We’re all familiar with Captain America from the comic books but what does writing him teach you about the character?

Christopher Markus: It’s teaches you that it’s very hard and sometimes beside the point to try and give him an arc. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, like we just let him run around. But he is a guy that history revolves around, and in some ways he does not always have the biggest change. The biggest change in his life was when they injected him full of super soldier serum. And it was a physical change – morally, intellectually, he was the same guy when he was 90 lbs. It runs counter to screenwriting logic, because we always want to take a character, arc them and have them changed at the end of the movie. It’s how you structure these things. And he resists that. He’s like a statue that stands there during all four seasons – everything happens and at the end of it he’s like “Nope, still here, sorry!”

People really responded to the political thriller style of The Winter Soldier . Did you guys create a story to fit that specific tone, or did the tone grow organically out of the story that you wanted to tell?

Stephen McFeely: Good question. I don’t know if I can chicken and egg that…

CM: I think it’s more the latter. I know at some point Kevin Feige suggested “Well, why don’t we just take down SHIELD? And have Cap have a hand in it?” He’s one man versus this giant organisation – you’re not going to have him drive in with a tank so there’s going to be some underhandedness. And suddenly it begins to suggest a political conspiracy. If you put that 1940s man into present day geo-politics everything is going to seem like a conspiracy. It’s just going to seem dirty and underhanded and shifty, and people won’t be telling the truth. I have a tendency to believe that it was exactly the same way in 1945 but it’s not how we view it. It becomes a political conspiracy simply by putting 1945 Steve Rogers in present day America.

SM: We so wanted to avoid iPod jokes but we wanted Cap to adjust to the new world, so it was about emotions, it was about ethics, it was about morality. It’s “How far have we come since you went into the ice?” not “How short have the skirts become?”

Do you think that kind of grounded political tone will continue into the third film – or could you create something as different as The Winter Soldier was from The First Avenger ?

CM: Well, that’s the challenge! But we are working on something that I think is an amalgalm.

SM: When we hit upon the Brubaker run of the comic book, we all said that, with certain exceptions, that ’s the tone of Cap’s modern franchise. And you can imagine that with us back, with the Russos back, then if you like Winter Soldier you’ll hopefully like the third one, if we do it right!

You say it’s an amalgalm of the first two. Could you also be bringing in a new flavour, too?

CM: Well, you never know…

CM: I don’t know if there’s anybody that we had in the wings that we couldn’t pull off. There are people that I’m always wanting to bring in. I want to put Modok into something, but you can’t just drop a giant floating head in! It’s not like “Oh, we have to go talk to this guy – there’s something I should tell you about him first…” [laughs]. Suddenly the whole movie needs to take on that structure in order to accommodate him. I never win that fight!

SM: But you will never rest.

CM: There were actually drafts where we had Hawkeye in it, but he didn’t have enough to do and suddenly it seemed like we were giving him short shrift. Hey, it’s a cameo!

SM: Natasha was doing a lot of that work for us.

Obviously you’ve drawn on the Brubaker material. Were there any ‘70s Captain America comics that fed into The Winter Soldier ? It seemed to have a touch of their sensibility…

CM: There’s one story where he’s going up against the Secret Empire and it eventually turns out to be Richard Nixon, although you never see his face! That certainly laid the groundwork for us saying “Are we crazy for doing this? For having a conspiracy?” No, they’ve been doing it for years! And there are other bits and pieces. The ship at the beginning was originally a big tanker and came from a run where Mr Hyde and Batroc are going to ram Manhattan with this giant gas tanker. I liked the dynamic of that big, slow moving thing. And then that evolved into a satellite launching vessel!

We’ve just heard that the Falcon is taking over Cap’s role in the comic books. Do you think the movies can accommodate these kind of shake-ups or do they need to stay faithful to the big, familiar icons?

SM: We tend to stay on the sidelines when it comes to the comics. We wait and see what we’ll steal from in three or four years from now! [laughs].

