SFX Collection: Best Of British

Yeah, yeah, I know. TOS mentioned it. We mentioned it. Seb mentioned it. And now we’re mentioning it again. But I’m sorry, but I can’t let it go without another item on it now I’ve got it, for a number of reasons.

Firstly: just to fucking recommend buying it. It’s a beautifully produced mag – wonderfully concieved, designed, and written. And best of all, it comes with a booklet The Art Of Doctor Who; which has a load of conceptual artwork and photos from behind-the-scenes of the new series, that is worth the £5.99 on its own. Just buy it, even if you don’t usually get SFX – you won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of the Who booklet, there’s eight pages of photos about Tucker and team’s crash sequence, some of which I hadn’t seen before, and all of which I’d not seen so nice and clearly. There’s a beautiful shot of the whole team, and a couple showing how the crash was actually achieved. Interestingly, the image was flipped in the finished show, as it was decided that the crash should happen from the opposite direction late into production.

And so, onto the two Dwarf pieces themselves – the Top 50 British Telefantasy Shows placing piece (a nice full two pages), and the Doug Naylor interview (a whole four!). They tell don’t tell any of us lot anything we don’t already know, but then I didn’t really expect them to, as that’s not really their aim. They are very nicely written though, and unusually free from mistakes – the only one I spotted was the captioning of this photo as being from “the Dwarfless seasons of the show, when they zipped around Starbug instead” – you’d have thought Holly in the background would have given it away, at least.

And lastly, I couldn’t let Doug’s latest words on the film and TV series go unquoted, even though we know it all anyway:

FILM: “It’s not so much in ‘development Hell’ right now as it is in ‘finding money Hell’! The script’s all beautiful, it’s just the money! I’m constantly meeting people who say they’ve got the money, they’ll get the money, they’re about to get the money, who then turn out not to be telling the entire whole truth. The film world seems to be riddled with people like that. I’m aware that you can’t make the film for three or four million pounds like many low-budget British movies, because it’s science fiction, but it’s also just difficult to get a film made where I’m not prepared to change the case and sell out to an American cast.”

TV: “It depends on the fil;m. There could be a TV series in time. I mean, in the end Red Dwarf has sold more videos and DVDs than anything the BBC has ever made, I think, including all the new stuff. There’s a passionate audience there, and it’s all looking good at the moment, but you just can’t count your chickens.”

So, you know, go and buy it, like.