I personally really liked Torchwood throughout. Did it seem as though in it's first few episodes that it was trying to force sexual stuff for the sake of it? admittedly yes, but I'd say that was just early wrangling with trying to get the tone right, which they then did, and I think I'm in a minority on this forum, but I think of series 1 and 2 as quality just as I do with children of earth, and the very fact that they were deemed good enough to then commission a big prime time five night event tv third series off the back of, shows that they must have done well at the time.

My problem with Class is with it's concept. Even before anyone's seen it, how enticing exactly does a show set in a school sound? not very to me, and as such I think that puts it at a disadvantage for people to even give it a try, so whether it's good quality or not, people might even give it that chance to find out.

Compare that with torchwood, and before we'd even seen it, we knew the concept was a well known doctor who character, running a branch of an organization that was just featured in the last major story arc of the main series. It practically screamed doctor who spin off as much as was possible.

Sometimes the shows with the most boring premises can turn out to be the best. The aforementioned Buffy, high school girl fights vampires while dealing with life problems, sounds like a recipe for disaster but actually worked.

Do we know specifically when Bill will debut?

Not yet. Specific information is conspicuous by its absence at the moment... The production team don't seem to want to release much.

For all their faults I enjoy the first two series' of Torchwood too. Not as much as Children of Earth but they were decent enough, and I cared about most of the characters to some degree. All the same those faults are glaring, and for me weren't so much 'early wrangling' as a misjudgement. Whilst I can overlook them the entire first series of Torchwood was flawed in this way. Chris Chibnall's earlier scripts in particular were borderline creepy in places - shoehorning in sex talk and "mature themes" in a way I'd expect a basement-dwelling teenager writing fanfiction to do it. There were decent ideas behind a story like Cyberwoman, but it was all done from completely the wrong angle.

Conceptually we actually know very little about Class. You could again use Buffy as an interesting parallel. As a premise it's predominantly set in a school, but amounted to so much more than that both in its initial season and the subsequent six even more so. It was the content, the quality of the characters and the decent writing that turned the vague premise into something special.

To make a comparison that's a bit closer to home, just look at the opening run of episodes in Series 2 of Doctor Who. The first four standalone stories are respectively set on a future alien world, the Victorian Scottish highlands, a school in contemporary London, and the Palace of Versailles. Of those four you could easily make the argument that the school setting is the dullest of those four - and yet I'd wager that School Reunion is actually the favourite of those four among a great many people - including a younger audience who had never seen Sarah Jane and so there was no sense of nostalgia for them (I was among them viewers at the time). It was good enough to ensure the go-ahead of The Sarah Jane Adventures which for all intents and purposes was also a school-based spin-off as well.

I think with competent writing, good acting and effort made that Class could be something very good. It's not going to be Doctor Who itself and in a way I'm glad it's not trying to be. I'm hoping it owns the fact it can't fall back on alien planets and period settings in quite the same way and manages some decent character stuff. Maybe with success (and I'll admit it if I think it's awful) the characters of Class will at some point cross their way over into Doctor Who...there's no rule that they have to derive from the main show in the first place, and there's potential at least. But then maybe I'm being overly optimistic? Who nose?

Very likely to be the first episode of Series 10, which is currently going by the title A Star In Her Eye. That being said, she might well make an unexpected earlier appearance in the Christmas special this year, you never know with Moffat.

When did the title come out?

Leaked from set. May change before airing, but unlikely.

Oh boy, the bad memories keep coming back.

I'm sure if the writing's good, it could indeed be a great show, it's just that the idea that it's written for teens combined with the setting don't inspire much confidence for me at the moment. Plus the show could be award worthy type of quality, but if many are as equally unimpressed at the sound of the set up, many won't even give it a chance, and if ratings are bad, the bbc won't keep it going even if it's the best thing they've ever produced.


Given that previously, we had the set up where there was a spin off for adults, and a spin off for children, I think knowing there was only to be one spin off this time, they should have written it for the entire who audience, rather than teen's, who, to me seem the most unlikely age group to be engaging with the main show, let alone a spin off.

Gattiss says Christmas special is 'Beautiful' and one of Moffats best ever scripts.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-...ark-gatiss-cry

I genuinely hope I feel the same when I watch it. I think when he's on his game, Moffat can be better at the christmas specials than in series episodes, as I consider A Christmas carol, Last Christmas and the husbands of River song, to be some of the finest episodes of his era.

That being said though, Gattiss's idea of what makes a good script is a bit here and there based on his own contributions, so I'm not sure how much faith to put in his opinion.

I really hope the Cybermen make an appearance this year. It's their 50th Anniversary - The Tenth Planet is 50 next month. If they don't then Moffat will have missed one of the best tricks he could pull off and will be a hugely disappointing Christmas episode.

The Cybermen have not been used well for a good few years (especially there appearance in the series 8 finale, where they apparently were fine with being Missy servants) and as such, unless they were part of a bigger group as in the pandorica scenario, I think it would be a waste of an episode.

Besides, something isn't 'the best trick they could pull off' just because it happens to be the 50th anniversary of the Cybermen. Episodes should be written on creative merit,not because the showrunner feels pressured into using a certain thing because fans think the time is right for them to do so.

The best 'trick' they could pull off isn't a trick at all. It's simply trying to write a fun, dramatic and engaging episode, the way it always is. I'm all for returning characters/races, but because the writer has been inspired to do so, and has a good story in mind, not because fans say 'but you have to, it's the >insert time< anniversary of so and so. Start down that road and they'd be presumably pressured to use characters every few years.

I know, but imagine the fuss if Doctor Who didn't have a 50th Anniversary episode or the Daleks hadn't appeared in it. But it would be nice if the Cybermen could be acknowledged in some way, as they were integral to the shows reputation for scary monsters.