CM: I think the movies can accommodate almost anything, if there’s a need. I think there is a much greater need to shake things up in the comics because that’s a narrative that’s been going on for 60 or 70 years, so you’re going to wind up having to do things to it. Ours has only been off the ground for five or so. So it’s not quite time to start changing things up yet. Plus I can’t figure out how he’s going to have the wings and the shield at the same time. Isn’t it going to get all crammed up on the wing? I don’t know… When those things happen in the comics you also have a tendency, perhaps cynically, to go “Yeah, but he’s going to be Steve Rogers in two months…” He’s going to wake up out of cryo-stasis or whatever it is and it’s going to be like “Oh, I need the shield back”. [laughs].

SM: We’re all so cynical.

You said you went back to some of the ‘70s source material. Is it daunting seeing just how many Marvel stories there have been, simply because there’s so much stuff to cherrypick?

SM: Yes. And you definitely want to read them in colour. When you get the bound black and white ones they’re…

CM: Heartbreaking.

I grew up reading the black and white British reprints…

CM: We wound up reading I don’t even know how many years’ worth of Cap in black and white. And the thing that becomes clear is that colour is the only thing that differentiates most of the villains! Just looking at these people you’re like “It’s a guy… in a stripy costume… who shoots some kind of energy out of himself…” It’s all gotten across by colour. I feel terrible for you there in Britain!

I was very jealous of your colour. And your Twinkies.

CM: But you have Hob-Nobs, right? [laughs]

Nick Setchfield

Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be released on DVD, Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray and digital download on Monday 18 ^th August

The post EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Screenwriters Talk Winter Soldier And Captain America 3 appeared first on Game News.

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe was shaken to its core earlier this week when it was announced that Edgar Wright has left Ant-Man . The Shaun Of The Dead , Scott Pilgrim and The World ‘s End director had been working on the project for eight years, already had a cast including Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly in place, and was in pre-production to meet the July 2015 release date of what’s slated to be the first Marvel outing after Avengers: Age Of Ultron .

Apparently “differences in their vision of the film” prompted the split between Wright and Marvel, leaving Ant-Man without a director, and Wright without the movie that could have launched him into the Hollywood A-league. But what do you think about the split? Do you still want to see an Ant-Man movie if Wright isn’t involved? Should Marvel have done everything in their power to keep a director with a unique vision and visual style? What would you like to see Wright directing next? Let us know your thoughts and your words might just appear in issue 251 of SFX , on sale Wednesday 23 July.

Post in the comment thread below, head to the SFX forum (opens in new tab) , or email us at sfx@futurenet.com (opens in new tab) , using the subject line “HOT TOPIC”. You can also tweet us at @sfxmagazine , using the hashtag #sfxhottopic , or join us on Facebook (opens in new tab) .

The post HOT TOPIC We Want Your Thoughts On Edgar Wrights Departure From Ant-Man appeared first on Game News.

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SFX: The final episode aired last week. Did you watch it live, have a get together, anything like that?
Karla Crome: No, I didn’t. I’ve been watching it a bit sporadically. I wasn’t keen on watching it until at least next year actually, but because we went to the screening at the start of the series I started watching it and so I just carried on. I watched the last episode online a few days before it aired. I just watched it on my own.

How did you feel after watching the last episode?
I was a little bit sad. It’s the end of an era and I had such a great time doing it. And it seems to have all been filmed and edited and come together so quickly and then just finished. You spend six months filming, which is a lot of time, a lot of long hours, and for it to finish so quickly is quite bizarre. It was a little bit sad, but I really liked the last episode. Wayne [Yip] gave us brilliant direction on it, and it was a nice episode for Jess actually. It was an episode for her that she hasn’t really had before. The only one I can think of is the one where evil Rudy turns up and they had a bit of a thing, but that was more about Rudy, so it was nice for the spotlight to end on her.

Was there a sense when you were filming this series that the show was back on track?
I am a notorious and constant worrier. I’m worried if I’m not worried. I find it difficult to be comfortable with anything for the same reasons that anyone gets nervous about something – because they want it to be good and they don’t want to let anyone down. The other actors seemed a lot more comfortable this time round with the work we were producing, and that was apparent from day dot. I remember having conversations with the boys and them being like, “Yeah, I feel this is a lot stronger.” I definitely had an inclination to agree with them at the beginning because the scripts were in a much stronger place and the actors were in a much stronger place, but I can never shake the feeling of concern until I see the finished product. That’s not just for Misfits, that’s for anything that I do. But by the end I couldn’t have been happier, in terms of Misfits .

