Fans of David Tennant will have been drinking him in as the Doctor last night, for his time is nigh. After two Christmas episodes, Matt Smith will become the eleventh incarnation of the famous Doctor, and Tennant shall be a mere memory. Awwww.

But what a way to go; sticking his beak in on Mars in the year 2059 where there a real problem with the water. Not just those air bubbles you get sometimes and wonder if it’s something icky – this water can kill you. And unpleasantly at that.

On Bowie Base One – love that – Captain Adelaide Brooke, excellently played by Lindsay Duncan, is showing that in the future, women are still in charge of anything that’s important. However, Brooke and her team dropped a clanger in that they melted some ice in the ice fields and let loose a nasty virus. Worse than Swine ‘flu even. Or David Cameron. Read more & comment »

Eastenders actress Lacey Turner has admitted that she hadn’t heard of bipolar disorder before her character Stacey Slater developed it on the soap.

Turner told MSN: “It was a real shock – I went to a storyline meeting and Diederick (Santer – the executive producer) said ‘how do you feel about bipolar?’ And I said ‘what’s bipolar?’ – I had no idea.”

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Big Top is a colourful, upbeat comedy series for BBC One from Big Bear Films set in and around a travelling circus.

Amanda Holden (Wild At Heart, Cutting It, Britain’s Got Talent), John Thomson (Cold Feet, The Fast Show), Sophie Thompson (EastEnders, A Room With A View), Ruth Madoc (Hi-de-Hi!, Little Britain), Bruce Mackinnon (The Office, The Catherine Tate Show) and Tony Robinson (Time Team, Blackadder) star as the performers and backstage staff who make up Circus Maestro.

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David Haye and Sarah Harding join Jonathan Ross for this week’s Friday Night With Jonathan Ross on BBC One.

Sarah Harding tells Jonathan that Girls Aloud will get back together but they don’t know when: “We’re simply taking a break, we all felt it was time… we said about a year, but we’re going to see.”

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John Simm has admitted that he has played The Master differently in the upcoming Doctor Who specials.

The actor will return as The Master later this year and warned viewers to expect a much less subtle performance from him.

He told the Daily Mail: “If you thought I was hamming it up in the last one, wait till you see this. I like to be quite subtle, but this doesn’t call for subtle. The Master is insane.

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Bradley Branning will make a huge exit from Eastenders next February, in a storyline written to celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary.

Before his departure Bradley will briefly reunite with his ex-wife Stacey and bosses are promising that his exit will be one of the most memorable yet.

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The latest Wonderland series offering was no less quirky and odd than its predecessors, and last night, we saw the six-degrees-of-separation like stories of the paths taken by seven Staffordshire Bull Terrier pups, their subsequent owners, as well as their original breeder.

Born of Uggs, whose owner Jackie wanted to make money from selling her pups, the seven puppies were destined for very different lives, but more or less to a man, or pup, their futures weren’t looking especially bright.

That said, one of them did fare very well; Jackie’s sister-in-law Maria bought one of the pups to help her children to get over the grief of losing their dad, and of all the puppies, this one seemed the most suited to getting along with fragile children. Read more & comment »

Last I heard Ricky Butcher was engaged to Sam Mitchell. But things change quickly in Walford and by this Christmas he will be betrothed to mouthy Bianca Jackson instead.

Ricky and Bianca realise their true feelings for one another after Sam quits the square next month. Their affair and lead up to the wedding will be the focus of a spin off DVD to celebrate the shows 25th anniversary.

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I’ve always liked Calum Best. He’s always struck me as a young man who fully realises that were it not for his celebrity dad, he’d be – most likely – just an ordinary bod. But I’ve always alternately felt sorry for him because of that fact and because it was almost an inevitability that we’d all be waiting with baited breath for him to follow in dad’s footsteps and fall off many a barstool.

And if he hadn’t, he would probably have faded into obscurity, but with the media waiting, cameras poised for those like-father-like-son moments, it’s often felt as if he had no choice but to become a serious boozer.

In making this film however, Calum demonstrated that he’s not about to turn into a raging alcoholic just to slake our thirst for a George Best clone and enable us to use clichés about apples not falling far from trees. Read more & comment »

When I first read the ‘blurb’ for this show, I thought ‘how can someone as financially privileged as Rosa Monkton pretend she understands the plight of someone who isn’t uber-rich?’

But, I had to take back that somewhat shallow thought when I watched this documentary. Money doesn’t take away heartbreak, and for Rosa, just as for the many other parents we saw in this film, little does.

All the parents featured in this film had disabled children, and from the get go, it was clear that Rosa’s empathy extends to far more than lip service.

However, what Rosa’s money can do is buy her physical help with her disabled child, but for those parents who aren’t wealthy, and they were in the majority in this film, that was what they needed most. Read more & comment »

Ryan Malloy is in for a treat next week! As the barman ventures into the Queen Vic’s cellar, he finds Janine all trussed up in a corset and suspenders, with a lot of boobage on display.

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Three major one-off films about the artistic careers of British female icons Margot Fonteyn, Gracie Fields and Enid Blyton will premiere on BBC Four from Monday 16 November as part of the Women We Loved season.

Richard Klein, Controller, BBC Four, says: “These films are sympathetic but frank dramatisations of women in the spotlight and how their backstage lives play out.

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The cast of Gavin & Stacey have admitted that they cried when they filmed the final scenes of the show.

Ruth Jones, who co-wrote the show, told The Mirror: “It sounds silly I know, but it’s been a big part of our lives for the last three years. It was very emotional filming at the end. Even from day one we all had this sad feeling about it all ending.

“In the final week, me and Jo Page just couldn’t stop crying. We were pathetic and we looked like frogs. And on the last day me and James were awash.

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What an astonishing film this was; not only did it serve as testimony to the capabilities of ordinary people in extraordinary times, those people were young people, some barely old enough to qualify for puberty.

The story told was a true one, but it could just as easily have been a gripping kids’ adventure story, and that was perhaps what made it quite magical. It was Enid Blyton meets The Hun.

We heard how some of the British ex-pat children at the British Memorial School in Ypres, Belgium, banded together – along with some of the adults involved with the school of course – to create a small but forcible Resistance movement. And again, I can’t stress enough how the recollections shared in this film made it feel as though one were hearing a fictitious account. Read more & comment »

This was an odd mixture of dourness, social commentary – from a time that now feels so alien, it may as well have been centuries ago – and narrative from those who were actually there before and after, and not just watching the events of the fall of the wall on their TVs.

And though overall Kevin Sim’s film was informative – if not overly ‘entertaining’ – I felt that his trying to assimilate art into it was an unnecessary distraction. And I thought it rather detracted from the otherwise serious journalistic endeavour.

But the majority of the film was, happily, mime free and took an unbiased look at the lives of those living within the psychological and physical confines of the infamous wall. Some happily and voluntarily embraced all that was promised by a socialist utopian society while other rebelled, and often, at the cost of their lives or liberty. Read more & comment »