the something similar to the War Doctor. When the Doctor is alone he seems to favour a tougher brand of justice rather than the peaceful, forgiving saviour that helps all when he has friends with him. But while this personality trait is obviously a bad one, it can still send a good message to the audience: that no matter how hard anyone tries, no one is perfect and that’s a good thing. The Doctor can help us understand that while we have traits in us that we don’t necessarily like, it doesn’t make us bad people as long as we recognise their negative impacts on us and those around us and the Doctor normally does.

So in conclusion, the Doctor, in my opinion is a fantastic role model. He not only is a righteous, compassionate person, he also makes mistakes like anybody else. The Doctor shows us that we might not be perfect but we are who we are and as long as we strive to be good people, we will be the best we can be.

Editorial written by Joshua Gardiner