Do you think Jess made the right choice settling down with Rudy?
You know when I said I see where I went wrong in the first series? Something they taught us at drama school, and it’s taken me a long time to realise it’s true through practice, is that you can’t put judgments on a character you’re playing, especially while you’re doing it. So you can’t sit there and go, “I think it’s a good idea that they do this, that or the other,” because it’s not helpful for creating the work. I don’t know the answer to that question, whether Jess should have settled down with Rudy or not, that’s just the way it was.

Jess didn’t use her power all that much, would you like to play a proper superhero at some point?
Yeah! I thought it was a shame she didn’t use her powers more. There were particular times when I thought, “Hang on, why doesn’t she just use her power?” Like looking through the door waiting for Alex to come along with a nail gun. I can see the point of dramatic tension, but I thought she could save herself an eyeball here if she just used her power! But it’s about the story and it wouldn’t have served that. I love the fantasy genre, I’d love to be a member of the X-Men. Or, you know what I’d really like, I’d love to play Buffy in a reboot or something. I would certainly like the opportunity to do a bit more of that, or maybe a bit of action, something I really had to beef up for and stop eating junk for so I could go and kick people’s arses. That would be really fun.

It seemed every character got their moment of utter humiliation this series, Jess more so than most. When you read Jess’ toilet scene in the script were you dreading the moment you’d actually have to act that out?
No, not at all. I couldn’t wait! I really couldn’t wait to do it and I was really glad I got the opportunity to. As you can probably tell I’m the kind of person who likes to sit around and mouth off about how things are morally. I’m very much not like Jess, it’s not a problem for me to talk toilet humour or burp in front of my friends or say things that are quite crass or recount stories about myself that are rude because I’ve never been much of a girly girl. I was always really envious of Joe getting to do these quite base, horrible things as Rudy, so I relished the opportunity for her to go and do something that was a bit gross really, because girls do and it’s not represented enough on telly. Jess is presented like… I’ll go in and get my make-up and hair done for hours and hours and that’s not me, that’s not what I look like and I know that’s not what a lot of girls look like. But guess what? Girls do shit and it’s nice to be able to do that for once.

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Do you have a highlight from your time on the show?
Getting the part was a highlight because I was a massive fan of the show and I felt really privileged and really excited. But I guess it’s the friends I’ve made. I’m in communication with Tash and Matt and Joe and Nathan at least once a week, whether that’s a phone call or meeting up for a drink. I see them and hear from them regularly. They are really good friends of mine I can’t imagine my life without them now. And it’s not just them, it’s costume, make-up, other people that I’ve met who I’m going to be friends with forever, which is lovely, because what are the chances of going into a job and getting on with everybody? I think they’re pretty low, but somehow we managed it. I don’t know if I’ll have another job like it.

What will we see you in next?
I don’t have anything lined up, but I’m writing a play. We’ve got a director and one of the actors ready. It’s very, very different to Misfits . It’s about a Jewish couple and it’s basically a romance, a love story. It’s quite tender and small scale, so I’m working on writing that at the moment and getting funding together for it, so that’s my focus for a while. I’ve always been into my writing but fortunately work’s been quite constant in terms of acting over the last couple of years, this is the first time I’ve been able to take a breather. I’m trying to choose my auditions and my projects quite carefully at the moment and really try between now and Easter to concentrate on this play, so that’s my main focus.

Misfits series 5 is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray now.

The post Misfits Karla Crome Interview appeared first on Game News.

You’re sat here in full costume and make-up, looking uncannily like Carole Ann Ford in 1963. Are people freaking out when they see you?