I don't know if this is a mistake or what but it's saying that Fady Elsayed (Ram in Class) has filmed for Doctor Who ....

http://www.beaumontlondon.com/clients/fady-elsayed

Re: Class, this was posted today on the BBC website official DW page:

"Class is a YA series that will premiere on BBC Three this Autumn and will feature more mature themes than Doctor Who - please note it is not suitable viewing for younger audiences."

There are unsubstantiated reports (not part of the above article, which was about Class launching its own social media pages) that at least one character meets a very gruesome end, lots of blood etc.

So deffo not a kids' show. They mean it when they say they are aiming for British Buffy.

I'll be interested to see what is meant by "more mature themes". Hopefully it doesn't just mean gore and swearing. I think that's the mistake they made with Torchwood's first season.

Not a children's show ? I'll believe it when I see it. !

Why would it be a children's show when the audience BBC3 is aimed at is 16-30?

I hope it's more along the lines of SJA and CoE's idea of mature themes rather than what Torchwood initially thought "mature" is (sex, f-bombs, sex, gore and sex... oh, and sex, sex, sex).

I do think it's a shame this isn't something a little more accessible for children though, this is something I think Torchwood did wrong. I love Doctor Who being dark and a little horrifying, but if you're going to do full-on adult Doctor Who material, I reckon it's best limited to audios and novels rather than actual television as it's going to leave children feeling like they're missing out.

Well we know that there's a gay character, and a gay sex scene of some sort ... but I don't think that sex is as much a preoccupation of Patrick Ness's as it was for RTD (I don't mean RTD Who, but it was a big concern of his to write about it frankly in Queer as Folk, and later on in Cucumber, etc...)

The thing is, right from the very first announcement, they've made it clear that the purpose behind Class is to make something for the 16-17 to early twenties demographic which tends to fall out of love with DW, even if they loved it as children, and (erroneously or otherwise) think of DW as being too childish for them, only rediscovering their interest in it after some years (or sometimes never). That's not a new phenomenon - it's exactly what happened to Peter Capaldi way back in the 1970s ... he's said that after getting every magazine, annual etc., writing to Radio Times, trying to take over the fan club, when he went to college and discovered girls, punk, etc etc he stopped watching the show and burned all his memorabilia, including items signed by various Doctors, etc., only coming back to the show much later. It's that lost demographic that Class is squarely aimed at, to keep them connected to the Doctor Who universe.

Also, Buffy was very definitely made for the 16-up market and had sex coming out of its ears in some episodes (not literally LOL), and that was very happily watched by reams of invested 12-year-olds, even if it wasn't intended to be. It all depends on how classily (pun not intended) these things are handled in-story, IMO, and whether they're an inherent part of character development or shoehorned in for sensationalism (which is the impression a lot of people got from early Torchwood, I think...)

I remember an episode where Buffy and Riley (whom nobody liked) spent the entire episode getting down and dirty and for some reason that was causing all sorts of weird mystical stuff to happen, and if I remember correctly the general consensus is that it's the worst episode of the entire show (weird, considering it's the same season that had Hush). :P

Anyway, for me the "British Buffy" thing is concerning to me, as whenever a show tries to "be like Buffy" it tends to be a disaster. Aside from the "Plot A; Plot B" structure it's a very difficult kind of show to imitate as it's a distinctly Joss Whedon type of show. Possibly one of the things that didn't wow me about RTD's Who, he was trying to base it off a completely different show without having Whedon's talent for that sort of stuff (imo).

I'm very curious about how the show will turn out though; right now I'm just waiting for an actual trailer. I'd be very pleased to actually have something else to watch this year.

Yes I had forgotten that episode, I agree it was pretty bad, but on the other hand the whole Buffy/Riley thing was the worst part of the show for me. I don't think by any means that sex in Buffy always worked - but on the other hand it tended to be there for story reasons, you never got the sense that it was written in order to be cool or hip or (worst of all) 'daring' in order to attract an audience, etc. I'm cautiously hopeful for Class. It might turn out to be rubbish - TBH I gave up on Torchwood halfway through series 1, but my partner, who's a completist and always watches a whole series even if he is hating it, persuaded me to keep going and it did indeed get better: quite a whole lot better. And COE was awesome, so it was worth it (never watched Miracle Day though, that was a step too far...) So yes, like you, I'm curious to see how Class turns out, but what I am hearing about it is tending to make me more excited (for now) rather than less.

Checked to see if he had a minor role in an older ep of DW but that doesn't seem to be the case so maybe the speculation about a crossover in the Christmas episode (or some upcoming episode) is correct.

Might be worth checking the CVs of other Class Cast members.

This is already making me excited. Whether or not it actually is beautiful or not is irrelevant; I'm just happy that Moffat is at least going to try to write a more poignant episode this year and not another silly idiotic romp like last year.


My impression is that it will focus on issues relevant to teenagers and young adults such as relationships, drugs, bullying/cyberbullying, mental health, racism, sexism, homophobia etc. For example, it could have an episode which focuses on some kind of addictive space drug (like in Nightmare of Eden) with some violent space gangsters or something along those lines. Okay, that sounds idiotic, but my point is that I think the show will be more grown up in that it'll try to focus on "issues" in a way that Doctor Who doesn't, but I don't think it'll have gratuitous swearing, sex or gore.

It could be terrible, or it could be great. I have no idea what way it will go. If they do go for a sort of "Waterloo Road with aliens" that wouldn't necessarily be bad. Waterloo Road was quite good back in the day, though less so towards the end.
Hopefully the show won't end up coming across as too preachy or feeling like a Soap.