My affinity for Doctor Who has to be well-known at this point in time, but there is another Brit series that really floats my boat these days. Coincidentally, or more likely not, both shows are currently headed by the same mad genius, Steven Moffat.

Sherlock co-stars one of my favorite british actors, Martin Freeman, and introduced me to the wonder that is Benedict Cumberbatch. But the show has another secret weapon that I am excited to dig into today, a wonderful score by David Arnold and Michael Price.

The name David Arnold should ring a few bells for a few of you, he is most well-known for his many recent James Bond scores, in fact he the second most frequent Bond composer right after the legend, John Barry. Aside from Bong, Arnold also has several other geek cred credits, most notably writing the scores to Independence Day and Startgate.

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The official Doctor Who convention in Cardiff over this past weekend brought with it a lot of news and announcements about Season Seven, including who will be the next companion after Rory and Amy depart mid-season. It also featured the first promo video for the new season, and BBC has just officially released it online. Whovians, rejoice!

In the promo, The Doctor wears a hat, rides a horse, and generally causes trouble, flanked as always by Amy and Rory. As previous set photos indicated, The Doctor and his companions will visit the wild wild west, the snowy tundra, and an ancient civilization, and will content with old and new foes alike. The promo even features guest stars Mark Williams (known best as Arthur Weasley) and Ben Browder of Stargate. We also learn that Amy Pond isn’t too great at handling a gun, and what exaclty The Doctor really would like for Christmas.

Amy and Rory will depart from the series in the fifth episode of the season in an episode featuring the Weeping Angels. The new companion, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, will first appear in the Christmas Special.

Doctor Who returns to BBC One and BBC America this fall. You can watch the new promo after the jump.

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Love it our hate it, it would seem Doctor Who is here to stay. Having been a staple of British Television for many , many years, the series is now firmly entrenched in the U.S. with fans from all across the country.

Those fans are, of course, waiting patiently for the new season to begin on BBC America and to get them ready, there’s a brand new trailer just released today. But first, some scoop on the upcoming season, directly from the BBC:

The new season will see the last days of the Ponds, with Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill making their final rollercoaster voyage with The Doctor (Matt Smith). Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) have been at the Doctor’s side for more than two seasons but what will he do after their heartbreaking departure?

New guest stars so far confirmed to star will include David Bradley, Rupert Graves and Mark Williams. Season 7 will then see a dramatic turn of events when The Doctor meets a new friend – the recently-announced new companion, played by Jenna-Louse Coleman. Prepare yourselves for thrills, adventures and dramatic surprises as the show builds towards its enormous, climactic 50th anniversary year.

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The seventh season of the revamped run of Doctor Who will unfortunately be the last for the Ponds. Amy and Rory have been with the Doctor since the beginning of the fifth season, and have been by Matt Smith’s side during his entire run.

So with that info common knowledge, show runner Steven Moffat took to twitter to reveal their choice for the Doctor’s next companion:

We saw a lot of brilliant actresses. But Jenna was the only person going faster than Matt – he had to keep up!

That Jenna of which he speaks is Jenna-Louise Coleman, the stunner on the right. She will be introduced in this year’s Christmas special and finish off the seventh season run in early 2013.

Being the companion during the Doctor’s 5oth anniversary year is a fantastic opportunity for the young actress. The show has retained a high level of popularity over the past seven years and looks to boom in 2013.

In other Doctor Who twitter related news, Moffat did also confirm that this upcoming season will indeed split at the half way point like last year. However, with the split coming around Christmas it will likely only face a small holiday hiatus. Nothing near as excruciating as the summer brake in 2011.

Look for new Doctor Who on BBC America this fall.

For several years now the modern iteration of Doctor Who has been a high water mark for genre television. Upping the ante with incredible writing, good budget effects and a group of actors that would put most prime time line-ups to shame.

Among this mountain of quality is also the superb musical scores Murray Gold has written for the series since it returned in 2005. The Doctor has always had one of the best themes in the history of television, but what Gold has been able to do is add so much life to the show by crafting complex themes and ideas that span across entire eras of the show.

The last two seasons have been the era of Moffat and Smith, who together have reformed the show into a stylistically very different beast than the Russel Davies run. Massive credit to Mr. Gold who has adapted to this new stylistic direction to write some of the best music of the show’s long and storied history.

So we come to the sixth series, the most recent and thus far most ambitious soundtrack yet. Series Six is a season dominated by answering very large and very important questions that have been presented over the course of the last few years. The season was also split down the middle which gives it a really great pace and flow.

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Steven Moffat is one of the best television minds working today. He is in charge of two of the most interesting, well written and generally fun shows on television, Doctor Who and Sherlock, and he might fancy bringing a bit of both together.

The Express is reporting that Cumberbatch is the desired choice to play the most recent incarnation of The Master, a renegade Time Lord who often butts heads with the good Doctor:

“It’s fitting that the Doctor comes face to face with his ultimate enemy, The Master, for the 50th anniversary and it’s felt Benedict is the perfect choice if schedules can work… Fans will love the idea of the man who plays Sherlock Holmes taking on the Doctor’’

This year Cumberbatch was in two highly regarded films stateside, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse, and the next year and a half will see him in at least two major blockbusters, Star Trek 2 and The Hobbit. So there is genuine concern about his upcoming availability for a multiple episode or even season long arc on the show.