I think I freaked out! My agent rang me – first of all she really wanted me to get it because her grandfather is William Hartnell! So when she rang it was like “No pressure!” So then, obviously, I googled Carole Ann Ford, and I thought “Oh, this is kind of weird…” My hair was long, but I could definitely see such a clear comparison between the two of us. So it was kind of freaky, but exciting because I was like “I really should get this because I really look like her!”

Have you met her?

Yeah, I met her at the readthrough. She looks great, she’s very glamorous. That was the first time I met her, so I was quite nervous, because not only were there 40 people in the room but she was there in my eyeline watching me every time I delivered a line! But she was lovely. She’s very supportive and she wants me to do well.

How do you think she felt about you playing her?

It must have been quite strange for her. She hasn’t actually vocalised what she thought of my performance or anything like that but she’s been very supportive. She was at a similar stage in her career as I am – well, she’d done more work than me – but I think she can kind of identify with me. She’s really rooting for me, which is lovely.

How have you approached the part?

Basically I’ve watched everything that she’s done. The first thing I had to try and get to grips with was her voice, because it’s much higher than mine, and it’s very particular – I’d never heard a voice like that before. It’s quite breathy, and the accent’s unusual.

It’s almost Welsh, isn’t it?

Some people say South African… I think it probably comes from having elocution lessons and stuff like that. So that was the first thing that I approached, because for me if I can find the voice then I can find it in the body and everything else. It’s just constantly watching her over and over again, to clarify her intonation, her accent… I break it down into phonetics and all sorts of stuff. I’m quite good at accents, and if I can break it down phonetically then even if it starts off sounding really weird the more and more I practice it the better it gets.

How much did you know about Doctor Who before you started on this?

I’d dipped in and out from childhood, but I didn’t know that much about it. Now, obviously, researching it and getting into it I suddenly realised what a massive fanbase it has. And I’ve suddenly realised that so many friends of mine are massive Doctor Who fans. They find out I’m playing Carole Ann Ford and they’re like “Oh, wow!” Someone wrote me a message on Facebook saying “Did you know that she’s only got an e on her name because the BBC wrote it wrong in a press release? And she had a child? And she was married?” And I was like “Oh my god!” (laughs)

Nick Setchfield

An Adventure In Space And Time is on BBC Two on November 21st at 9.00 pm

The post An Adventure In Space And Time – Claudia Grant Interviewed appeared first on Game News.

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It’s a fundamental feature of the Star Trek universe and similar concepts crop up in other sci-fi series. But is warp drive possible? Over to our new sister mag, Science Uncovered …

If warp drive – or other FTL travel – were possible, it would certainly make inter-stellar space travel more convenient in the future. Take Alpha Centauri, our nearest star system. It’s 4.37 lightyears away and travelling at the current speed of Voyager 1 (17 kilometres a second) it would take approximately 67,000 years for a spaceship to reach it. If you take the star Kepler-62, now thought to be orbited by two habitable planets, it would take us more than 20,800,000 years to get there, even using today’s cutting edge propulsion technology.

Rather inconveniently, sci-fi solutions tend to break one of the main tenants of Einstein’s theory of special relativity – no object can travel faster than light in space time.

But we have physicist Dr Miguel Alcubierre to thank for giving us a glimmer of hope that a warp drive may one day be propelling astronauts. He proposed a theory for how warp drive would work. It’s essentially a cheat – instead of moving an object faster than the speed of light, you warp spacetime itself. He proposed that spacecraft could travel a wave of warped spacetime, while existing in a bubble of normal spacetime.

The warp drive would then work by contracting space in front of the ship, pulling it to its destination, and expanding space behind it, effectively pushing it forward.

As far fetched as all this sounds, it hasn’t stopped the good people at NASA from setting the ball rolling with proof-of-concept experiments. Dr Harold “Sonny” White and his team are conducting small-scale tests on photons to see if warp drive travel could one day be possible.

The aim of their experiments is to simulate the Alcubierre drive in miniature form – by using lasers to warp spacetime by one part in 10 million. Dr White and his team are trying to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels within a certain area then observing the change with a device called an interferometer.

These experiments are the latest stage in Dr White’s work on a warp drive. In 2011 he released a paper called Warp Field Mechanics 101 , which contains an updated version of Dr Alcubierre’s warp drive theory. The problem with the original design is that it required far too much energy to work. But by changing the shape of the warp drive bubble around the spacecraft to a doughnut shape, Dr White proves he could make it more energy efficient and, theoretically, more feasible.

So warp drive is still a distant dream – but it’s not time to give up hope just yet.

The first issue of SFX ‘s sister magazine, Science Uncovered , goes on sale on Thursday 21 November, in all good newsagents and supermarkets and in digital form. Find out more at www.science-uncovered.com and follow the team on twitter at @SciUncovered .

The post The Science Of The Warp Drive appeared first on Game News.

You’re telling the story of the birth of Doctor Who but what’s the focus of the drama?

It really is William Hartnell’s story. It’s the story of the first Doctor and his journey. He becomes a kind of Willy Loman character, so there is that wonderful human condition/everyman thing. We can all relate to it being either our dad or us. We’re all replaceable in life – if anyone thinks they’re not then they’re mistaken. You have your day and then it’s time to move on. It’s a great universal story, so what we hope is that if you don’t really care about Doctor Who , if you’re not a Doctor Who fan, in the way that you may not have cared about rowing but you still loved watching Bert And Dickie , this is the same thing. We hope that it’s a universal story about a man’s journey, towards the end of his life, in a Death Of A Salesman kind of way. In that way we hope we get a really broad audience. But we’ve got lots of lovely things in for real fans, lots of little nods.

How faithful have you been to the historical facts?

What we’ve had to do for dramatic purposes is amalgamate a lot of people. In Delia Derbyshire we’ve combined a number of characters – although she ran the Radiophonic Workshop there was Ron Grainer who composed the music and then there was Brian Hodgson who was the guy who brought in his mother’s house keys and ran them up and down the back of a piano to create the TARDIS sound. We kind of amalgamated certain details. The original Doctor Who was a committee commission – there were so many people involved that we couldn’t possibly dramatise so we’ve condensed it all down to a few key characters, and then made Sydney Newman the driving force. He was the guy who brought the idea of doing a science fiction show, and he was an ideas man.

We know this is a passion project for Mark Gatiss…

Mark’s had the idea to do this for 15 or 20 years. He even did a spoof sketch where he played Sydney Newman. For years he’s been a huge fan, and then he started researching, so he’s had primary source interviews with everybody who’s still alive that you can get hold of. Tons and tons of documentation – the first script that he delivered had everything in it. We’ve had to rationalise it and pare it back and pare it back, but a lot of detail in the script comes from one on one first hand interviews with surviving people. And then at our readthrough we were very lucky to have Mark Eden who played Marco Polo, Bill Russell who played Ian Chesterton and Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan – and they’re in it, as well. Bill Russell plays Harry, who’s an old school BBC commissionaire, dressed in the pseudo-military uniform they used to wear, going “You can’t come in here without a pass, sir!” The first time we meet Sydney Newman is with William Russell. Carole Ann is blink and you’ll miss it. We didn’t want to be a bit cheesey and do an obvious cameo, so there’s a lovely scene in a 1960s street where the camera pans into a house window and a 1960s family is sitting around the telly watching Doctor Who … As we pan through a grandmother comes out and goes “David! Martin! It’s time for your tea! And that show you like’s on!” And she beckons them in, and you just catch a moment of her – it’s Carole Ann Ford dressed as an old lady. It’s just a little taste of her. And Mark Eden, who was Marco Polo, so lost forever, is playing the head of the BBC, Donald Baverstock.

How did the old members of the team feel when they saw their past being recreated like this?