The 50th anniversary year of the longest running sci-fi show in history is expected to be huge. No doubt bringing back the Master is only the tip of the iceberg of plans the Grand Moff and BBC have in store for us in 2013.

For nearly 50 years Doctor Who has captured the imaginations of countless minds, from the very young, to the very young at heart. The internet age has allowed that active fan base to accomplish some pretty incredible things, including the ambitious Doctor Who Fan Orchestra which takes individual YouTube submissions of each instrument and re-builds themes from the show.

From the video’s description:

The Doctor Who Fan Orchestra invites musical fans of Doctor Who to take part in an online collaborative celebration of Murray Gold’s music. Participants submitted recordings for this work from November 2011 to January 2012.

This final mix includes a total of 177 submissions from 154 individual participants, ranging in age from 11 to 57, and who are located in at least 18 different countries across the world, including: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.

The end result is incredible, a near flawless performance of two classic early run Murray Gold themes. The video itself is a collage of individual performances that is almost as interesting as the music they are playing. To see the pieces fit together in an intricate, 21st century weave of YouTube videos highlights this magnificent piece.

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Sherlock Holmes is a popular character these days, between a popular film franchise and an acclaimed BBC TV show, there are several ways to enjoy his particular brand of inductive reasoning. So popular in fact that BBC has ordered up a third round of Sherlock episodes, according to the trustworthy official twitter of show creator Steven Moffat.

Add that popularity with a recent trend of taking quality foreign programming  and re-purposing it for American audiences and it will come as no surprise that CBS has ordered their own Holmes pilot as well. Elementary is planned as a modern take on the classic detective, putting Holmes in the middle of New York City.

This is not the first time a network wanted to put a Holmesian character on the mean streets of the big apple. Law and Order spin-off Criminal Intent was originally conceived as a way to put a detective like Sherlock in the Law and Order universe. That worked well, but the character was only loosely based on Holmes, it will be interesting to see how the character fits into the CBS style drama mold.

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For those who are stuck in the box of US television, and have yet to venture into the exciting world of British TV, you’ve missed quite a bit. Sure, there are the hits like Doctor Who and Sherlock, but one show that doesn’t get nearly as much play as it should is the E4 series Misfits.

Just finishing up its 3rd season, the show follows a band of teen troublemakers who, while stuck on a chain gang for community service, are struck by lighting, granting them superpowers to do whatever they choose. We wish that was all the show was about, but it’s managed to become one of the best shows on TV in only 21 episodes.

This past season saw the departure of the show’s lead comedic relief, Robert Sheehan, and the introduction of This is England’s Joseph Gilgun. Now, with two more characters leaving the show in the season 3 finale, we can expect to see the show make a return for a fourth year.

We don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t caught up, but you can catch up on Misfits over on HULU.com. Not even the show’s creator has a clue where the band of juvenile delinquents are headed next year, but we definitely know that it will involve plenty of superpowers, and tons of swearing.

Can’t wait!

With the growing popularity of BBC America over the past few years, US audience members have become inundated in the wild world of all things Doctor Who. With massive billboards in Times Square, TV spots on primetime TV, and more toys than you can collect, The Doctor has become a staple in American TV culture.

With that, it only makes sense that another industry that’s skyrocketing would try to claim their territory with this franchise, in the form of a video game.

The game, titled The Eternity Clock, has been shrouded in mystery, for the most part, since it was announced a few months back. All that we know is that fans will have the option of playing as The Doctor or love interest River Song.

The game is set for release next year on PS3, PC, and the newest Sony platform, the Vita. In the last few days, BBC leaked the very first teaser of the game online, and we’ve got it for you to check out.

It may not show much, but you can check it out after the jump and judge for yourself.

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We told you last month that Harry Potter director David Yates was gearing up to make a Doctor Who feature film. At the time there was some ambiguity as to where it would stand in relation to the current, and extremely popular, British series that just finished up it’s sixth season. Yates seemed to suggest that this would be a new incarnation, with no relation to the current Doctor or his television show.

Current show runner Steven Moffat thankfully provides some more information that should be great news to all the Doctor Who fans out there. He recently tweeted:

“To clarify: any Doctor Who movie would be made by the BBC team, star the current TV Doctor and certainly NOT be a Hollywood reboot.”

Leave it to the Grand Moff to assuage fans the world over in a concise 140 characters or less.

Of course this is far from official, there are still several years before this movie hits the screens, and we are still over a year off from a very big 50th anniversary year for the Doctor, which I am assuming will come with it’s ample share of surprises. Still, it is good to know some one deeply involved with the project has his head screwed on strait.

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David Yates has been spending the better part of the last seven years directing the final half of one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of cinema. Now that the plucky “boy who lived” is all done with his misadventures at Hogwarts, Yates is looking to bring his new found clout to another of Britian’s fictional Goliaths, Dr. Who.

Variety is reporting that Yates has teamed up with BBC Worldwide Productions to bring the Doctor to the movies.

“We’re looking at writers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right,” [Yates] said. “It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.”

Dr. Who is the longest running sci-fi television show of all time. Spanning nearly fifty years, this classic show has gone under several major overhauls and is know for it’s ability to re-shuffle itself on the fly. The most incredible thing about the Dr. Who franchise is that flexibility has been worked into the cannon of the show. The Doctor is always the same guy, he just “regenerates” into a new body, personality and all. Neat huh?

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