It was quite emotional at the readthrough. We went around the table, as you normally do on a table read – “Hi,I’m so and so and I’m playing such and such,” – and when it came to “I’m William Russell and I’m playing Harry” and “I’m Carole Ann Ford and I’m playing Joyce” the whole room just cheered. It really was quite moving. I think it was quite weird for the actors playing them, because on one hand it’s great to meet the person you’re playing and on the other hand it’s actually incredibly daunting, and a bit scary. So it was a two-edged kind of thing, especially for the wonderful Sacha, who’s playing Waris Hussein, because Waris is still very vibrant and working and amazing for his age – well, he’s not that old, he’s 75, but you’d think he was 55. He’s had quite a few meetings with him, and I think that was really useful to get the intonation of Waris’ voice, but also quite daunting for him because he feels a great responsibility, because Waris is still very much with us. It’s been lovely to be able to include a couple of cast members from the first ever episode. I think that really means that it becomes slightly timeless.

Are you a Who fan yourself?

I grew up watching it. My Doctor was Tom Baker and then Peter Davison. I’m a huge Peter Davison fan. I remember the 20 ^th anniversary being “The Five Doctors” and Richard Hurndall playing the part of the original. And I’m a fan of the reboot as well. I really love what Russell and now Steven have done with it. I was doing Misfits so I quite like that kind of science fiction/fantasy thing anyway. When I was asked to do this it was wonderful, a dream come true, but I never thought we’d be able to do it on this scale. What we’ve managed to do, given that it is a tight budget – budgets always are these days – is create a cinematic experience. We’re really trying for it to punch slightly above its weight. What we really wanted to do was get a sense of the ‘60s, so we are looking at the grade of things like The Ladykillers . We want to bring out that Technicolor 60s whereas The Hour has a very 50s sepia look and The Girl had a very Hollywood bubblegum look, the blues and the pinks. We’re going for the mauves and the greens, the green corduroy suits, those kind of reds and greens, Routemaster bus interior, things that pop. We really wanted to get a sense of cinema and we’ve been blessed to get Terry McDonough who most recently has been having a big career in America doing Breaking Bad and Hell On Wheels and those kind of things. He’s brought a real cinematic flair to it. John Pardue is our director of photography and John lit The Girl with Toby Jones.

What does David Bradley bring to the part of William Hartnell?

He’s so amazingly, beautifully talented. What he’s able to do is take Bill from this quite irascible character, who is quite grumpy and a bit like the Doctor that you see, and show the way it changes him. And his changing relationship we play through his granddaughter, who’s called Judy. We show how in fact he did become Pied Piper-ish, and felt a real duty to the children, so when he was out in real life kids would follow him and the Doctor became this huge character. David has the range – he’s heartbreaking. You take this grumpy actor who’s not being recognised properly, he feels he’s been typecast as army types… If you look back at Brighton Rock or This Sporting Life he’s a wonderful film actor but he’d got stuck in a rut, and he was very snippy about taking the role of the Doctor, because it was perceived as children’s television. But by the end he didn’t want to go. David is just magical as that.

Has Jessica Carney, William Hartnell’s granddaughter, been involved?

Very much so. All through the script, when Bill talks he calls his wife and his granddaughter love – “Alright, love, I’ll be home in a minute,” – and she called us and said he never called anybody love, he called everybody darling, he was that theatrical even at home. So little details like that we’ve managed to bring into the script. She has the original astrakhan hat and the original emerald ring, so she brought those to set – we’re not using them because they’re too precious!

Nick Setchfield

An Adventure In Space And Time will be on BBC Two on November 21st at 9 pm

Correction: a glitch crept into our feature in SFX 242, where we incorrectly state Matt Strevens is the director of An Adventure In Space And Time . He’s the producer, of course – Terry McDonough is the director. Our brains were clearly nibbled by Zarbi.

The post Producer Matt Strevens Talks An Adventure In Space And Time appeared first on Game News.

The 50th anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who appearing on our screens is almost upon us. So our new sister publication, the science magazine Science Uncovered , takes a fun look at how much science fact there is behind the science fiction; written by SFX ’s very own deputy editor, Richard Edwards, the full article will appear in the first issue of Science Uncovered , available in all good newsagents from Thursday 21 November. And here’s sneak peek at an extract:

Could you build a room that appears much bigger on the inside?

Despite having the appearance of an old-school police box, the TARDIS boasts many rooms, including a swimming pool and a library

The explanation in the show for the fact that the TARDIS is much bigger on the inside than the outside is that it is “dimensionally transcendental” – its exterior and interior exist in separate dimensions. While that initially sounds plausible, unfortunately it’s littered with problems. Assuming that those other dimensions are something beyond the three we observe in our everyday lives, it’s unclear which dimensions the Time Lords are referring to. Physicists and mathematicians frequently use additional spatial dimensions to model complicated ideas (in superstring theory, for example), but no experiments or observations have ever proved that they exist. We’re also not sure how a gateway between dimensions could be carried around in a spaceship. We think it’s safe to say this is more magic trick than genuinely feasible science – hopefully, however, physicists will manage to prove us wrong one day.

Likelihood rating: 1/5

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Could a human body regenerate into a different form?

In TV’s most ingenious ruse for allowing a show to continue after a lead actor’s departure, the Doctor has taken many forms

Regenerating a body is science fiction for now, but it’s possible to build body parts – such as windpipes and bladders. “More complex structures, such as the liver, heart or the brain are very challenging,” says Dr Paul De Bank from the University of Bath’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine. “While it is possible to grow pieces of tissue, such as bone, muscle and cartilage, assembling these into a functional limb has not yet been achieved. But with breakthroughs in 3D printing technology, it may be possible to take the first steps towards generating functional organs.” Watching the Doctor harvest cells from his body and wait as they slowly grow into replacement parts would be a poor substitute for the drama of his explosive regenerations. So, could we prompt a human body to regenerate from within? “One of the main focuses of regenerative medicine is to stimulate the body to repair itself,” De Bank explains, “either by activating the stem cells, or by turning on pathways that species such as salamanders use to re-grow limbs. It is thought that we have the genetic capacity to do this.”

Likelihood rating 3/5

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The 50th anniversary special, “The Day Of The Doctor”, will air on BBC One on Saturday 23 November as part of the BBC’s 50th anniversary celebrations. To read “The Science Of Doctor Who ” in full, pick up the first issue of Science Uncovered , on sale on Thursday 21 November. To find our more about the magazine, visit www.science-uncovered.com , where you can download a free sample issue! Follow Science Uncovered on twitter @SciUncovered

The post The Science Of Doctor Who! appeared first on Game News.

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What’s worse than living through the apocalypse? How about being constantly hit on by the antichrist. That’s what poor Anna Kendrick is forced to deal with in the latest end-of-the-world comedy Rapture-Palooza. She plays the mild-mannered Lindsey who, along with her loyal boyfriend Ben ( Bones ’ John Francis Daley), must endure blood rain, foul-mouthed insects and a very horny Devil played by The Office’ s Craig Robinson, in his second armageddon-themed comedy of the year after This Is The End . Heaven knows how she’ll cope…

“It’s the apocalypse at the end of your driveway,” explains director Paul Middleditch. “The world doesn’t end, it continues in a remarkably domestic way. The antichrist has a problem child, he has a problem wife, even though he’s ruling the world he deals with the banalities of life. He’s a remarkably underwhelming ultimate figure of evil. Lindsey and Ben are these two ludicrously stupid optimists who feel they have the opportunity to vanquish the antichrist by locking him away. They’re bumbling their way through a moment of religious significance that they have no understanding of.”

Scriptwriter and Bill and Ted mastermind Chris Matheson scoured the bible for tongue-in-cheek rapture inspiration. In their quest to stop the devil, Lindsey and Ben have to dodge sweary birds, undead neighbours and weed obsessed wraiths. “Chris looked through the Book of Revelation in quite a lot of detail and all that stuff is in there,” explains Middleditch. “I think one of the Apostles wrote it. He must have had some ’shrooms or something because where does this stuff come from? It’s the sort of film that you’d hope would become cult, where guys would be smoking joints and watching this thing on a Saturday night. There’s just something so wonderfully underwhelming about the end of religion as we know it.”
Simon Bland

Rapture-Palooza is released on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 28 October, courtesy of Lionsgate.

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Meet The Coldest Girl In Coldtown (opens in new tab) …

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. It’s an eternal party, shown on TV 24 hours a day – gorgeous, glamorous, deadly! Because, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave…

The new novel (opens in new tab) by Holly Black, famous for The Spiderwick Chronicles , is out now from Indigo and you can read the first five chapters now !

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What do you think? Tweet @SFXmagazine with the hashtag #Coldtown.

This is an advertising feature from SFX ‘s chums at Orion.

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Author Simon Clark has given SFX more details of a Doctor Who story he was commissioned to write a decade ago.

Back in July 2003, the news broke that finally, the BBC were making new Doctor Who , with the casting of an official Ninth Doctor announced… no, not Christopher Eccleston, but Richard E Grant.

Created to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary, “Scream Of The Shalka” (which is getting a DVD release on 16 September) was a Flash animation (six episodes, each of 15 minutes), hosted on the Beeb’s Doctor Who website. By the time the first instalment went live in November, it had been rather undercut by the announcement, in September, of the series’ imminent return to our TV screens.

Further animations were being planned, and since it took a while for the producers of the television version to put the kibosh on all that, for a while work continued on a second story: “Blood Of The Robots”, another six-parter, written by horror novelist Simon Clark. It was a dream job for the author, who’s a life-long fan of the series.

“ Doctor Who has been the video track of my life,” Clarke explains. “I was five when the first episode aired and I’ve seen every episode since. Somewhere emblazoned on my neurons must be memories of all those mythic lost episodes. When I was five or six I wrote to the BBC asking them to send me a Dalek. They didn’t, but they did send me a signed photograph of Bill Hartnell, which I still have on my shelf beside me.”

Clark suspects that he was approached back in 2003 because around that time he was writing The Dalek Factor , a Doctor Who novella for Telos Publishing.

“Perhaps the producers got wind of this. I was told about the animated Doctor Who , and asked to submit a very brief outline. They liked what they saw and I was then asked to submit a more detailed synopsis. On the basis of this I was given a contract to write the scripts.”

The synopsis Clark used in his first script gives a good flavour of what the finished story would have been like:

“A blend of adventure, drama and humour. The Doctor arrives to find a world full of intelligent, sensitive robots that have been abandoned by their human owners, who are too squeamish to ‘kill’ them when they’re obsolete. Now ruthless salvage squads are hunting the robots in order to make room for human settlers forced to migrate from their dangerously over-crowded home planet.”

“There would have been some frightening elements, and a dash of gruesomeness too,” the writer explains. “I’d planned shocks for the viewer, too, as it struck me that, back then, people watching a drama on a computer would mean they were sitting much closer to the screen than a TV, so there could be exciting ways of creating a much more intense impact.”

“There was also scope to have things happen in the animated Doctor Who that couldn’t have been done in the classic TV episodes. For example, one of the robots dumped on the scrapyard planet was a Funeralbot. He’d been junked because his pneumatics were at fault and instead of gently lowering the coffin into the grave it always ended up flipping the coffin high into the air and out of the cemetery. My little homage to Robot Wars !”

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Clark knew which actors had been cast in the lead roles, and was particularly excited to be writing for Derek Jacobi, who in “Scream Of The Shalka” played a version of the Master whose consciousness now resides in a robot body, confined to the TARDIS.

“I’ve been in awe of Jacobi since I saw him in I, Claudius ,” Clark says. “He has such a wonderful melodic voice. Right from the start, I thought of having the Master talking about his favourite tipples, just so I could have the great actor voicing the words Merlot, Amontillado and so on in such a resonant way.”

Clark’s work was quite advanced by the time the axe finally fell.

“The entire storyline was complete, and I’d written three scripts and started on the fourth when I got the call that sent my heart dropping like a stone.”

So, is there any chance of the story emerging in some other form some day?

“I don’t know,” says Clark. “I guess that isn’t in my hands, but the detailed storyline and three scripts are complete. It would just be a case of blowing away an accumulation of interstellar dust and work could begin on completing ‘Blood Of The Robots.’”

Ian Berriman twitter.com/ianberriman

Read about the recovery of a Doctor Who “The Tenth Planet” script .
Read our Doctor Who “The Ice Warriors” DVD review .

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